Move Students Off Campus, Move Classes Online
Written By: Hannah Blatt
Published in the Champlain Current
Published: March 2010
If the Champlain College campus is shut down by an emergency, the school’s plan is to have all classes moved completely online.
“We want to deliver as much of the curriculum online as possible,” explained Jeff Rutenbeck, Dean of the Division of Communication and Creative Media.
Responsibility was left with individual faculty to develop a set of online classes that would tide the student and the course over for roughly three weeks.
“For some classes this can be difficult, but it varies from division,” Rutenbeck continued. “We asked [faculty] to build in an emergency plan with whatever tools they will have access to, and to do something meaningful with the class.”
For some courses, the transition to online teaching is easier than others. A number of classes that are taught at Champlain are already partly or even mostly online.
This is especially true of classes in the Core Division.
Associate Professor Ken Wade, for example, has re-formatted his class to fit the potential emergency. This semester his class roster includes Capitalism and Democracy, Minority Report, and Concepts of the Community.
“I have a hybrid class now, part online and part face to face,” explained Wade. He meets with his classes face to face to discuss the readings, and what students have learned. All of his assignments are online and they are also due on Angel, which will help make the switch to solely online teaching easier. Also, Wade gives all of the deadlines to his classes at the beginning of the semester to make sure that there is limited confusion if the school has to shut down.
This makes it easy for the class to go completely online as long as the students and teachers have Internet access.
“Core is generally online as it is, because of the program Angel,” said Chris Yoon, a sophomore Game Art major. “Angel would be very useful with discussion blogs. [Though] I can see some individuals not joining in on the discussion boards, which would be bad in an online class.”
But what about classes that depend on face-to-face or hands-on contact, such as Fundamentals of Acting, or Public Speaking?
Currently, the Public Speaking classes are all about writing and delivering speeches.
“A big part of Public Speaking is the audience,” states Yoon.
“If live speech became impossible due to the school shutdown, then students would pursue the development of rhetoric from the Greeks to today via online sources,” explained Erik Kaarla, a Public Speaking teacher. “These online sources would encompass anything from YouTube and MegaVideo to Ted.com. The focus would be on students examining for example, the inaugural addresses from the last 100 years, and then reporting on language changes and the use of metaphors.”
“This is a good idea, because I don’t feel like I learned enough from my previous Public Speaking class,” explained a sophomore Communications major, Amy Lieblein. “It would be nice to learn a little more about the art of language and usage, but it is understandable that we are only changing the course in a state of emergency.”
In an ideal world, Kaarla would like to meet with students one on one, but in an emergency, the campus would probably be deserted. In such a case, a cyber component, such as Skype, would be added to the equation. Another option might be phone conference calls.
All of the different options would create a very different way of looking at Public Speaking. The phone and Skype would certainly help focus on how your voice sounds when you are delivering a speech.
“This is a good way to practice the different tones in your voice,” stated Lieblein, “but something you have to get over is speaking in front of people.”
For some programs the emergency might actually be an opportunity. A photography class, for example, might be assigned to document the emergency in whatever aspects were available to the individual student.
Tim Brookes, the director of the Professional Writing program, believes that an emergency would be a great writing opportunity. As a result, he and his program faculty wrote a plan for the entire semester, instead of only three weeks.
Brookes’ plan was simple. “Here’s how your going to respond to this emergency: you’re going to write about it.”
“Writing is a matter of practice. As long as we’re practicing our writing then there’s room for improvement,” explained a sophomore Professional Writing major, Lana Atamian. Writers always want to write about what’s happening, what’s on your mind, and about anything out of the ordinary; which means that an evacuation or other emergency would provide plenty of material.
Brookes acknowledged that other programs might have a lot more difficulty adapting their syllabus to take advantage of an emergency.
“We have it easy,” he said. “The syllabus is easily adaptable to our external situation.”
“There is no reason why our program wouldn’t be successful outside of the classroom,” stated Atamian.
The first assignment in the emergency syllabus, for example, is to write one’s first impressions of the situation.
“How exactly did you get the news of the emergency? What was going on around you? What ran through your mind?” Brookes took the time to write out questions that would inspire anyone to get started on a writing assignment.
He would also want his students in the program to write a transition piece about their experience of getting home, and what it is like there.
“Write about the journey from Burlington to where you are now,” explained Brookes.
Poetry, creative writing, and creative non-fiction are flexible classes. For example, from the syllabus, a poem could be, “Write a poem from the point of view of someone who has been locked inside a room for three weeks.”
For the journalism class it could get a little trickier. The syllabus stated, “Use your imagination and your initiative to try to gather whatever solid information you can without physically endangering yourself.” These facts that students gathered, and the interviews they could complete, would turn into an article.
The best way to communicate with each other would be Angel, but if for some reason you lack access to Internet then there is always an envelope and a stamp.
“Unless you’ve been affected by the flu personally then there is no reason not to be able to do your work. Think about it this way, if the school hadn’t shut down you would still be attending classes,” reasoned Atamian.
“Based on your observations, write an essay in which you reflect upon how this emergency has affected the lives of those around you,” stated the syllabus.
Not every student, however, anticipated that the switch to online classes would go smoothly.
Jennifer Lunney also contributed to this article.
