Fall semester toggle terms so far

Greetings from a warm and humid Virginian August weekend.  I have spent the past three days working at home on four different computers and wondering if I should rethink all work travel for the next season.  Today has a very spring 2020 feeling to it.

But that’s not what I’m posting about here.  At least, not about my personal choices.  Instead, I’d like to update you on campuses deciding to start fall classes online, rather than in person, and making that choice from fear of escalating COVID-19 infections.

To explain: most of academia has planned on fall 2021 being a time to return to in-person education after nearly two years of the pandemic.  Yet the sudden explosion of COVID’s Delta variant has thrown these plans into question.  One response is to return to some of 2020’s in-person public health measures (masking, low-density spaces, social distancing) plus vaccine mandates, encouragement, or assuming enough people on campus will have gotten jabs to make things safer.

Another response is to quickly throw classes online for a short period of time.  We did this in fall 2020 and I dubbed the practice the “toggle term.”  Since nobody has come up with a better label, I’ll stick with toggle for now.  The idea is that a campus experiencing a sudden and local COVID-19 upsurge can suspend in-person education for a short period of time, switching classes to remote instruction modes until the danger recedes enough to resume face to face experiences. The toggle is rarely publicized or celebrated, but the pandemic has proven it to be one tool in a college or university’s strategic toolbox.

Last week I wrote about some early toggle term instances.  More have cropped up since. I was initially going to just write about the new ones, but, realizing there wasn’t a running list of them, I decided to make this post just such a tracker.

Here are the fall 2021 toggle terms so far:

• At Alamo Colleges (San Antonio) “[m]ost courses will take place remotely for the first two weeks of the semester (Aug. 23-Sept. 6).”
• California State University, Stanislaus announced it would hold the first six weeks of classes online.
• Houston Community College will hold classes online “for at least the first four weeks of the semester.”
• Rice University shifted the first two weeks of classes online.
• Mahidol University (Thailand) will hold classes online under an emergency decree a
• The University of Texas-San Antonio announced it would hold the first six weeks of classes online.

There are also other signs of toggle terms which are developing in different ways.  For example, Northern Illinois University decided on an unusual measure: a publicly stated toggle threshold.  When campus COVID positivity on campus reaches 8%, faculty can decide to teach online.  So far they haven’t gotten close to that number.  Perhaps we can think of this as an open or conditional toggle.

In Atlanta, a group of Spelman College faculty essentially threatened to launch their own toggle term unless administrators implemented stronger public health measures.  The instructors sent out a public statement:

“The faculty at Spelman College were excited about returning to in-person instruction,” the message began. “However, much to our disappointment, faculty have not received clear and enforceable protocol and safety guidelines that will ensure our health and wellbeing when teaching face-to-face. While awaiting acceptable responses to these concerns, we have decided not to teach in-person. Most faculty will use alternative instructional methods for course delivery.”

I think this may be the first faculty-driven insurgent toggle during this crisis.  Perhaps we can think of it as a bottom-up or organic toggle. Update: it looks like Spelman’s recent public policy moves have mollified those insurgent faculty, because the college president stated they agreed to return to in-person classes.

In my last post I mentioned the University of Florida’s abortive toggle. (more here) That’s another example of how this strategy can play out.

Have you seen any other colleges or universities implementing or exploring the toggle term?

I’ll update this post as reports come in.

(thanks to folks in the Higher ed in the pandemic Facebook group for a couple of suggestions; toggle photo by Andy)