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For Pa. state universities, online courses involve a learning curve for faculty, students alike

  • Jan Murphy/PennLive
A  Millersville University sign is seen on campus in Millersville, Pa.

 Carolyn Kaster / AP Photo

A Millersville University sign is seen on campus in Millersville, Pa.

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Alex DeCaria has turned his basement into his classroom where he records his lectures and plans to teach his meteorology classes for the remainder of the spring semester.

Sitting down there, all alone inspired the Millersville University meteorology professor to write a song parody to Eric Carmen’s, “All By Myself.”

“Eight months ago, I didn’t need a microphone. A Zoom account was an unknown. Those days are gone. All by myself …,” sings DeCaria.

Yes, they are gone, or at least for the rest of the spring semester.

All 14 state-owned universities, which include Millersville and Shippensburg, like other colleges and universities across Pennsylvania and the nation have or are transitioning away from in-person instruction to online learning for the rest of the semester to help slow the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

This decision has forced the state universities’ professors and students alike to make some adjustments that were unforeseen and in some cases, unwelcome for the sake of their health and safety during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Graduating seniors at nine universities so far – Bloomsburg, Clarion, East Stroudsburg, Kutztown, Millersville, Mansfield, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock, and West Chester universities – have learned their May commencement has been postponed. Other activities and sporting events that traditionally happen in the final weeks of an academic year are now cancelled.

With campuses shut down for the last half of the semester, students have or soon will receive word about refunds on a prorated portion of room and board and student fees payments. That’s a decision that isn’t easily made for university officials, who say they know it’s the right thing to do.

But finding as much as a $100 million systemwide to provide refunds causes a significant financial blow to their budgets.

Meanwhile, instruction through solely online methods has resumed or is set to start on Monday. Students received prolonged spring breaks to give faculty a week to prepare for the switch to remote instructional methods.

Shippensburg University was among the universities that resumed its spring semester last Monday.

“So far, it’s been semi-smooth,” said Dylan Smith, a Shippensburg University marketing major. “I feel like a lot of the professors don’t know what’s going on either. So they are constantly updating and emailing us different things. But for the most part, in terms of switching to online classes, it was pretty easy.”

But the sophomore student, who now goes to class at a table in the living room of his parents’ Middlesex Township home, added: “Personally, I would prefer to learn face to face because I learn a whole lot easier in physical classes rather than doing it online.”

Shippensburg University sophomore Dylan Smith of Silver Spring Township says the transition to fully online-classes this week has gone semi-smooth in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak but prefers face-to-face instruction.

PennLive

Shippensburg University sophomore Dylan Smith of Silver Spring Township says the transition to fully online-classes this week has gone semi-smooth in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak but prefers face-to-face instruction.

‘All by myself’

DeCaria, a self-described Luddite, is a stranger to social media. He said his only access to it is through his wife’s Facebook account. He’s never been a fan of online learning either. But he spent time this past week in his basement doing some trial runs of synchronous meetings with students to get ready for classes to resume on Monday.

He sat down there preparing to teach his 300 level courses to meteorology majors with no one around. The prospect of only seeing his students on a computer screen prompted Eric Carmen’s 1970s ballad, “All By Myself”, to keep running through his head. His wife showed him a video of a professor somewhere else doing a parody to Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic, “I Will Survive,” which got him thinking that he might try his hand at writing his own song parody.

“I thought about singing just the chorus of that for my students when I started an online course,” he said. “Then I thought I could probably rearrange the words and rewrite the whole song. So it kind of came to me quickly.”

He intended the video to be an icebreaker for students in his online meteorology classes once classes resume today. But it began making the rounds in family and university circles, he said.

Millersville University officials posted it on the school’s website. It drew more than 20,000 views as of Friday morning. Among those who saw it were former and current students, including graduating senior Grant Carlton, who responded by created his own video parodying the song, DeCaria said.

 

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One of our students, Grant Carlton, wrote and performed a response to Dr. DeCaria’s cover of All By Myself 💛🖤

A post shared by Millersville University (@millersvilleu) on

“I think my students are surprised I even know how to play an instrument,” he said.

As for teaching courses on atmospheric dynamics and cloud dynamics along with two other classes remotely, even he wasn’t sure he could pull that off when the university announced it was going fully online. With the help of support from the university’s IT staff and colleagues, DeCaria said he has found it’s going better than he had feared.

“What I decided to do with my classes is I don’t think you can replicate a lecture course online the way I do it so I’m prerecording each lesson maybe for 30 minutes hitting the highlights using Zoom and annotate it,” he said.

“We are still meeting synchronously but my hope is that the students will come to the synchronous meeting prepared having watched the prerecorded lecture and reading the notes and materials,” he said. “Hopefully the synchronous meetings will be more for questions and answers and clarifications.”

He’s also revised his course syllabuses to assign more weight to homework and quizzes and less on the final exam when it comes to grading his students. DeCaria remains optimistic that students will still gain knowledge from his classes using this different format.

“I am doing everything I can to make this a meaningful experience and not a waste of time,” DeCaria said. “I’m not going to lie. I don’t think it’s going to be exactly the same. It’s going to be a struggle trying to get the same level out of what they would get as though I had them in the classroom for the whole semester. But I don’t think they are going to be greatly disadvantaged.”

Missing college life

For students like Smith, outside of preferring to be sitting in class and instead having to cope with connection glitches that arise when a lot of students log into Zoom at the same time for a class, there’s the loss of social interaction with other students.

“It’ s tough,” he said. “I have a couple of friends in a couple of my classes and we would always get together and do homework and help each other with quizzes and stuff like that. It’s a little more difficult now because we’ve mostly resorted to texting and sometimes we use our own Zoom calls to converse with each other and do homework.”

He misses campus life outside of his classes, too.

“It’s nice to have human interaction with other people,” Smith said. “I just feel it improves the overall quality not only of education but life.”

Kim Garris, a spokeswoman for Shippensburg University, said the university community is working at reviving some of the social interactions virtually. She said students there love Bingo so they are working on developing a virtual Bingo game students can play. They also are trying to create some virtual activities to help graduating seniors celebrate the end of their college career.

“Any kind of way we can connect our way of life, we’re trying to connect it virtually,” Garris said.

Regardless, Smith said, “I would much prefer to be on campus. Not that I don’t love being home but everything’s got it’s up and down.”

His mom, Tracy, is especially happy with only one complaint, he said.

“There’s got to be more food stock in the house.”


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