Following the announcement that online courses will begin instruction after an extended spring break on Monday, March 23, faculty from all schools have been working to develop plans for the transition over this past week.

Grace Bruton | Student Life

During the extended week of spring break, WU professors must transition their courses to an online format for virtual instruction.

Arts & Sciences Dean Jennifer Smith shared a survey with faculty to assess familiarity with online learning tools and identify challenges that certain applied classes may pose March 10. Smith also sent an email to Arts & Sciences students regarding updated academic policies, March 13.

Smith said that the situation of classes having to end halfway through the semester is “extraordinarily rare,” and with that being the case, professors must provide students with the option to either receive half the credit(s) of the course or pursue an alternative opportunity to receive the full credit(s).

“We are absolutely going to provide a way for everybody to complete…the credits and the requirements,” Smith said. “You know it, it might not be precisely the same topic, but we are going to make it possible for people to finish whatever they needed to finish. And that may be by changing the nature of the course.”

Professors are currently in the midst of adapting their syllabi to fit the online format. Many professors have sent surveys to students to determine their access to necessary technology and availability at set hours to sort out time zone differences or other commitments.

Laboratory courses

Although plans have yet to be finalized, laboratory classes are one type of course that will require large changes. Rather than performing experiments, Smith said that professors are currently redesigning their courses so that students can view video demonstrations and use given data to complete an analysis.

General Chemistry Laboratory Director Alison Redden said she wasn’t completely shocked upon hearing the news that the remainder of the spring semester would be moved online, but addressed the difficulty it posed for instruction.

“When we got notice that we should start thinking about it, it was kind of this abstract idea that this might happen,” she said. “But when it became reality, there’s just all these things spinning through your head…at the same time recognizing that this is the right decision, that this is what the University needs to do, but how can I move this course online?”

Redden noted that she is currently working on a plan for the remainder of the semester and relaying information to her students as she goes. For now, she has set up an online forum via Piazza to address any concerns that students may have. Redden said that the new laboratory class format can still be done creatively, such as by having the person performing an experiment make an error in the process, and having students watch the video and identify the error to assess how it would change the results.

“There’s no scenario where it’s perfect,” Redden said. “I don’t want to pretend that I can achieve the exact same things online that I can when I have students hands-on working in the lab. But I think what I’m trying to do is look at the big picture, my stated goals for the semester, my big picture objective. How can I, broadly speaking, allow students to accomplish those?”

The Performing Arts and Music Departments

For the Performing Arts Department (PAD), the switch to online instruction has done more than just change the format of courses. Productions such as “Ironbound” and “WashU Dance Collective 2020” have been canceled.

“There’s a tremendous sense of loss,” Pannill Camp, chair of the PAD, said. “We have had a lot of conversations in the last 24 hours about whether it’s possible to salvage anything from these shows, and in most cases, without students on campus they just can’t go on.”

Professor William Whitaker, who teaches two sections of Acting 1: Fundamentals of Acting, noted the challenges of transferring such a hands-on, performance-based class to a virtual format. Depending on students’ ability to access the internet, he hopes to continue with projects such as scene and monologue performances, which students could work on over Zoom before sharing a recording on Canvas for classmates to view.

“The very nature of theater is present tense, right?” Whitaker said. “The actor’s in the room, and so we’re trying to deal with making what remains of the course at least a positive experience or something we can learn from.”

While not being in a performance space prevents technical theatre classes from producing their work on a stage, Stage Lighting and Lighting Technology Professor Sean Savoie said that conducting classes virtually will not pose too much of a challenge. Students can download the same software they’ve used on lighting consoles to program and visualize lights on their own computers.

“The fact that we’re not producing it live is not a major hindrance for us,” Savoie said. “We’re able to do a very virtual world in the computer and create a really close realization of what we want to do, which is actually pretty nice.”

The Lighting Technology class will no longer produce its final project of lighting “Retina Burn,” a concert featuring a live band in Edison Theatre on April 23. However, students will still be able to program the lighting virtually.

Other departments have also had to cancel performances, such as the music department’s Choirs Concert, scheduled for March 27. Due to time zone issues, Choral Director Nicole Aldrich does not foresee holding synchronous rehearsals of course material.

“Because we’ve got students all over the world, it doesn’t make sense to try to say, ‘Okay, let’s have a rehearsal of all of the altos or all the woodwinds together over Zoom,’ because it’s not possible,” she said.

She plans to have students with access to a working microphone record themselves singing parts of the music meant to be performed at the concert. Rather than introducing new material for students to learn and perform, Aldrich said she and other music professors are working to create syllabi that focus more heavily on music theory and analysis, which will make music courses more accessible for students who don’t have access to recording devices or instruments.

“Going forward, we’ve talked about doing choir-related assignments, like I’d put up two recordings of a piece by different choirs and ask students to talk about the differences between them and talk about their favorite,” Aldrich said. “…We have the option for students who have the technology and have their instruments at home to continue with private lessons over Zoom, for example. But we also have then the option for people to participate in other kinds of music-related things like analysis, like studying history or some aspects of performance that don’t require them to have their instruments.”

Sam Fox School

At the Sam Fox School, discussions of virtual learning have been ongoing for weeks, as students from the Sam Fox Florence Program were told to leave their studies in Italy on Feb. 28. Dean Carmon Colangelo said that the school’s senior staff members have been meeting every day to discuss the transition and hold workshops on using online learning tools. Although many Sam Fox classes involve hands-on work with materials in studios, Colangelo noted that artists such as architects and designers often create images virtually.

“Everyone will have to work differently,” Colangelo said. “Even the sculptors, obviously, they won’t be able to make fixed parts, ceramics or metal pieces, or those kinds of things at that facility. So during this interim period, they’re going to need to think creatively…I’ve been emphasizing this: Innovation will come out of this limitation. And a lot of art comes out of very modest means.”

Professor Arny Nadler, who teaches the sophomore course Sculpture Studio: Material and Culture, noted that he and other faculty members are aware of students’ limited access to materials, resources and productive working environments. He plans to focus much of his courses on using found materials, such as objects in nature or students’ homes.

“As artists, there are always limitations to what you can do,” Nadler said. “And so we’re being very mindful and really trying to give students a bunch of options so that they certainly do not feel like they are kind of forced into a situation where they are having to acquire things that they don’t have the resources to do.”

McKelvey School of Engineering

In Introduction to Computer Engineering, students have been working with a piece of hardware called an Arduino board. During Monday studio classes, students work in groups to complete practicum exercises. On Wednesdays, students demonstrate lab assignments in the presence of an instructor or a teaching assistant.

Professor Roger Chamberlain, who is one of two instructors of the course, said that he hopes students who left their Arduinos in their dorms will be able to have them sent to them in the next few weeks so that they can work with other students over a video chat service. He plans to have students show their work meant for that Wednesday lab either over a Zoom chat or by uploading a video to Canvas.

“How do we address this notion of if they don’t have their equipment with them?” Chamberlain said. “What do we do about that? And so we bought ourselves a little time saying the assignment that is due immediately upon return to instruction is going to have effectively no real due date for quite a while. Give it to us some time and you’ll get credit for it.”

Due to the fact that students will be spread across time zones, Chamberlain is considering varying the times of instructor and teaching assistant office hours, which currently take place every day of the week.

“We promise to be very, very, very flexible in not being draconian with respect to, ‘Oh, the rule says exactly this. You must do it exactly this way,’” Chamberlain said. “Very much more of, ‘Okay, have you met the spirit of what we’re trying to do?’ We’re gonna be happy with that.”

Additional reporting by Kya Vaughn