By the Scene staff
Fall semester classes are scheduled to start in a couple of weeks at Forest Park, and plans are still evolving, but it’s clear that campus life will be very different due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The number of people in buildings will be limited to 500 at any one time. The cafeteria will be closed. Stairwells will be one way. Everyone will be required to wear face coverings and practice social distancing.
Students with varied comfort levels and circumstances may find reassurance on St. Louis Community Community College’s website at stlcc.edu. They can choose from four types of classes: face to face, live virtual lecture, online or hybrid.
“We have not been given a limitation other than the guidelines that have been out there for retail, which really don’t match up to what we do,” said Forest Park President Julie Fickas.
“So really what we have done is to keep the traffic as limited as we possibly could on campus, providing some general transfer studies. Those normally would not be courses that would have to be on campus. So we did make a concerted effort to offer some of those. And to offer some of our developmental education and our English as a second language course as well, because students will appreciate an on-ground experience.”
Monitoring the number of people on campus will be achieved by counting those enrolled in on-site classes each hour.
Other community colleges and universities are establishing their learning environments based on local regulations and severity of coronavirus spread in their areas, Fickas said. “We’re following our county and city guidelines and going with the more restrictive guidelines.”
STLCC IN THE MIDDLE
The coronavirus continues to wreak havoc on American society, creating big complications for students and teachers preparing for the new academic year. All K-12 public school districts in St. Louis and St. Louis County are planning for online-only classes, at least through the first nine-week quarter.
In contrast, some colleges and universities in Missouri are going back to nearly regular class schedules, bringing most students back to campus.
St. Louis Community College, whose classes start Aug. 24, falls somewhere in the middle. After an intense summer of planning, officials are rolling out four types of classes that can be found by clicking on the “Modality” link on the college’s home page.
Here are the options:
- Face-to-Face: The traditional way to learn, in which courses are primarily in-person, on campus and in a classroom or lab.
- Live Virtual Lecture: The class meets online, at a specific date and time, using a streaming service. Students are required to be there to experience real-time engagement with faculty and classmates. Online assignments outside of regular lectures may be required.
- Online: Students complete class work on their own schedule in a virtual environment. Some courses may require proctored tests or meetings at designated times, meaning a test must be supervised so that the test taker’s identity is verified.
- Hybrid: This format includes a combination of the above. In each case, the class will meet at a specific date and time (either on campus or virtually) and will require virtual engagement. The number of meeting dates and times and level of on-campus engagement varies by course.
HELPING STUDENTS NAVIGATE
Fickas called the Modality link on the STLCC home page “awesome.”
This resource “helps students understand what they’re signing up for,” she said. “All this terminology, especially with the online environment, all these different words, are very confusing to students.”
The college learned lessons from its abrupt switch to online instruction in March, when the pandemic forced cancellation of all on-campus classes, Fickas said.
“We’re defining the things we were trying to do as we went online in spring. We tried to provide an experience where students didn’t get dropped in the cracks, but we did try to do some of the live virtual lecture, and we called it that, but we’d never used that term before so nobody knew what it meant.”
Faculty members are getting significant training on the platforms involved in the college’s new approach to instruction.
“The amount of training that’s going on and the amount of time that faculty are investing in training to be excellent at the job they do will be going on forward,” Fickas said. “They’re really investing a lot of time right now.”
REGISTRATION INCHING UP
Fall registration numbers are down, but now that the class schedule has been finalized, “we’re seeing it move in a positive direction,” Fickas said.
In these turbulent times, policies on the wearing of masks and other coronavirus-related restrictions are fraught with controversy. Disputes also have erupted over whether students should be returning to their schools or continuing to learn remotely.
In St. Louis, some parents of K-12 students whose public schools won’t let them take on-site classes are transferring them to private schools, the Post-Dispatch recently reported.
Forest Park is not hearing so much from parents but students themselves, raising concerns “on both sides of the fence,” Fickas said.
“It’s ‘I would like to be in face-to-face classes, you don’t have enough of them.’’ And we’ve also heard from students who are like, ‘Why are you having anything face-to-face? Why isn’t everything you do virtual?’ It runs the gamut.”