BY RUDY FICHTENBAUM AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum issued the following statement of solidarity with essential workers today: We all have been touched by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Our system of higher education has been upended in the course of only a few weeks. AAUP members in medical school and health center chapters and…
BY JONATHAN REES Guest blogger Jonathan Rees teaches at Colorado State University-Pueblo Do you remember Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs)? 2012 was supposedly the “Year of the MOOC” because they were going to revolutionize higher education. By teaching at scale, matching a few superstar professors with thousands of students at a time, the argument…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from Remaking the University. Michael Meranze is Professor of History and Chair of the Academic Senate at UCLA and a member of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. COVID-19 has brutally laid bare the devastating impact of several decades of privatization and capitalist globalization.…
BY JOHN K. WILSON MacMurray College in southern Illinois, which announced yesterday that it will be closing its doors in May after operating for 174 years, was the first college I ever attended. Well, sort of. It was a summer math camp for high school students, with the lure of receiving college credit for attendance.…
BY HANK REICHMAN Regular readers of this blog may recall that on March 14 I posted an entry entitled “Online Proctoring and Student Privacy Rights at UCSB.” That post reproduced a letter from the University of California at Santa Barbara Faculty Association (UCSBFA) to campus administrators raising concerns that ProctorU, an online test monitoring service…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Before the COVID-19 pandemic absorbed everyone’s attention, brought much of the country to a halt, and pushed higher education, what continues of it, online, the higher ed community was focused on the remarkable wildcat strike of graduate student employees that began at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and…
BY AARON BARLOW I am keeping technological interfaces with students to a bare minimum out of compassion and to assist learning. My students have enough to deal with right now; they don’t need additional troubles from platforms they don’t know and technologies they may not be able to access. They are New York City residents…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday the University of Wisconsin at Madison began instruction online, a move that the great majority of colleges and universities have made or are making in response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Here’s what English professor Caroline Gottschalk Druschke told the Wisconsin State Journal about the move: “None of us are going…
BY AARON BARLOW We’re learning a lot about distance education right now. As a group, that is, as faculty. Few of us have ever bothered with using digital tools, much less considered teaching solely online or even in a hybrid situation. We’ve assumed, correctly, that distance education is a pale approximation of learning without electronic…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Dear Colleagues, I just signed the campaign: Healthcare Workers Need Protective Equipment Now. It is being distributed by AFT and other groups. It would mean the world to me if you could also add your name to this important issue. Every name that is added builds momentum around the campaign and…