The Hybrid Idea Continues

There continues to be continued student agitation for some kind of "hybrid" option in which students could either attend classes in-person or attend via Zoom or some such online format.

From the Bruin: University of California students criticized the UC’s decision to continue in-person classes without hybrid options and expressed frustration with difficulties obtaining accommodations for disabilities. Starting Jan. 21, UC campuses began announcing plans to allow students to resume in-person classes at the end of the month. According to a campuswide email from UCLA’s COVID-19 Response and Recovery Task Force, professors have the discretion to determine whether they will request a hybrid option for their classes.

UCLA’s Disabled Student Union recently circulated a petition calling for hybrid learning options, and students held a sit-in inside of Murphy Hall urging the administration to implement long-term hybrid options...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2022/03/06/students-voice-frustration-with-uc-over-lack-of-hybrid-learning-options.

The article goes on to describe agitation at campuses other than UCLA.

As we have noted in prior posts on this topic, in theory you could have a camera in the back of every classroom and sufficient microphone coverage to pick up sounds of the instructor and students. Someone presumably would have to monitor the equipment to some degree in real time. There would be no option in this cheapest version for online students to participate directly.* And it isn't clear how exams would be administered in such an arrangement. Options that allow more than just watching a course become much more complicated and potentially much more expensive. They also would require the instructor to keep track of the in-person students and the online students when, say, there were opportunities for questions or comments. Courses with labs requiring hands-on activities would become still more complicated.

Since there is continued agitation, however, it might be useful to produce credible estimates of what various options would cost, starting with the cheapest camera-in-the-back-of-the-room format which, as we have noted, goes back to the televised lectures for college credit of the 1950s.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/01/what-do-students-want-part-2.html; http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-good-news-is-that-deal-was-reached.html.