Recent Changes to ENG 330 Pandemic Plan

Our course will be online only for the Fall 2020 term.
This was a late change in plans, as unexpected for me as it may have been for you.

Until recently, ENG 330 was listed as a “dual delivery” course: the idea, presented to professors months ago, was (as I understood it) to provide accessible, synchronous live-streaming of in-person classes, which would be held in classrooms where rigorous safety precautions would be in place. That way, students could choose whether to attend in person or remotely. Professors were asked to choose ahead of time: for a prof whose pedagogy is centred strongly on in-person participation and discussion, the choice seemed obvious.

However, the practical application of dual delivery — modified over recent months for a variety of reasons, simply because campus administrators are understandably having to adjust to an unprecedented and ever-changing situation — has proven unworkable for ENG 330. In our assigned classroom, there would only be room for a quarter of the usual enrolment cap of students for ENG 330: that gives too little flexibility and choice to students. New campus and city rules now require everyone, even profs delivering lectures or leading discussions, to wear masks: the three quarters of students tuning in remotely would thus have to hear my voice thrice muffled, through a mask, through a mic, and through their computer — hardly equivalent to in-person learning. For those few of us who would be physically present in class, campus safety precautions taken thus far to prevent the spread of the virus may, according to various campus advocacy groups, not have had time to adjust to new discoveries about airborne transmission.

In short, for ENG 330, there really is no choice. Moving to “online only” status will allow me to remove my mask while teaching, crucially, so that all students can hear me clearly. So ENG 330 is now online only, with Monday sessions meeting synchronously on Zoom and Wednesday sessions replaced (as was always the plan) with pre-recorded, asynchronous lectures.

But wait — I’m not giving up on dual delivery entirely — it was a great idea initially and has great potential:

For ENG 330, I will attempt to organize informal outdoor gatherings with social distancing, in person, for some of our classes. If the plan works, then students will be able to choose to attend those gatherings in person (with no cap to their number, since outdoor gatherings in Ontario can go as high as 100), or to engage with gatherings remotely through Zoom (using campus wifi, whose strength I have tested successfully in outdoor locations). Click here for more information.

After classroom capacity returns to normal and masks are no longer necessary, I plan to retain some dual-delivery and online elements in all my future courses (it turns out that some lectures work better as pre-recorded videos; keeping Zoom open in all future classes will continue to allow students, when needed, to participate remotely in real time).