NEWS

Coronavirus: Purdue joins Ohio State, IU, dozens of others, ditches in-person classes

Dave Bangert
Lafayette Journal & Courier
Under President Mitch Daniels' tenure, Purdue has frozen tuition and boosted enrollment, conditions he says puts the university in a strong position to reopen this fall.

WEST LAFAYETTE – Purdue University, where President Mitch Daniels last week told faculty to start preparing to deliver courses online in case the coronavirus situation escalated in Indiana, followed the lead of Ohio State and Indiana, fellow Big Ten universities, and will quit holding in-person classes after spring break.

In a letter to the campus Tuesday evening, Purdue President Mitch Daniels and Provost Jay Akridge said students will start taking their courses online starting March 23, the day after spring break. They said faculty and students “should be prepared to continue as long as in-person instruction seems inadvisable – potentially through the end of the semester.”

Daniels said that “the campus will remain open after spring break.”

Purdue’s 44,551 students on the West Lafayette campus leave for spring break after classes Friday.

Students in the residence halls will have the option of choosing whether to return to campus or not after spring break, Daniels said. All campus events involving outside visitors will be canceled from March 16 to May 2, he said.

All other normal campus operations, Daniels wrote, would continue and that the campus would remain open. 

"Supervisors should be making plans around essential personnel and telework in case we need to take more aggressive actions," Daniels wrote.

The action followed a day when more than 2,000 people had signed an online petition, calling on Daniels to go with online classes. Indiana University announced a similar plan to do away with in-person classes after next week's spring break, lasting through April 6.

And a seven-page document detailing how Purdue professors and students might need to deal with remote classrooms, labs and exams went out to faculty members Monday, Frank Dooley, senior vice provost for teaching and learning, said Tuesday. Dooley said he and others started working on a plan more than a week ago, as the universities in other parts of the country hit earlier with confirmed coronavirus cases contemplated the move.

“If we were to go that direction, I can’t then say, ‘I need a week to get everything ready for campus,’” Dooley said. “My work, if you want, has been the ounce of prevention. … It went out yesterday, and my in-box is as full as it’s ever been with people asking follow-up questions. ‘What do I do about this? Have you thought of this?’ We’re still figuring those out, as we go through new territory.”

Late Monday, Ohio State suspended in-person classes for the rest of March and stopped all university-sponsored international travel through at least April 20 after Ohio health officials reported the first confirmed cases of the coronavirus labeled COVID-19 in the state.

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In the past week, dozens of universities – most in harder-hit areas in the Northeast, Washington state and California – have canceled in-person classes, in some fashion, for the coming days or weeks. Among them: Harvard, New York University, Columbia, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-San Diego, University of Southern California, Princeton, Seattle University and Amherst.  

In recent weeks, Purdue has ratcheted up university-related travel restrictions. University-sponsored travel to those on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Level 2 and Level 3 advisories – China, Japan, Iran, South Korea and Italy – have been prohibited through the summer. Last week, Purdue canceled all university-related travel – including for study abroad and service learning trips – during spring, which starts after classes on Friday.

Indiana had six confirmed cases of COVID-19, as of Tuesday morning, according to the latest figures from the Indiana State Department of Health. Those cases were in Marion, Hendricks, Boone and Adams counties. On Monday, schools in Avon closed for the next two weeks in connection with a coronavirus case in the Hendricks County city, 55 miles from West Lafayette.

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Last week, the Tippecanoe County Health Department declared a public health emergency, saying the number of people tested for coronavirus was in the single digits. No case came back positive, according to Dr. Jeremy Adler, Tippecanoe County health officer.

In a previous letter to campus last week, Daniels and Purdue Provost Jay Akridge wrote that it was “very unlikely that the problem will progress to the point of needing to impose ‘social distancing’ and pause face-to-face instruction as a result of a COVID-19 outbreak on campus.” But they wrote that the university was working on a plan to use Purdue Online to “allow us to continue to deliver courses.”

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“Faculty and staff should begin to consider how, through Purdue learning management systems or other means, they would deliver classes and continue communications with students to keep their educational programs on track,” they wrote.

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Dooley said a team to Purdue faculty members and administrators developed the “teaching remotely” advice, breaking things down into questions about how to communicate with students, how to deliver and complete coursework and how to assess students. Dooley said that included questions about how to do work typically assigned in a lab and what to do about students who might live in areas without reliable broadband internet access available on campus.

Dooley said Purdue’s approach leaned on skills taught in the university’s IMPACT program.

An acronym for “Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation,” IMPACT is a training program meant to challenge professors to evaluate what they’re teaching – “‘What are you trying to accomplish in this class,’ as simplistic as it seems, a lot of time the faculty hadn’t thought of that,” Dooley said – and come up with ways to make sure that comes through in the teaching.

Dooley said the adjustments professors made in classrooms after that training – more than 400 faculty members have been part of IMPACT – will be similar ones they’d need to make if forced to rethink classrooms during a public health emergency. He said professors with labs already have been designing online presentations that focus less on how to do an experiment and more on data analysis afterward.

“I’m not going to tell anyone it’s going to be easy,” Dooley said. “The first thing we’d want the faculty to do is to say, ‘Here’s what’s changing in my class, and here’s what my expectations are going forward.’ … Something closely related to that is the importance of being reasonable. We’re all in this new circumstance. We may very well have to adjust our thinking, as we go.”

Cheryl Cooky, chair of the faculty-led University Senate, said conversations were ongoing about the possible changes, including what would happen with students living on campus and whether students would have the tools they needed to complete the semester.

“I think this is a massive endeavor,” Cooky said. “But as far as I can see, these questions are being addressed.”

Ninghui Li, a computer science professor, lobbied Daniels, along with U.S. health officials, earlier this week to adopt what he called “aggressive social distancing policies” to contain the coronavirus spread. He wrote a paper outlining the odds of an outbreak without them.

“I believe that Purdue should move to online teaching as soon as possible,” Li said. “Based on the spreading of the virus … this is inevitable.  If it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or after spring break.  The disruption to the students’ study and everyone’s life is essentially the same which day this happens.  The longer the university waits, the higher the risk to health of Purdue community.  Equally importantly, delaying causes significant anxiety among the campus community, especially among the people who understand the risks.”

James Ray, a senior studying economics and political science, said Purdue should join Ohio State, especially as 44,551 students on the West Lafayette campus head out for spring break.

“In not pushing towards elimination of in class meetings for at least until the two-week incubation period is over, the administration is putting its students and faculty in a position of unnecessary risk,” Ray said.

“At the very least, this may lead to some students being unable to re-enter the country, which puts them at a serious disadvantage academically, but more problematic in my mind is that when that population returns, we may not even be able to figure out who is infected for several weeks, and it could lead to an outbreak on campus that we have the opportunity to at least try to minimize,” Ray said. “The temporary strain from a two- to five-week suspension of in class sessions is far less damaging than the potential for a student wide outbreak of COVID-19.”

Aside from planning for virtual classes, Daniels last week said the university wouldn’t host visitors traveling from countries on the CDC’s list. He said Purdue also was working on a plan for “spaces for quarantine and best practices for attending to those who are in quarantine and those with whom they have interacted.”

FOR MORE: Purdue set up a site to answer frequently asked questions on the topic. To read it, go to: www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2020/Q1/need-to-know-info-about-covid-2019.html

Contributing: The Columbus Dispatch. Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.