OT: aOSU Moving all Classes Online for the Rest of the Month due to Coronavirus

Thoughts and prayers that you can get over this indignity.

i acknowledge your resiliency.

Honestly, if we could just make the internet a public utility so that the entire nation was broadband ready, we could do away with bricks and mortar schools (and school shootings) entirely.

Because the utility of a college education goes well beyond strictly memorizing material and some of it is the value you get from real life interaction and the exchange of ideas. 

I think most individual classes could be online, I don’t think an entire degree online has the same value 

Not everything easily transfers to online material - lab classes, just as one example, absolutely require the hands-on experience.

In addition to the example of online classes not being useful for lab, there are some other types of classes or exams that require hands on work or showing how you derived your answer etc.

That said, there have been a few professors that have excited me for lectures/classes. 

David Potter was without a doubt the best lecturer, maybe best speaker in general, that I have ever heard. His Emperors of Rome class was literally fun to sit through. Also the only time I have ever seen a professor get a standing ovation at semesters end. Lot of athletes in his classes, ironically, but I guess He was some form of admin for student athletes

Would you choose a surgeon who'd only had online classes?

As a teacher who has monitored and graded on-line HS classes, trust me when I tell you that cheating in on-line classes is prevalent. And if HS kids can do it, college students would be far better at it.

Delivering instruction by Internet (lectures, Q&A via on-line conferences) is fine. Assignments and assessments/tests are a disaster. Copy and paste a few potential short-answer or essay questions into a Google search and see how many answers you get.  Often, you could google a complete multiple choice question and there it would be, complete with the correct choice.

And there's no guarantee that the person submitting the work is the person who is enrolled. I had one kid who we used to joke (bitterly, because we couldn't 100% prove it) who never would have graduated without his girlfriend being good at math and/or cheating at math.

There's some things that just can't be taught (or taught effectively) in an online space. If you're taking a science degree and your course requires lab work, do you really think that can be done effectively via an online portal? I doubt it. 

I'd also consider trade schools. I don't know that they have lab work per se, but I imagine a lot of the teaching they do is very hands-on and applicable to what the students will later see out in the field. You can't teach someone how to properly redo an entire building's electrical wiring via the internet. Or at the very least, I doubt you get the same value out of what you'd learn online that you would in a classroom or out in the field. 

Then there's some things, like business classes, that don't necessarily require or need face-to-face interaction, but when you're split up for group work, I always found that the face-to-face time with your group was much more valuable (and helped better build camaraderie) than everyone working remotely 100% of the time. Just my opinion. 

Because studies have shown that you learn more with doing classes in person. Also, if you've ever taken an online class, you'd know you the information goes right through one ear and out the other, you barely learn anything, and the classed are by and large jokes

At 1 point,  bowling green had the highest std rate in the country.  That's a better use of the word outbreak.  No quarantines there.....

Discussions about how faculty would deal with all online classes are already ongoing. Technical staff is also being involved.

eh, not clear.

washington, stanford did it because it was the end of the quarter.

seems like osu is doing it around a spring break.

vandy just did it for a few extra days, and there was a case with a student.

not obvious that sending kids home, and then bringing them back in a few weeks, is going to actually help - indeed, it might spread things more rather than less (imagine everyone going home and then coming back in a few weeks)

There's zero confirmed cases in the state of Michigan. Once there are cases in Michigan and/or Ann Arbor then I think it could be viable, but as of now that would seem completely premature

It will slow / reduce the spread of it, though.  Even if people that have it are out and about, there will be fewer people to infect it fewer other people are out and about.

I don't know if it's "worth it" to shut down entire countries (Italy just did this!) from a cost-benefit standpoint, but there will be fewer that get sick by taking certain measures.

As recently as 2009-10, a novel A/H1N1 strain killed an estimated 150,000-500,000 people worldwide, including an estimated 12,500 right here in the U.S. We're a long way from that right now, but we are also doing much more to try to contain CoVID-19's spread. 

What we also have a lot more of right now is social media, which is making misinformation and outright falsehood about this virus, and government reaction to it, subject to the eye of the beholder. That makes it more dangerous for all of us.