As schools return after Winter break colleges attempt to provide safe and effective learning
As the Omicron Covid surge continues to rage across the nation students and staff at local schools, colleges and Universities return to the classroom. To mitigate Covid spread, several of the Memphis Metro areas educational delayed the return to the classroom in favor of remote learning. While the Shelby County Schools and University of Memphis opened business as usual, Southwest Tennessee Community College chose remote learning for the first week.
The Centers for Disease Control recommendations for positive Covid cases has reduced isolation days to five, from the World Health Organization's suggested minimum of 10 days. The week of remote learning will hopefully allow time for returning students to recover from illnesses contracted during the holidays.
Instructors and Professors at southwest have been teaching remotely for much of the past two years, but there are concerns about the efficacy of online learning as opposed to classroom-based or hybrid instruction a mixture of the two.
Instructor Graddy additionally stated that many of her students were new to the College and unfamiliar with the Learning Management Software, which is provided by Desire to Learn and Entitled PAWS. “They were just the dots. In other words, they logged in.
I don't know what they were doing. They didn't answer their name. Probably who knows, I don't know. We'll see a lot of these students are already accustomed to virtual, so I don't anticipate it being a real problem. The problem comes with the new people coming in. The people that were not here in the fall and they just are clueless about everything about how do you get in. Well, they don't know technology enough to work paws, so there is a huge divide.”
The State of Tennessee’s Reopening plan started during the 2020/2021 school year primarily focuses on the primary school system and government links to higher education policy have fallen into neglect and return file not found errors. As the School year unfolds there will hopefully be more data available.
