By Rene Kaluza
You might be able to learn from the past or even visit it, but you can’t live there.
Students, staff and faculty have seen the future during COVID’s occupation of the campus, and they will likely want more, according to King Banaian, dean of the School of Public Affairs.
He points to the simple principle of elasticity: Something stretched never returns totally to its initial state.
“I think our faculty have been extraordinarily stretched, and done so with great humor and have embraced the challenge,” said Banaian, who has juggled the concerns of 42-plus faculty, a handful of staff and thousands of students during the challenging days of COVID.
“We got pulled, let’s say, 100 units out from where we were in terms of the acceleration that we had to go through, because we had to,” he said. “We’re not going to stay at 100, but we’re not going back to zero.”
He’s not certain what that will look like, but he anticipates the changes to be borne out of the successful adaptations made during COVID.
“I think that means there likely will be more flexibility for students in terms of how to manage their schedules,” he said. “I think there (will be) more creativity, in terms of how to teach a class online. I think you’ll see a greater variety of methods.”
Banaian also believes the School of Public Affairs (SOPA) and St. Cloud State may have skipped ahead a bit in a shift to more hyflex instruction, which involves instruction from a camera-equipped room that allows students to be present and others to watch remotely simultaneously. The instruction is also recorded for students who want to view it later.
Educators have been examining hyflex as instruction that would let students toggle daily, or maybe even hourly between the forms.
At St. Cloud State, it was a very niche mode of instruction before March of 2020, Banaian said, with very few classrooms equipped to deliver it.
Post-COVID, he estimates at least 10 percent of classes will look like that forever.
Students who are self-employed or work the gig economy will find it ideal.
“You have pockets of time where you could go to class, and you have pockets of time when you can’t go to class, and you can’t really predict when those are,” he said. “Then hyflex is perfect for you.”
If the gig economy continues to expand, then hyflex may be something that expands with it.
Banaian speaks with pride about the other ways in which SOPA’s faculty and staff have stepped up with creativity and flexibility to deliver the best education possible to students despite having their own issues to face during the pandemic — children learning from home, family to care for or health susceptibility.
“A lot of it was the faculty just looked at it and said, well, there’s a job to do. And let’s get on with it,” Banaian said, noting the willingness of some to teach even in a class with one-fifth the students.
They worked quickly to get comfortable with the formerly uncomfortable – Zoom, headset microphones, online delivery techniques, email and texting with students, creative testing structures.
“They were really thinking about, does this student need me to be here? And if that’s true, then I need to be here,” he said.
He believes that some faculty will use the opportunity to push themselves beyond the online understanding they were forced to develop during COVID.
“We’ve known for a while that we have to change. And so now we can use the lessons we’ve learned here to get the changes we knew we needed before,” Banaian said. “I just think it was difficult for us as administrators to free up enough time (for them) to make the shift. We freed up enough time now because we had no choice.”
While adaptations and health and safety adjustments were crucial for students, Banaian also had to consider the health and safety of faculty members, the school’s staff and students who couldn’t leave campus because it was their only home.
Initially plans were short-term. Modify spring semester. A thousand questions arose, and then a thousand more as COVID rolled across the country, settled in and weeks stretched into months and months into semesters and semesters into school years.
Who needed to work from home because of family or health issues? What equipment and technology was needed. How could it be maintained? How could staff be available to help students with transfers and internship and job searches, financial worries, graduation concerns?
SOPA’s reconfigured staffing and offices mean someone is almost always available to take a student’s call.
Kristy Modrow handles student relations and experiential learning for SOPA.
“Students are being affected by COVID in negative ways. Positive things have come out of it, too, but there are students who have contracted COVID and had a hard time in their classes, or they’re taking care of a family member,” Modrow said. “It becomes harder to focus on what they need to focus on to be successful.”
The flexibility in courses has helped that.
Internships have been harder to find, especially in the public sector. She and students have had to be innovative to find ways to complete that requirement of graduation.
Microsoft Teams and Slack have joined Zoom in Modrow’s repertoire of communication tools, and she has been pleasantly surprised by their value in getting a lot done while not being face to face.
Still, she believes students miss the interaction — with each other and with faculty and staff.
Modrow points to what might be an interesting glimpse at the near future though: Online sections of classes for spring are filling faster than the in-person sections.
“I think, perhaps the sense of belonging is going to be missing,” she said.
Banaian has found some pleasant surprises.
Community interest in the knowledge that’s available through the faculty and campus has been strong.
A pop-up seminar the school did on how to get people to take a vaccine featured an alumna who is a vaccination nurse, a campus researcher on DNA and RNA, a geographer with a biology background and a faculty member with expertise in political leadership and messaging from leaders.
“What I did not perceive was how many more people would want to talk with us and have us create these events,” Banaian said.
The school’s Quarterly Business Reports became more popular online than its typical delivery at a meeting; and that may inform delivery of the school’s annual Winter Institute.
Faculty dedication and ingenuity has been evident on many fronts.
In August, tornado sirens roared as Banaian drove to Stewart Hall for a delayed commencement ceremony for spring graduates. SOPA’s was the last of six ceremonies that day, scheduled to start at 7 p.m. Despite an hour spent waiting out the foul weather in the basement of Stewart Hall and the late hour, several SOPA faculty were there to honor their graduates.
Shawn Schooley, who leads the Master of Public Administration program, organized pictures – properly masked and distanced — with the dean on Husky Plaza for its nine graduates in May to emphasize the sense of accomplishment.
And, while Banaian admits to being amazed by all the university has accomplished for students by a major reliance on the Internet, he is also eager to get back key missing pieces.
“What (the Internet) really has trouble replicating, to me, is having a shared experience with another person while you’re learning something. And that’s the part that I can’t wait to get back to,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to ever think that we can just completely replace this with the web, because students learn from each other as much as they learn from our faculty or from a book or from a webpage, and that’s the part that’s harder to put together through online.”
He’s also eager to keep the school’s Hospitality and Tourism and International Relations programs healthy and strong while the pandemic has devastated the travel industry.
Travel is a natural part of those programs, which often include study abroad sessions and trips to participate in Model U.N. and Model Arab League conferences.
While the Internet can facilitate and duplicate part of that work, it’s not the same education that students would get by having a face-to-face experience.
That’s also true with the growing interest in conversations about race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. Visual cues are missing on a Zoom screen, Banaian said.
“When you are engaging in a conversation with a human being that is difficult, many of us, including me, want to actually be in the room with a person because I rely on being able to read body language to have to have an effective conversation,” he said.
That’s not to say the conversations shouldn’t take place, he added.
“It’s just to say, I’m hoping we’re a little forgiving of the fact that some people will be a little more intimidated in having those conversations when we’re not able to be together.”
While a timeframe for climbing out of COVID is uncertain, Banaian and his colleagues already are putting together the mix of courses and building potential schedules for a 2021-2022 school year that has both pieces of the past and the future — which is now the present.
