FORT WORTH, Texas _ Mollie Blashka was shocked when she learned she'd have to leave the UT Arlington campus for the rest of the school year.
She had to rush back to Arlington from a visit to San Antonio to move out of student housing, making it just in time before the campus closed. Her freshman year of college has been drastically altered.
The novel coronavirus has closed college campuses the same way cities have shut down.
Now Blashka and students across North Texas are adjusting to a world where vigorous class discussions are taking place in bedrooms and dens instead of in college classrooms. And where social interaction with peers, the foundation of campus life, has all but ended.
"It's a mess," said Blashka, who is now at home in Richardson with both her parents and two younger siblings _ formidable distractions from class work. "Somebody always wants your attention," she said.
Distance learning
Meanwhile, Peggy Semingson, an associate professor in UTA's school of education, is celebrating her colleagues' quick adaptation to distance learning. Semingson has been teaching online classes since 2008 and compiled a six part YouTube series to help other professors teach virtually.
The key has been flexibility, Semingson said. Students and faculty are used to a rigid schedule _ class on Monday and lab on Thursday, for instance. But working and learning from home means those schedules can be interrupted by family, pets or an essential trip to the grocery store.
Many professors have shifted away from live lectures in favor of content students can consume on their own time. Those should be short, digestible videos, Semingson said, because 90 minutes in a classroom is not the same as 90 minutes on a laptop.
"This is a long-term skill set teachers need," she said, noting that there appears to be no clear end to the viral outbreak.
Students understand that the rapidly changing college experience is no one's fault, said Lexi Barlow, a sophomore a Texas Wesleyan. About 60 students are still living on campus there, said Barlow, a resident assistant, but classes have shifted online.
The mood from students she knows has been disappointment and sadness, she said, mostly over the loss of human contact.
"This has really helped unify the student body. We've all had to come together in a way to get over this," she said. "You don't really know how important it is to have that in-person contact until you're alone in your room."
Equipment needs
At the University of North Texas, faculty and staff are looking for creative ways to adapt to the isolation, said Jennifer Cowley, provost and vice president of student affairs.
UNT has robust music and art programs, with classes that often require in-person lessons. Some have shifted seamlessly to video calls, Cowley said, but a big hurdle has been getting students equipment they need.
The school worked with instrument makers to purchase extras for students to check out and has made hundreds of laptops available to those who had been using the school's computer labs. Some software, like the Adobe Creative Cloud, has been made available for free download for students. Library staff have digitized hundreds of textbooks and other material for students who may have left their books in their dorm rooms.
Sometimes these adaptations have to be re-imagined, Cowley said. A chemistry professor designed a series of home-based experiments students could do without the instructor, but that plan was scrubbed with counties shutting down non-essential retail stores and ordering residents to stay home, she said. Another professor lost internet connection at home and drove to a campus parking lot to upload content for a webinar, she said
"It has been a herculean effort by our faculty and staff to get classes online and make them as valuable as possible," she said.
This could be the new normal for UNT, Cowley said.
"We're hoping we can resume class as soon as possible," she said. "But we're planning for the possibility this will continue through at least the summer semester."
Lack of hands-on learning
UNT junior Carlynn Greene praised her professors for moving quickly to web-based teaching in a tweet last week.
Greene said she had been worried teachers would fumble around with Zoom, the video conferencing software, or fail to understand the school's online classroom portal.
One of Greene's teachers, an older woman who had struggled to play YouTube videos on a classroom projector, has picked up Zoom rather quickly, she said. Some classes have been "very frustrating," Green said, but she believes professors are doing their best with limited resources.
As a broadcast journalism major focused on production, Greene's core class involved hands-on training in the school's TV studio _ experience she is no longer getting.
"There's not a lot we can do now," she said. "It's not really the same quality of education."
Hands-on training is a major part of the UNT Health Science Center at Fort Worth's curriculum, said Meredith Howard, director of hospital practice and an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacotherapy.
Fourth-year students would normally be starting a six-week rotation through a pharmacy or hospital, but some of those plans have drastically changed. While some pharmacies have remained open, hospitals are limiting outsiders to prevent unnecessary contact with potential COVID-19 patients.
Those students who can't go to clinical rotations in person are creating drug treatment protocols at home and seeing patients virtually, Howard said.
For first- through third-year students, the shift to online learning has been the biggest challenge, she said. Faculty had basically a weekend to prepare for distance learning, she said. Though some students and faculty had been reluctant to fully participate in a virtual world, being slow to take on new technology or initially refusing to turn a webcam on, her classes have now adjusted to life over the internet.
Last week, when Howard hosted her first video conference discussion, she felt a sense of relief when she saw her students' faces.
"It was just good to see them," she said. "I think we've taken for granted our interactions."
Missing campus life
Students and faculty have been robbed of relationship building, which is at the center of the college experience, said Kristie Bunton, dean of TCU's Bob Schieffer College of Communication. The communications college has been quick to adapt online, she said, using the coronavirus scare to test communication technology professors have long been touting and to apply real-world situations to crisis communication classes.
Most TCU students chose the school for its traditional campus feel, Bunton said. She said she felt for students who deserved an on-campus experience surrounded by friends, who now find themselves somewhere else, possibly isolated.
"They're finding their independence as young people and then we said, 'Go back and live in mom and dad's basement,'" she said. "I think in some ways our students are grieving."
Blashka, the UTA freshman, feels that way. She's studying linguistics and Korean and had low expectations for online learning. Picking up on complex Korean words via video chat worried Blashka, she said, but she was impressed last week with how well the class has gone.
Instead, she said, she's longing for campus life _ familiar faces on the UTA commons, new friends and freedom.
"It feels a bit suffocating," she said of being home. "My friends and I had made plans, things we wanted to do. That's just been thrown out the window."
