I went to read the scholarship on universities during and after Katrina for some speculation. A brief thread.
1. (I wasn't the only one. This by @andreperryedu) brookings.edu/blog/the-avenu…
1. (I wasn't the only one. This by @andreperryedu) brookings.edu/blog/the-avenu…
2. A run-down of then-current institutional responses. Keeping in mind that this time the shutdowns and disruptions are system-wide. But it gives an idea of institutional-level needs. Mostly around housing and transferring. higheredtoday.org/2015/08/19/hur…
3. Matriculation agreements were done quickly, suggesting lots of red tape can be efficiently crossed out when there is will. higheredtoday.org/2015/08/19/as-…
4. AAUP report from commission called to order to assess Katrina responses. The bit on financial exigency is of note. We will all be learning more about force majeure in coming months aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/6…
4 (cont'd). Adding link to the full AAUP report because I'm not sure that link backs to it aaup.org/report/report-…
Observations. 1. Students who are embedded in vulnerable networks may not return or may need to switch institutions to maintain their vital role in their networks. 2. When the issue isn't capacity but scale, how can financial aid and matriculation agreements make that work?
3. If austerity was already the institutional logic, crisis response can exacerbate that (no news there, shock doctrine etc.). Looking at how faculty and staff labor are classified and re-organized could be important indicators.
4. I don't know how student demand might respond when the crisis at hand is both economic AND social. For instance, HE usually expands when economic conditions weaken but what if the economic crisis is also a public health crisis that constrains expansion? I don't know.
More observations. 5. I suspect someone followed up on efficacy of these Sallie Mae programs? (This excerpt from HURRICANE KATRINA IMPACT ON THREE HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES (HBCUs): VOICES FROM DISPLACED STUDENTS (Johnson and Rainey) 
From the same article, this note about online instruction offered during and after Katrina might be worth following up on.
Ray Schroeder recently wrote about his experience with that Sloan online consortium project insidehighered.com/digital-learni…
From a link back in that IHE story is a real-time account of the "Sloan semester" by George Lorenzo pdfs.semanticscholar.org/cc36/64f843364…
Notes on that Sloan white paper case study: they focused on "critically needed courses" and I don't know what agreement we have on what those would be at this scale. It would be Gen Ed planning committee drama but 1 million people and no way out.
Just the infrastructure needed to build a catalog of available online courses seems daunting and something that could not be done at scale. It could be a machine-learning challenge though.
One of the biggest takeaways of the report is that the online semester was possible because of 1) pre-existing infrastructure and 2) because the scope of the "bridge" solution was predictable and knowable. Number 1 is shaky for most HE institutions right now and 2 is impossible
And this suggests that advising ("matchmakers") will be critical to helping students restructure their degree pathways as course are interrupted, maybe restructured, some not offered for extended periods of time as faculty/staff fall ill or have to care for families.
Universities will need a degree of department-level advising that keeps track of required courses and prerequisites to help advise students that I don't think many Unis have.
Students and their families need a lot of help with financial aid during crises.
There is a lot more in that case study to consider. Now I'm moving on to some peer-reviewed research, starting with Camille Jarrell, Raymonda Dennis, Marian Jackson & Cynthia A. Kenney (2008) Academic and Student Affairs Issues Post Hurricane Katrina
(By the way, doing even this low-level research from home is very frustrating. I use three different browsers to get around things like this error)
I take it back. We won't be reading that one because I cannot open it. Frustrating.
You will be interested to know that while I could not access the article using my institutional credentials, I was able to BUY the article. So weird, huh?
I charged it to my research account and now you are all about to have to read $44 and 28 minutes of my life that I will never get back's worth of this gotdamn article. You're welcome.
Survey of student advising and academic affairs staff at community and technical colleges post Katrina. It starts off with a citation I may track down later.
(I will say here that we know relatively little about tertiary HE actors like these "crisis management" firms. They're up there with "administrators consulting" and "executive search firms" in my book.)
More caution to echo previous white paper case study by Lorenzo: building ad-hoc advising policies and infrastructure.
Something I keep wondering about is addressed here. Very path-dependent, strictly accredited programs like nursing that require in-person hours will have a lot challenges. And students will have a lot of issues.
Things to consider: who can teach online and the mechanisms for making faculty teach online. It's a significant site of within and between institution inequality. I'll use my experience as a small case. I have a lot of course releases. I am able to negotiate for them.
I have also trained to teach online and teach online regularly. I am also tenured. So, I CAN teach online, do not HAVE to teach as regularly as my less secure colleagues, and course releases and online instruction varies a lot by program, college and institution.
Universities have the most direct control over the most contingent faculty. They can be "made" to teach online. As yet, I've not seen much evidence of what can be done to make your star faculty or research faculty or very senior faculty do so if they don't want to.
A whole section on the role of distance ed and "technology leadership" coming up. The gist is that autocracy and money probably help a lot. Not much analysis offered here, though, which is strange.
A list of challenges worth ruminating on. Channelling @hypervisible and @audreywatters when I say that some tech provider is selling your university a "solution" to each of these five minutes ago.
Sound familiar? The case describes the context that lead to high attrition. To be fair, I would expect less attrition since this is a system-wide shock, meaning even the most well-resourced students are going online (and I assume they're more likely to persist).
But I would also expect attrition to be highest among the most vulnerable students, who are demographically similar to those impacted by Katrina.
Researchers point to a mkt survey about broadcast media v. social media. Students don't just need info dumps. They need a way to speak back to faculty & admin. Without it, the online class spaces become those social spaces and that may amplify problems more than solutions.
Another case study earlier in the article describes well-meaning faculty creating informal communication channels. It was meant to provide support and did. But it also undermined formal comm channels when they did a bad job of providing two-way comm platforms.
Also? Students wanted phone calls, which may be ironic and outdated. Not sure.
I may have broken this thread somewhere around here
You get the labor you pay for
You get the labor you pay for
