Daily Lumina News 083120

Jackson College was one of the first institutions to make the call. Daniel Phelan, the Michigan community college's president, decided in March to go virtual for the summer and fall semesters, and the school notified students in early April that it would be fully online for the rest of the calendar year.
In this interview, Phelan discusses whether the early decision to go online has paid off and how the college is addressing other challenges presented by the pandemic crisis.

Adams State University President Cheryl Lovell is imploring the state—or anyone who will listen—to help connect the rural school with the COVID-19 testing that it currently is unable to afford or access.
The disparity in testing is another reminder of the imbalance created by Colorado’s limited higher-education funding, a system that, although awaiting a makeover, awards money based largely on how many students an institution enrolls.

They spent months training professors, streamlining communications with students, and fostering a sense of community online. The problem? These colleges are in the minority.
While many instructors—regardless of their institutions’ stated plans—scrambled to learn how to become better online teachers, colleges that decided in May or June to teach the fall online have been better positioned to help them make such improvements. Instead of spending their summers planning to teach hybrid courses in socially distant classrooms, professors have been able to focus their attention on how to design a fully online course.

As colleges bring students back to campuses for the fall semester, questions are increasingly being raised about what it would take to send them home or revert to online instruction in the event of an outbreak of COVID-19.
Some colleges are publishing "triggers" that will lead them to consider closing; others refuse to boil decision making down to a few numbers.