Expected Enrollment Fall 2020

Please give us a sense of your plans if MIT is fully remote?

Are there opportunities to reduce the number of subjects taught without disrupting student fulfillment of requirements? (Please tell us if your answer to this question differs for subsequent scenarios from your answer here.)

What components of your current learning objectives CANNOT be achieved remotely?

Please give us a sense of your plans if only some students are remote (e.g. international students)?

What are the practical requirements of teaching this way?

What are the potential impediments?

How would you operate if there is strict social distancing (required minimum square feet per person) for lab/project/studio/performance spaces?

What are the practical requirements of teaching this way?

What are the potential impediments?

How might you suggest that MIT divide the students? (e.g. by major, year, student choice to coordinate with friends)

How would you operate the non-remote-able components of your curriculum in these circumstances?

What are the practical requirements of teaching this way?

What are the potential impediments?

Do you have feedback on options for which students to have on-campus when?

How would you operate the non-remote-able components of your curriculum in these circumstances?

What are the impacts on students, faculty, and staff?

What are some department/program specific learning opportunities that would be unique at this time?

What are some broader and potentially MIT-wide learning opportunities?

Feel free to share any other thoughts.

Academic Programs Office

I've heard many UG students saying that they would try to take a leave of absence if this fall is fully remote. I also know many of our students feel incredibly isolated how things are right now. They miss the causal interactions and work with their peers and residential community. Many are having a hard time focusing, especially those with learning disabilities.

I think you need to give all students the option of returning to campus, if they feel comfortable that way some students won't feel targeted. Also, we have such a diverse community on campus, I don't know what the message would send if we changed that.

I really like this idea, as it eases us back into some sort of normalcy, which hopefully we will return to one day. If we require everyone to wear masks, we need to think about how we can supply them, etc.

I think this would create incredible staff and faculty burn out, as well as be extremely distracting for students. In the midst of trying to create a new way of doing every single project and part of our jobs virtually, if we then need to try to reinvent the wheel and create new deadlines, etc., I can't image any person being okay with this. It takes years for academic flows to be created on campuses, and this would really upset that flow and interfere with a lot of summer opportunities for students.

Experimental Study Group

Paola Rebusco and Graham Ramsay

We will teach classes remotely and think of activities to build a virtual community

ESG teaches GIRs and some humanity subjects, removing those subjects would eliminate the program

We won't be able to do project enhanced learning as originally planned, but we are brainstorming new ways to still have hands on components

If some students are on campus and others remote, we would need to select our cohort only from students on campus

It would be impossible to use ESG spaces with strict social distancing

We would want to have all the first year ESG students in the same group

They would happen at ESG

it would be more difficult for first year students to learn how to work together and make connections

We would want ESG students to be on campus during the same first trimester

we would need to reorganize the material in trimester modules, it would require more curriculum development over the summer

500+ graduate students, 200+ UROPs

We will continue operating as we are today. Many of our researchers can work remotely to move forward their research but those who need access to special laboratory equipment such as robots and fabrication facilities are not able to make progress. One significant issue is the well being of the students. Graduate students who are living alone are beginning to show signs of mental impact. Many undergraduate students are telling us that they will take a semester off or a gap year if classes continue to be virtual because their virtual campus experience is not good.

The department will provide the integrated answer from our faculty.

Work that requires access to hardware is affected. Also, students find that the campus experience of working on p-sets and talking in social settings can not be captured on zoom.

The courses would have to have both on-campus and remote components and I am not sure it is possible for one course to be both. Grading would have to be done very differently for remote students and on-campus students because the students learn much better on campus.

The course could have two sections -- on campus and on line -- to be graded differently. This might require doubling the teaching effort.

Dealing with different time zones and IT infrastructure. I heard about the case of a student who has to write essays on the phone because it is the only way to stay connected.

We would have to make building/room access plans consistent with social distancing and campus parameters. But how would we enable students to work together on p-sets? The social learning component of our campus is part of the culture that makes or students strive.

Many spaces and coordination for accessing those spaces

Not clear we can keep all the students apart all the time.

Dividing by year makes most sense to me. For most classes, the majority of the enrolled students are in the same year.

Allocate class lab facilities and form smaller sections. Perhaps reduce the class time?

Need many more sections for subjects which might necessitate higher teaching loads.

How would clubs work under this model?

Assign schedule by year. For example, at Dartmouth campus housing is managed by requiring all sophomores to be on campus during the summer quarter.

Same as in the previous scenario.

Social learning is an important aspect of the MIT experience. Students get together to work on p-sets, to discuss solutions to small and big world problems, they participate in intellectually-focused clubs. We need to find a way to enable this.

Campus-wide data collection and analytics.

Social aspects of technology.

We have to balance staying safe with offering a rich thriving educational experience. The feedback I get from our students is that the difference is learning between now and before March is huge. I am concerned about losing student enrollments if the virtual campus continues in the Fall. I am concerned about safety if the circumstances are not ready for opening campus. If we find a safe way to bring students back to campus we need to figure out how to enable social learning.

If MIT is fully remote in the fall we plan to eliminate the portion of our subject offerings that involve experiential learning, performance, international travel, and other non-remoteable elements. We plan to conduct classes using Canvas and Zoom. We are considering shifting the current blend of asynchronous and synchronous instruction to more asynchronous instruction since many of our classes meet four days a week. We may be able to deliver more effective instruction by using more pretaped lectures or informational videos, and focusing the synchronous meetings on communicative activities. This may also be necessary due to student time zones, and will help avoid student and instructor Zoom-out.

We are reducing the number of subjects offered next year due to both budgetary constraints and remote teaching issues. We plan to eliminate the portion of our subject offerings that involve experiential learning, performance, international travel, and other non-remoteable elements.

we still plan to teach remotely as our classroom do not provide adequate space for physically-distanced teaching

unequal situation for 2 groups of learners

By year, with priority to seniors

we have eliminated non-remote-able

a portion of our instructors are not available to teach beyond May 31 due to other employment or family commitments. Will they receive extra compensation for third term?

We can offer global, diverse, multilingual perspectives on the pandemic and its social/cultural impacts

as above in a multidisciplinary context

I am concerned about potential instructor burnout, ergonomic issues, and need for uncompensated summer work during this crisis. Their well-being is my utmost concern, in addition to the well-being and educational outcomes of our students. There are particular equity questions for other academic instruction staff, who are not compensated at the same level as faculty, and also have higher teaching loads (3-3). In addition, if we see a drop in enrollments next year, this will have a knock-on effect for language classes, which are sequenced. This might lead to a decline in concentrations, and pose obstacles for students who wish to minor. Finally, we are concerned about IAP. In IAP we offer intensive language classes. If IAP is eliminated, it will have an impact on our curriculum.

Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Undergrad (CMS and Writing) and Masters (CMS and GPSW)

Approximately 700 in classes

This seems the most plausible scenario for many people in the department. I am writing from the perspective of not only our own courses, but also from WRAP, which supports CI-H, CI-HW and CI-M courses.

The general feeling is that most of our courses can be offered online. Though a couple of the core graduate courses might need some significant change to better align with the modality of teaching. We have three categories of courses that are impacted more substantially. First, courses that use specific media where interacting with that media (touching, seeing) are important for understanding. Second, are courses that use particular media production equipment that students would not have access to off campus . Third are our education courses, which involve time in the classroom of K-12 schools (though this may not be our decision anyway since it will depend on school rules).

As for WRAP involvement. CI-HW, CI-H and CI-M classes: All CI-HWs that we teach can move to be fully online, and WRAP lecturers are already preparing for that, since in all scenarios, small classes such as these would be online. While some assignments will need to shift somewhat, everyone believes that with careful planning, no content or instruction would be lost in the transition. Importantly, we may want to change the times that some sections are offered, to accommodate students in all time zones.

Similarly, we believe that with planning, we can continue to support all CI-H subjects (either live or online), though again, some assignments may need to change.

For CI-M subjects, which are usually hands-on lab or design classes, more substantial changes are likely to be necessary in both activities and communication assignments; the shifts made in these classes for the second half of this semester have been substantive and have often required changing genres, which involves substantially more work for WRAP lecturers (more explanation on this is in the later material). However, if the disciplinary faculty can figure out how to move the lab/design work online, we see no reason why we cannot teach our content online as well.

Potentially. We have thought about combining sections at least. And are thinking about ways to have more co-teaching, which would involve dropping some classes. But it doesn't look like we have much room to drop classes.

As mentioned above, we have three categories that don't work well. First, courses that use specific media where interacting with that media (touching, seeing) are important for understanding. Second, are courses that use particular media production equipment that students would not have access to off campus . Third are our education courses, which involve time in the classroom of K-12 schools (though this may not be our decision anyway since it will depend on school rules).

If everyhting were really back to normal (seminar style classes), just missing international students, I think we'd try to find a way to move back to our "normal" instruction and do our best to support the students who can't physically be there. For many of the classes that would mean appearing remotely synchronously. It is hard to capture a seminar style class and access it asynchronously.

Running seminar style classes in hybrid modality will be hard. Classes that involve physical materials and equipment will be hard or impossible to offer remotely (some materials can be shipped but others cannot). Classes that involve field visits will be impossible to offer this way.

Eqiupment, materials, in person visits. Time zones.

Most of our seminar style classes could not operate this way. It would be too challenging and require too much space. Classes that require specific matertials and eqiupment could take advantage of this situation to run small labs and/or have signouts of materials. It would also allow access to library materials, which are very important for some of our classes and could be made available this way.

In theory seminar style classes would be useful to run this way. But if everyone is really six feet away form each other it becomes impossible to be close enough together for adequate communication in most circumstances.

Compliance is a big one. But so is access for immuno compromised faculty, staff and students. How will the be incorporated if they cannot be on campus?

We haven't come up with any good answers for this. Faculty seem to think that teaching remotely would be better than this scenario. Though in some of the classes with specialized equipment and materials they could do that for part of the year. While this is about undergrads, there were many questions about what this would mean for graduate classes.

We could allow for equipment sign out, library access etc in part of the class.

In most scenarios we're going to have some fraction of our students off campus and some on. Mixed modalities are harder to teach than teaching online. For some classes like CI-HW which tend to segregate by year, we might have better luck.

Homogeneity of classes. Most classes are mixed years, and majors (our classes are taken by many other majors).

Everyone uinversally agrees that this is not workable. We cannot do this model. It will exhaust students and faculty. It will be very costly. It will be disruptive and have all of the drawbacks of the other models plus more. We should not do this model at all.

We didn't even consider this, because everyone disliked this model so much.

Cost, time, mental energy, logistics. This model is problematic. People did say that if we really went to trimesters with shorter terms that we could think about it. But that too would require a lot of rethinking of classes.

People are excited about the opporutnities here. But we also need to calibrate expectations. While we are trying to cut budgets, most of the thriving ideas cost additional resources. We need to reconcile those things.

First for thriving is having adequate time and tech over the summer to rethink classes.

Second are new classes that take advantage of the medium. There are ideas for new science fiction classes, COVID related classes, classes about and in virtual worlds, and classes that connect to other classes to create larger learning communities.

Both of these require new resources. For the latter, something like the class funds to develop new courses would be wonderful.

Connecting classes in some unique ways seems like a good opportunity. Some faculty had ideas around this particularly for first year students.

For the most part our faculty are preparing to teach online next year. Though they hope that we have a chance to evaluate mid-way through the year in the hopes that we could get a spring semester on campus (or part of one). They were also open to the shifts in the calendar if that meant for a higher probability of doing some classes on campus for part of the year all together. People struggled with part of the students for part of the time. It seemed problematic for the classes that we offer, and a model that might create a two tiered system.

We are preparing to teach remotely in Fall Term. In striving for quality of teaching over quantity of teaching, no instructor is being asked to teach more than one class in Fall. Our classes will be taught synchronously, with asynchronous components (Slack discussions, video-recorded mini-lectures, independent research projects, etc.). As a department, we are now compiling best practices, drawing on what has been learned this semester. In addition, we are adjusting our teaching schedule to better accommodate remote teaching; at least one of our subjects, for example, is moving from a 3-hour once-a-week slot to a twice-weekly 90-minute schedule.

As noted above, no instructor is being asked to teach more than one class this coming Fall semester. We may not be able to offer the same flexibility in Spring semester. We are prioritizing the teaching of those subjects that will enable students to fulfill their Concentration, Minor, or Major requirements in our program.

Many of our learning objectives can be achieved remotely — and we will do our best — but missing in-person interactions will sometimes make these achievements difficult. Making sure all students have an equal voice in class discussions will always be compromised by differential access to telecommunication and Internet tools, by varying household circumstances (with some students taking on new household responsibilities if people in their circle are essential workers, newly unemployed, and even sick), and more.

If it turns out that some students will be remote while others will be together in the classroom with the instructor, we would want to offer remote students the ability to join the classroom synchronously via Zoom. At the same time, we would want to record the class session (not only lecture, but also classroom view/student comments, since many of our classes are discussion based and even our lecture courses are highly interactive). We would want to make such recordings available to students via Stellar/Canvas for asynchronous viewing.

In addition to the technical requirements, we would need to think about enrollment caps for each class in light of the availability of classrooms. Our own 2 classrooms in E53 are small and would not be viable if 160-square-foot areas around each person would be the standard.

Providing synchronous instruction to students across an array of Time Zones is likely the most significant impediment.

We would likely not offer our project-based/studio courses (we have 3) next year. Instead, we would continue to teach remotely.

Given the constraints that will be placed on students’ mobility if on campus, teaching our subjects remotely would in many ways be easier/more rewarding even if (some) students are on campus (with the exception of the time zone issue).

It will be important to work with student living groups (whether FSILGs or dorm floors) to sustain a sense of community (this will be important for the trust upon which public health guidelines will be predicated). Maybe every other floor of a dorm could come back for a semester with the students spread out by using the rooms of the alternate floors?

If by year, preference should be given to seniors and first-year students.

Again, our first thought is to organize this through the living groups, since that’s likely what would help make the social experiment of socially distant living and learning succeed. Our own majors/minors do not generally have junior or senior projects in our program that would require them to be on campus. Obviously, seniors should be on campus the semester before graduation.

Same as we would for the scenario of letting half the students be on campus for one term.

We would adjust the schedule such that no instructor would teach in more than 2 semesters. To do so, we would need to think about how best to offer at least one of our core courses, required for the Concentration, in each of the 2 terms (that might mean giving a “Tier One” designation to a course that’s currently listed as a “Tier Two” subject). We might need to hire outside lecturers (such as our own recent PhD students) to help fill in the curriculum such that we wouldn’t need to ask any faculty to teach 9 months of the year.

Anthropology subjects have the potential to take real advantage of having students located throughout the country and around the world. Students can pursue “real world” investigations of concepts or issues discussed in class readings and lectures. These can be both mini-assignments for “show-and-tell” in class, as well as multi-week ethnographic or interview-based research projects in the place of a final term paper or exam. We can “bring the world” into the classroom by asking students to report from their home cities, states and countries.

We in Anthropology have been excited to learn of the possibility of an “overlay class” on Covid-19 and global responses to the pandemic and would be eager to contribute to that. We have faculty who teach subjects in medical anthropology, and these faculty have already started re-tooling their classes to speak to the pandemic, and could easily attach some of their sessions to an MIT-wide class.

We also have a wide network of connections to medical anthropologists, sociologists, and historians in the New England and Northeast area — including at Harvard, Brown, Princeton, and beyond — which we would be eager to activate to make our disciplinary and community expertise available to MIT students and the MIT community through guest lectures and workshops.

Anthropological topics more generally — to do with cultural belonging; migration; cross-cultural communication; food security; the place of religion in social life; the realities and societal risks of amplified inequality by race, economic status, gender, age, nation, and more — speak to matters that are always important to understand, but even more vital in testing times such our contemporary moment.

The contact info for this document names Anthropology's Senior Academic Administrator, Irene Hartford, but the department head Stefan Helmreich (sgh2@mit.edu) can also serve as a contact.

Staying off-campus and out of town; concentrating on 'classical' blackboard classes and data analysis for research (both are possible without presence on campus)

To a certain degree, pre general research can happen instead of classwork; however, as a majority of MIT-WHOI Joint program students tend to move to their advisor's institution, shifting classes into later years may cause issues of how to schedule increasing commute without losing research time.

Data acquisition from field work; courses that require hands-on lab activities

I would stay out of town and off-campus (Woods Hole vicinity) and profit from the resources that come along with a remote infrastructure that is still established.

Ensuring that taking classes remotely does not come along with a disadvantage.

I do not understand the question.

I would stay off-campus in the vicinity of my lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Remote infrastructure for classes and student resources remains established for people that still prefer to practice social distancing.

Graduate Office spaces can be tight such as social distancing could simply become difficult when all people are back on campus.

Offering a larger number of identical lab sessions to allow people to spread and decreasing social interactions

Ensuring that the remote infrastructure remains in place to account for individual cases

A lot of traveling might be involved in this scenario.

Students that graduate or have their pre-doctoral exams are on campus in one of the earlier terms to allow preparation for their (remote) exams afterwards.

Offering a larger number of identical lab sessions in all terms to allow spreading

repetition for faculty and only having part of their lab groups around; students need to be able to travel and find housing for only short periods of time when only coming back to campus for 1/3 of an academic year; enhanced administration effort for staff to ensure social distancing and enhanced arrival/departures

By and large we are adjusting our teaching offerings to select classes with limited hands on components —e.g. no museum-based courses.

NA - we offer few courses to begin with

hands on work in museums, archives, and fieldwork/field trips

Adequate technology; also the books/library resources described in answer to previous scenario holds here as well

If requirements aren't provided for, they will become impediments! Also, time zone issues for our classes, many of which are discussion based.

By and large we are adjusting our teaching offerings to select classes with limited hands on components —e.g. no museum-based courses. That said, in several cases we would imagine seeking permission for a socially distanced field trip to the surrounding community or the museum or other campus resources on occasion. As with access to offices and other facilities there should be some petition process.

This avoids time zone issues of hybrid models

Ideally would teach mostly remote but offer library/archive/museum/fieldtrip on case by case basis

Time zone issues for our classes, many of which are discussion based.

Unanimous view from faculty this is not desirable

The three semester proposal is highly undesirable--faculty are unanimous in opposition to it. What is the process for dealing with faculty who are taking their sabbatical or other one semester leave? What does this mean for TA assignments? In the morning calls some have suggested running certain courses more than once to accommodate undergrads in this scenario; we are a small unit and can’t offer more than one run of any course.

There are opportunities for participation and collaboration with colleagues and students at far flung institutions.

STS and SHASS more broadly can put the COVID crisis in larger perspective.We plan to address this issue in some of our classes but there are opportunities for MIT wide events that we are working to put together and welcome collaborations with colleagues elsewhere on campus.

PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering

Civil and Environmental Engineering

We plan to build on the experience of this spring semester to transition to online delivery, either synchronously or asynchronously. We anticipate some challenges in delivering any required in-person elements of graduate subjects (group projects, demonstrations, etc.).

We do not anticipate significant opportunities for reduction in graduate subjects taught; most of these satisfy our core requirements or are already offered on alternating basis. We will have a better estimate after we survey all of our subjects.

Any hands on demonstrations or group projects.

This too would build on current experience for lectures, where faculty are generally recording synchronous lectures and posting them so that they can be accessed asynchronously as necessary. However, for lab/project classes this would represent a clear inequity, where remote students would have a limited learning experience. As a result, in our view, this would necessitate a continuation of current emergency grading.

Additional training on simultaneous in-person and recorded lecturing (video support, tablets, etc.)

As suggested above, this option could result in significant inequities, and may also lead to confusion as to how content is being delivered. Management of instruction would need to be elevated.

None of our PhD subjects are of this nature, so would be like Scenario 1, see response to #8

As described, this scenario is not relevant to PhD program (unclear how graduate classes impacted)

Not relevant to PhD program, other than perhaps for TAs

PhD students who are TAs may be overburdened if have to teach labs/recitations multiple times (depending on how model implemented)

No clear impediments for PhD students

Again, the focus here seems on UG, not G, so not relevant to PhD program per se. However, we have significant concerns about the re-organization required to set up 3 semesters. Furthermore, we must anticipate some potential for flexible transitions in the event of a resurgence of covid, and shrinking classes into shorter semesters will make this particularly difficult.

Though the focus here is on UGs, we assume that the 3 semester structure would also apply to graduate classes, and this would require significant re-working of graduate subjects (each semester presumably a bit shorter than usual) and timing of offerings. CEE graduate subjects would only be offered once per year, so if lectures proceed wholly on campus, then such classes would only be accessible to 2/3 of UG; if remote, no impact on UG. This scenario may also add TA’ing responsibilities associated with re-configuration of semester structure. In general, this scenario would add undue stress and workload to faculty, students, and staff.

May be some opportunities for new undergraduate/graduate seminar on covid transmission or online delivered subjects in partnership with peer institutions. Specifics TBD until fall scenario and teaching needs clarified.

No additional thoughts on this at this time.

Technology and Policy Program

Noelle Selin or Frank Field

selin@mit.edu; furd@mit.edu

Because TPP is a research SM, our research component will be the most problematic, particularly for international students. Moreover, TPP students are funded on the “School of Engineering” model, where funded research appointments account for tuition and stipend payments. Incoming students will not be able to pay tuition for doing coursework remotely if they have not secured a research assistantship. Much TPP student research can be done remotely for continuing students, as it largely involves modeling and simulation rather than lab work. We have a few students, however, whose work involves laboratory and field studies.

TPP expects to be able to fully adapt its coursework to an online teaching model, working from the experiences garnered during the spring term of AY2019-20. We will also be relying upon similar distance learning from the subjects not offered by IDSS. This reliance is most sensitive to decisions by the Economics and Management faculty, whose subjects 14.003 and 15.011 are part of the TPP core and typically taken in the fall semester. Restricted electives come from more departments, but our flexibility is greater there, and students can choose to shift their coursework across different semesters in our two-year program (only a few students are planning February 2021 graduation, and they should have finished their coursework). Our cohort-building exercises, which have required physical presence and group work, will have to be adjusted/restructured.

About 90 units, plus a research thesis, are required to complete the TPP SM. A reduction in subjects is not credible overall when it comes to the basic requirements of the degree. However, because student preparation varies according to background and experience, the Program has traditionally held that subject cannot be “waived” because of prior training. Rather, we require that a more advanced subject be taken instead to satisfy our degree requirements. We are exploring to what extent we might be able to substitute for some requirements (e.g. economics, quantitative methods) through existing offerings and/or MITx.

Our cohort building and group work exercises cannot, as presently constituted, be achieved remotely. However, it may be possible to develop new teaching instruments to accomplish some of these goals. Timing would be problematic, since the intent of that effort is to get the students early in the degree program.

Remote international students will raise the issue of research support alluded to above. Otherwise, the teaching methods that were initiated during the Spring of 2020 should serve as a basis for the educational component.

With some students physically absent, the cohort-building exercises will, as noted above, be challenged and will likely require substantial revisions, as listed above.

With a hybrid model, there will be clear needs for instructor support to manage the audio/visual components, particularly monitoring and setting up access for recording of the class presentations. Asynchronous aspects (students in different time zones necessarily accessing lecture/test materials at times different than in-class students) will require development of instruments that can ensure effective educational outcomes.

The current TPP cohort has students who are presently in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the US west coast and Europe, making time zone coordination particularly difficult.

See above; students who are never even digitally present concurrently with the rest of the class will likely suffer. Cohort/community building will suffer, and research progress/access will also be problematic. The financial implications of the research access issue will be particularly problematic for international students, particularly with the complications of visa requirements.

A main concern is the TPP program lounge, in which students congregate informally, conduct group work for classes, and attend cohort-building activities. While formal gatherings in that space could be restricted, the space is open and our ability to control informal gatherings in the event that the space is not 100% closed is minimal. The space also abuts TPP and IDSS administrative and faculty offices, several of which are occupied by individuals who are members of particularly vulnerable groups. Despite MIT’s social distancing efforts, and our efforts to emphasize the need to avoid getting together in groups, students continued to gather – also after-hours – in that space, sharing food and drink, until the campus was locked down in mid-March.

Because students work with faculty and research scientists across campus as research assistants, we have little ability to help them control their work environments. In early March, several students reported to us that they were still expected by their supervisors to be on campus and participate in group meetings. Our students’ safety is thus dependent on other departments/labs/centers instructing their own faculty and research staff to comply with guidelines.

The main requirement would be physical infrastructure – wired classrooms. Zoom works well when everyone is on zoom, but sound and video are terrible in a conference room when run off a laptop. Avoiding half-zoomed lectures would be a better alternative, but would require some virtual components for on-campus participants and more creativity on the part of instructors.

As above, availability of wired classrooms and infrastructure.

We are not commenting on this alternative as we are a Master's program.

We do not think this option would fit our needs. Altering the start/end date of semesters would have substantial implications for research and internships, which are important for our students’ progress and professional development. IAP is a typical time in which first-year students conduct research (often field research, which may be possible again in January in some places) and make progress on their theses; given our subject requirements, adjusting to a new three-semester schedule could have ramifications on student thesis completion down the line.

Altering the number of units for particular subjects, if that changes as a result of shorter semesters, would require revisions to the curriculum.

The institute already has a structure and deadlines in place for H1 and H2 subjects. Our students would probably benefit greatly if subjects were shifted from full semester to H1 or H2; this would lessen their need to “multi-task” on coursework and research, and enable some to carve out more dedicated research time (much of which could be conducted remotely). This would also preserve the ability to keep the same units for subjects.

Changing semester timing would provide an additional burden to organizing partially-remote activities.

Changing semester dates would cause substantial and long-lasting ripple effects on student, faculty, and staff longer-term planning and work-life issues (e.g. logistics of moving and rental apartment contract dates/sublets if MIT’s schedule is not consistent with other area universities; internships; travel, when permitted again).

The public policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its sources and mechanics as well as the way it reveals the fraught relationship between technical expertise and public decision making, has many points of potential connection with the TPP teaching domains. Development of case work might be possible, while current events will continue to provide numerous examples of some of the teaching lessons of several of our subjects. We could also contribute to Institute-wide efforts on this topic.

Through TPP’s Research to Policy Engagement Initiative, we have started conversations in TPP and IDSS about how MIT research can draw on best practices to better inform policy and decision-making for challenges like COVID. We could contribute to MIT-wide learning opportunities on this topic.

Please do not hesitate to get in touch (selin@mit.edu, furd@mit.edu) with any other thoughts or discuss further. We are a relatively large Master's program with some unique considerations, especially our RA funding model, and we are concerned especially about our ability to make sure students are supported (and with a large % of incoming international students). Depending on what MIT decides, a resulting inability to support students by our program, even if temporary, could have long-term ramifications on the health and competitiveness of our program in a competitive global environment. We have to date been able to attract students to TPP with the (to date, credible) promise, but not a guarantee, that they will be supported for their graduate studies; if we are not able to do this, we will harm our existing students but also our ability to maintain the program in the future.

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

see answers to STS survey

If our grad student TAs are in different time zones, that may be challenging to figure out scheduling

No, but this is not a desirable scenario

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Most likely extra work for our grad students. Difficulty figuring out leave plans for students with fieldwork/archive work if those travel opportunities resume. Please also see responses to STS unit survey.

Please see responses to STS unit survey

Please see responses to STS unit survey

One special circumstance for grad students that is part of instruction but falls outside the regular course offerings has to do with preparation for qualifying exams. Typically students could borrow books through libraries or cross-institution borrowing and that is now suspended. Faculty and students are still limited in what materials are available in e-format; we would appreciate some additional funding devoted to book purchases/rentals for students at this stage. More specifically, our PhD students reading for their common exam list will encounter many books which are not available electronically. Undertaking qualifying exams becomes cost prohibitive in units such as ours, and we do not have internal resources to buy all of our students all the books the exams require.

Media Arts & Sciences (MAS)

* On average MAS offers 20 courses in the fall semester. We would offer the majority of these courses online. We would review the feasibility of courses that require access to special labs or equipment on a case-by-case basis and cancel courses if necessary.
* Over the summer we would work with instructors to put in place necessary technology platforms and support, and in some cases suggest adjustments to the course design, emphasizing seminar style options for example.
* We are considering adding a course focused on the design of online learning (relevant to the current situation, but more broadly focused on re-inventing blended learning).

We anticipate being able to offer the majority of our courses online. We would make certain that all MAS students will have access to the number of credits and the types of courses they are required to take in order to proceed in their studies as planned. If necessary, we might consider combining certain offerings, or perhaps creating several special offerings depending on the geographical location and subject needs of our students.This answer does not differ for subsequent scenarios.

The learning objectives of being a Media Lab student cannot be fully captured by courses alone. A core element of our graduate program is to “build things” and to participate actively in our multidisciplinary community. In addition, the serendipitous intellectual and cultural encounters that take place constantly in E14/E15 cannot be replicated online. Being 100% remote would greatly affect the type of education experience we can offer our students.

Specific elements of the MAS program that we would not be able to replicate online:
* Access to special labs and equipment (wetlabs, yellow box, audiovisual production/experimentation facilities, etc.).
* Group projects that require in-person collaboration.
* Projects that require access to the E14 FabLab (which are many).

It is not impossible - but it would take time and research - to develop new tools and methodologies that could better replicate the experience of being a Media Lab student.

This is the least desirable scenario in our view. From experience, having some students participate remotely and some in person will lead to a significantly diminished experience for the remote students. In addition, the Media Lab teaching style does not lend itself easily to be moved completely online. As mentioned above, we would anticipate a markedly different experience for remote students.

If we had to split our student body in this way, we would consider the following approaches:
* Offering specially-designed courses for remote students only. These would include additional support and coaching, and would focus on teaching aspects that are particularly suited for remote study, for example seminar-style courses with invited experts.
* As much as possible, design courses as online-first, where even in-person participants would be using digital communication tools.
* Provide special individual support/coaching to remote students to help with challenges they may face.
* Build strong peer-to-peer relationships between in-person and remote students, for example, by forming project teams that include some remote and some in-person participants.

Seminar rooms with excellent audio-visual integration for remote participants, e.g. high-quality microphones that pick up room level conversation, screens that can be integrated into the seating arrangements (giving remote participants a “seat at the table”).

This scenario has significant challenges, including:
* Managing participation across different time-zone;
* Maintaining a sense of community and cohort among the students;
* Preventing remote students from feeling disconnected and isolated.

We could spread out class times, limit classes to the larger meeting rooms only, and hold some classes in the Media Lab’s open spaces and sixth floor meeting spaces. To do this properly, we would hope to limit outside-MAS use of the 6th floor spaces in E14 so that we could stage the maximum number of MAS student-related activities there.

For individual research labs (yellow box, wetlabs, A/V studios, FabLab) we would implement strict scheduling requirements to limit the number of people in the space at any given time.

Careful class scheduling and space management, and deploying new access systems for individual labs.

Creating a teaching schedule that evenly distributes classes throughout all days of the week, and excessive booking of E14 spaces by external (often external-to-MIT) organizations and activities.

Presumably in this case, all graduate students would be able to return to campus so this would only require minor adjustments for MAS. Undergraduates could do UROPs in the Media Lab when they are on campus virtual UROPs when remote.

Some considerations for MAS students:
* Identify moments when working from home is less disruptive (e.g. when preparing for general exams, when writing up, etc…) and group students based based on these criteria.
* Allow incoming masters students to start with two on-campus semesters to help with orientation and building a sense of community.
* For PhD students, allow faculty and students to select the appropriate time for students’ remote semester and decide on a case-by-case basis.

Limit and spread out access to lab spaces and equipment (lower density should be achievable).

* Impact on faculty: need to redesign courses to adhere to three semester structure
* Impact on students: assuming that our students would stay physically in the Cambridge/Boston area, they could in most cases maintain their housing arrangements. Students would require a highly-functioning remote work environment. In some cases, students may require access to equipment during a remote semester, which could be arranged on a case-by-case basis.
* Impact on staff: Relatively limited. We might suggest continued work-from-home for at least part of the staff to further reduce density.

* Adapt MAS.863, the Media Lab’s "How to Make Almost Anything" course to an online format. This would also allow us to increase enrollment (the course is always over-subscribed) and potentially offer an open online version as well.
* Create a special subjects MAS course focused on designing new models for blended and online learning - using COVID as the immediate challenge, but looking much further ahead to new ways of supporting collaboration, knowledge generation, and learning in a particularly ML/MAS style.

* Increase the flexibility of the academic requirements for MAS students; increase the use of independent study projects, especially those that would not require on-campus presence.
* Develop a graduate equivalent of the UROP program, allowing MAS students to do research “internships” in other Media Lab groups, especially where remote participation is possible.
* Create an MIT system for online peer-learning groups for our students. Many successful students will be able to form these groups without our help - but especially those students that struggle would greatly benefit.
* Greatly increase research into hands-on and studio-style online learning. If we are truly aspiring to provide “the MIT experience” online, we need to find ways to integrate not just "mens", but to a much larger degree also "manus", into our students’ online experience.

The current quality of online conference-learning media is very poor. Since much of Media Lab/MAS investigation involves the creation and evaluation of extremely high-quality audio, video and physical materials, we would like to lead explorations of existing platforms that offer far greater quality than Zoom-like systems. In anticipation of being disappointed with existing products, we would be interested in conducting research into developing higher-quality platforms for remote collaboration, perhaps in collaboration with some of our member companies and perhaps by supporting the entrepreneurial endeavors of some of our recent graduates.

In addition, the entire paradigm of hyper-sensitive remote collaboration is currently impoverished and should be the subject of MIT-wide research. We would be happy to participate in - or indeed to spearhead - such an initiative.

We are planning to teach remotely. -hoping that all teaching is synchronous at scheduled class time AND recorded for asychronous teaching/learning

Probably not. If we have extremely low enrollment in a subject, we will likely not offer it. -happened recently, but seems unlikely now.

many UROPs cannot be done remotely. our lab subjects are best done in person, but can be done remotely; Labs are being taught remotely now, but are far less effective; much less effective than any other type of remote subject.

Plan for fully remote still applies. for lab subject, remote student could defer the subject (we have enough flexibility for that); or if need be, we could offer 'lab' subjects remotely for some.

Full support of remote teaching and learning, as seems likely; need to figure out lab subjects if some remote and some not and 'fair' ways to evaluate such different experiences.

I think nothing serious or insurmountable.

We would offer multiple times for our lab subjects; some parts can be done remotely; some must be done in person; would split some times; duplicate others, either different days or extended hours

It will largely depend on enrollments; based on recent history, we should be able to do this and we are starting to plan.

If enrollment exceeds capacity, we might need a lottery system (we used to do this); always a concern that altered class days/times overlaps or interferes with other subjects or activities

RANDOM; mix the students up; different majors; different years. Friends will remain friends; major cohorts will still be connected; a real opportunity to encourage mixing

two possibilities: compacted more intense 1/2 semester lab subject; or 1/2 hands-on and 1/2 remote; with each being offered each half semester

making curricular content fit and work; getting buy-in from staff and faculty; limited number of faculty so should not be too tough

same as practical requirements

This is a non-starter among our faculty. Virtually everyone was opposed.

similar to other options; but MUCH more complicated with what would be offered when and for whom; and too much disruption to peoples time

almost all negative; asking almost everyone to redo what they teach; no one has any idea what would/could/should be offered which 'semester' This seems far and away the most disruptive and least useful option of any

"unique'; it is all unique and not in a good way compared to pre-Covid-19; it can and will be improved from the current 'managing'; I think there are opportunities to build community that extend beyond academics

We have already incorporated Covid-19 into most of the Biology subjects; some of this could extend to other units; Many opportunities for 1st yr seminars around the myriad of aspects related to Covid-19 (social, economic, ethical, medical, scientific)

Please consider offering ALL students the opportunity to come back to campus in the fall. Distancing would be between the students and the rest of the MIT community, especially those at higher risk for serious Covid-19 illness. Staff in and out of student housing would require appropriate PPE and training; teaching would largely be remote, save for safely distanced lab/project based subjects, as in other options with some students on campus. Having 50% of students in living quarters and supposedly distancing is likely to end up being similar to 100% occupancy. Would need robust virus testing and isolation of students who were contagious or likely contagious. All those infected could be housed together temporarily. I'm looking into the health risks associated with such a scenario, but it seems more feasible than a couple of weeks ago, and perhaps not at all reckless.

Biology Graduate Program; similar issues for Microbiology and CSB (computational and systems biology)

37 NEW students in fall 2020; ~200 grad students total in Biology

we will offer our grad subjects remotely

creating a community of our 1st yr grad students will be much more difficult

We are encouraging our small number (probably 2) of international students who are not already in the country to consider deferring for a year

we will be able to teach remotely; but would be better to have students in town

our grad students begin lab work in the spring; we would integrate that with whatever policies were in place then

In spring the students begin choosing a lab; it is important that they have some access to the lab and the people in it; best done in person

should not affect our grad program; the half-and-half should NOT apply to PhD grad students

subjects can be done remotely, even with all PhD students here; for these students, most lab work cannot be done remotely

they need to be here for lab work

they need to be here for lab work

NON-STARTER; terrible for figuring out TA assignments

for lab work, semester system is irrelevant

can't think of much positive

we will incorporate Covid-19 info into our grad subjects

Please enable all grad students to return to compus

1000s, depending on scenario

Math classes would be offered remotely in a mix of synchronous (mostly zoom) and asynchronous (mostly taped in 2-190 and similar rooms with ODL assistance).

We are looking at the curriculum to evaluate which classes must be offered (e.g., GIRs, program requirements, and fundamental building blocks that are required for other courses) and which can be postponed in order to redeploy teaching resources. This would necessarily have negative impact on the quality of education, which we would try to minimize.

It is likely that we would offer more sections of several subjects at more times (especially to accommodate multiple time-zones) with smaller class sizes than we would for in-person learning.

The spring experience raises some serious issues:

A. How to handle exams and grades in a fully remote environment

B. How to foster student engagement and connections to both faculty and other students. Some classes reported large declines in student participation after going online, both in lectures and in recitation.

C. How to add sufficient “extra value” to distinguish large course experience from (free) OCW

D. How to insure that all critical class material is covered. Many classes report that they have slowed down, covering markedly less material.

[From 8] We are looking at the curriculum to evaluate which classes must be offered (e.g., GIRs, program requirements, and fundamental building blocks that are required for other courses) and which can be postponed in order to redeploy teaching resources. This would have a negative impact on the quality of education compared to a non-remote semester, which we would try to minimize. (similar for all scenarios, except 3.75 where the total number of classes will increase substantially over the three terms combined)

Virtually all of our classes can be done remotely in some form, although at a reduced level and with significant additional commitment of faculty resources.

Substantial benefits of an MIT education in mathematics come through student and student/faculty interactions and collaborations that are much more difficult to foster remotely. We were fortunate this semester that initial connections were already forged before instruction moved on-line. We would not have that advantage in the fall.

Perhaps most at risk in fully remote formats are the student presentation components of our CI-M subjects (it is hard enough for students to learn to give good presentations before a live audience, even harder in remote formats), group work exercises in many of our recitations, and the group creation/clustering at the start of many classes that encourage collaboration. It is very common, especially in large classes, for students to form problem set groups; this is extremely beneficial, both for educational outcomes and for community, and it is much more difficult to facilitate remotely.

Classes would be offered in lecture halls and filmed; it is possible that some classes would be offered purely remotely in this scenario as well. We think it will be challenging to offer fully “duplexed” synchronous teaching in large classes that have significant student participation components. Good integration of classroom cameras with zoom and having “co-pilots” to assist primary instructors and monitor on-line chats would be essential to insure that remote students are not at too marked a disadvantage. It may be that asynchronous lectures with synchronous smaller-group discussion sections or fully “flipped” teaching modes will need to be implemented in many, especially larger, classes.

In this scenario, we would need substantial technological help to equip classrooms with webcams. We will likely also need additional support staff for classes that normally do not have them, and potentially even for subjects where support staff exist but have not traditionally been required to attend classes.

This seems especially challenging for remote students in recitations and CI classes. We are also concerned about the scheduling of classes to accommodate students across time-zones, which may require splitting some subjects into multiple sections to provide greater flexibility.

In this scenario, the majority of our classes would become remote, at least for lectures.
Ideally, we would like to have recitations and CI classes meet in person if possible. This would have educational value but also help to build connections and community. It may be necessary for students to take turns attending recitations in person and remotely, rotating through regularly, or expand the number of such sections, keeping them smaller, to respect social distancing.

In addition, it would be enormously better if testing can be done in a proctored situation even if the lectures are remote.

This seems very difficult. Certainly, entering students should be present for the first half to introduce them to MIT and to each other and to help build community.

[From 11] Virtually all of our classes can be done remotely in some form although at a reduced level and with significant additional commitment of faculty resources.

Substantial benefits of an MIT education in mathematics come through student and student/faculty interactions and collaborations that are much more difficult to foster remotely.

We would try to schedule more CI presentations for students during the half-term that they were on campus. We do worry that in terms of team-building and collaboration, those in the “first half” would have an undue advantage over the others.

Classes would operate both in-person and remote, similar to scenario #2. If social distancing is still being observed, there might be at-risk faculty who would need to teach only remote classes. Indeed, we find it hard to imagine how social distancing can be maintained if any significant amount of teaching is classroom-based (just thinking about entering and exiting classrooms, motion through corridors, natural tendencies of students to congregate, …).

The logistics are very difficult.

Testing would be a mix of in-person and remote, which would be difficult to make fair.

Project-based classes and seminars would be difficult.

We strongly discourage this scenario, which we regard as a logistical nightmare for all and an unreasonable additional teaching burden for our faculty. But if we must do this, then we would prefer to have entering students on campus for the initial term – to introduce them to MIT and to each other and to help build community – and completing students on campus the final term. Our CI-M subjects and others that critically involve student teaming would especially profit from in-person teaching. But it is difficult to imagine how to distribute class offerings across these terms to accommodate students present and yet to offer everyone the opportunities they need without teaching many single-term classes 2 out of 3 terms and without offering many classes normally offered both fall and spring all 3 semesters.

[From 11] Virtually all of our classes can be done remotely in some form although at a reduced level and with significant additional commitment of faculty resources.

Substantial benefits of an MIT education in mathematics come through student and student/faculty interactions and collaborations that are much more difficult to foster remotely.

All of these scenarios require additional work from our faculty – remote or “duplexed” teaching is simply harder work – but this scenario requires an unreasonable extra burden due to the need to repeat classes over multiple terms. Staff are similarly over-burdened in this scenario. Depending on the degree to which classes are duplicated and other logistics of scheduling, students may have a difficult time selecting classes (or even terms, if given the ability to choose?) in which to participate. There are also major questions of what they will do during the “missing” term: internships? jobs? other on-line learning? What will MIT support?

Learning how to give effective, engaging remote presentations. Learning how to flourish under adversity.

How to build community when students (and faculty and staff) are scattered across the globe (or even in the same building, but isolated due to social distancing constraints). [Our CPW event was a real achievement in this respect, and we are certain MIT will come up with more such ideas and opportunities…]

While math is universal in so many respects, for some domains it may be useful/interesting to have participating students from many points around the globe.

For Mathematics, most of our classes can be taught – albeit with some loss in quality – in a remote format and thus many will be in most of these scenarios. (“If it can be done remotely, it must be done remotely.”) But we strongly feel that 3.5 and 3.75 are unduly burdensome for our faculty and logistical nightmares for all involved, and we strongly discourage their adoption.

We have heard a number of reports of students considering taking a leave if MIT is fully remote in the fall. This greatly concerns us. We must be able to offer a semester that has sufficient value that students want to be part of it.

MEng Civil and Environmental Engineering

Civil and Environmental Engineering

This would be a significant concern for this short self-funded 9 month MEng program. If there is no on-campus instruction, we may anticipate a further drop in enrollment as students choose to re-apply in the future when an on-campus experience might be possible.
In terms of instruction, we would build on the experience of this spring semester to transition to online delivery, either synchronously or asynchronously. We anticipate some challenges in working through group activities and hands on projects. We may need to create additional support for social aspects of community-building among this cohort of students.

We do not anticipate significant opportunities for reduction in MEng/graduate subjects taught; most of these satisfy our core requirements or are already offered on alternating basis. We will have a better estimate after we survey all of our subjects.

Any hands on demonstrations or group projects.

If international students cannot be on campus, we anticipate significant inequities, with remote students having a more limited learning experience. This will be particularly egregious for this specific 9 month MEng program, and we might expect to have students choose not to enroll if not on campus. In terms of class instruction, this would likely build on current experience for lectures, where faculty are generally recording synchronous lectures and posting them so that they can be accessed asynchronously as necessary.

Additional training on simultaneous in-person and recorded lecturing (video support, tablets, etc.)

As suggested above, this option could result in significant inequities, and may also lead to confusion as to how content is being delivered. Management of instruction would need to be elevated.

Instead of having a single designated room for students in this program, we would likely need to assign desks to them in several different rooms and labs in Building 1 (if available). And we may need to limit certain class sizes to students in this degree program since they would need the credits to graduate.

In particular, group projects will require rethinking to create the same educational outcomes. These pedagogical exercises are based on teamwork around a common table, sketching and brainstorming. If this program were to move online, it would require greater facilitation from faculty and perhaps a teaching assistant.

If we are not able to design a reasonable pedagogical approach to this tuition-paying professional degree program, we may end up with a very small class of ~4 students instead of the 12 students that we expect.

As described, this scenario is not relevant to MEng program (unclear how graduate classes impacted). Because the MEng program is typically a two-semester, 9 month program, we could consider offering one semester on campus to one half of the cohort. International students may not be able to attend in person, but domestic students could be divided into one semester each on campus.

Again, the focus here seems on UG, not G, so not relevant to MEng program per se. However, we have significant concerns about the re-organization required to set up 3 semesters. Furthermore, we must anticipate some potential for flexible transitions in the event of a resurgence of covid, and shrinking classes into shorter semesters will make this particularly difficult.

Though the focus here is on UGs, we assume that the 3 semester structure would also apply to graduate classes, and this would require significant re-working of graduate subjects (each semester presumably a bit shorter than usual) and timing of offerings. CEE graduate subjects would only be offered once per year, so if lectures proceed wholly on campus, then such classes would only be accessible to 2/3 of UG; if remote, no impact on UG. This scenario may also add TA’ing responsibilities associated with re-configuration of semester structure. In general, this scenario would add undue stress and workload to faculty, students, and staff.

Because we would potentially be conducting research and design projects through remote learning, we may be able to connect with professional colleagues who collaborate remotely across different time zones. For example, on many engineering projects there are firms who pair a team in New York with a team in Sydney so that they can work continuously around the clock. We could create case studies through interviews with professional engineers to learn about the opportunities and pitfalls to remote collaboration across time zones.

No additional thoughts on this at this time.

UG degrees in Chemical Engineering (10/10B/10-ENG)

We will prioritize the offering of core (required) courses for students. We will leverage the experiences in the current term to guide practices for the Fall term, including the possibility of adding recitation-style class meetings to provide students with more in-person problem solving. In short, we plan to do what we have already done, but in a more organized manner.

We will likely reduce the number of elective courses offered by 2 (possibly 3) to enable those faculty to be re-assigned to the required courses. This should not impact time to degree for any of our students since we offer a large number of elective courses.

We typically offer two experimental laboratory courses in the Fall term. It is expected that students who complete these courses remotely would NOT gain competencies in the hands-on aspects (e.g., how to inoculate a bioreactor using proper aseptic technique). Our senior design class also relies on students working closely in teams. Distancing of students would impact their ability to learn this collaborative style of work.

The requirement to provide some remote teaching is not substantially different from the need to provide all remote teaching. Thus, the answer here is the same as for Scenario 1.

If some participants are in-person and NOT just on-campus, we may need to adjust class times to enable students to participate across various time zones.

There is no practical way to provide an equitable experience if some students are participating in a normal scenario and others are remote. If all are remote learning but physically present on campus, the impediments are minimized.

We would need to restrict the number of students who occupy the teaching lab spaces at a time. This would likely require redesign of the curriculum to maintain distance. For the senior design course, access to the "bunker" (the departmental computer cluster) would need to be controlled, with occupancy limits.

We are likely to need additional TA support to teach courses in a socially-distanced manner. For one of our labs, the TAs have typically been UG students. This may present a serious challenge for the fall. We may also need to restrict enrollment (e.g., to seniors only) to ensure that occupancy limits can be maintained.

We may need to appoint additional TAs at a time when budgets are under pressure. We may also not have sufficient spaces collectively across campus to allow for effective social distancing.

As instructors and advisors, we have all heard from students for whom "study at home" is simply not working. We suggest prioritizing access to campus for these students, perhaps enabling a larger fraction to remain on campus all term. Beyond this, we suggest that enabling students to be grouped based on some self-selection (e.g., friendships, living groups) might reduce student stress.

The response here is similar to Scenario 3, although we may not need additional TA support if students are only working in-person for half the term.

This would absolutely require a redesign of our laboratory courses. Both are CI-M's, with integration of experimental work and communication intensive assignments. The redesign would require a clean separation between the on-campus and off-campus portions of the course. Whether the presence is in the first or second half would also play a major role in how the curriculum could be redesigned.

We may wish to increase the in-class lab hours to achieve a good fraction of the learning objectives. Not being able to do this would certainly require a significant revision of the objectives.

First and foremost, we believe that this scenario is wholly impractical. But since the question is being asked, we'll answer it. It will be important to group students according to major/year, for example, all sophomores in Course 10/10B/10-ENG attend together, to enable progress towards the degree.

This would operate similar to Scenario 3.5, which is similar to Scenario 3, but the demand for additional TA support may be unnecessary.

As stated initially, this scenario seems unworkable. For UG students, there is likely to be mass confusion and stress, especially through "FOMO" (fear of missing out) among the "excluded" groups. Their ability to switch majors would also be severely impacted. For faculty and staff, this would require massive restructuring of courses (either to reduce content or spread over two of the terms) AND/OR require that the same classes be taught more than once. Increasing faculty teaching load in our department is not practical. We strongly object to this scenario.

Prof. Chris Love offers a course on design of immunotherapeutics that is extremely well-suited for emphasis at this time. We are also thinking of plans to leverage the BioMaker Space and other curricular elements to offer unique seminar series or courses that may be offered to our students in the age of COVID.

Love's class would work well in the context of a campus-wide effort, and he has offered to engage in coordinated activities across campus.

In our discussions with students, we have come to believe that there would be significant advantages to having students physically present on campus even if teaching and learning are remote. This includes a quiet place to study and strong, stable Internet access. Of course, this must be done safely, but we are supportive of efforts to return students to campus to support their education. If students are not able to return to campus, it may be possible to use local MIT Clubs to help catalyze connections between students in remote locations.

MS degree in Chemical Engineering Practice (MSCEP)

We will prioritize the offering of core (required) courses for students. We will leverage the experiences in the current term to guide practices for the Fall term, including the possibility of adding recitation-style class meetings to provide students with more in-person problem solving. In short, we plan to do what we have already done, but in a more organized manner.

We will likely reduce the number of elective courses offered by 2 (possibly 3) to enable those faculty to be re-assigned to the required courses. This should not impact time to degree for any of our students since we offer a large number of elective courses.

The primary issue for MSCEP students is the loss of community, particularly as it relates to "psetting" together. We have dedicated first year offices (for PhD and MSCEP students) that are effectively 24 hour study lounges. These have been critical to student success and stress management, and we are very worried about being able to support students remotely.

The requirement to provide some remote teaching is not substantially different from the need to provide all remote teaching. Thus, the answer here is the same as for Scenario 1.

If some participants are in-person and NOT just on-campus, we may need to adjust class times to enable students to participate across various time zones.

There is no practical way to provide an equitable experience if some students are participating in a normal scenario and others are remote. If all are remote learning but physically present on campus, the impediments are minimized.

We would need to restrict the number of students who occupy the first year offices, or close these learning spaces altogether.

No significant changes since there are no required in-person components to the MSCEP course curriculum.

Our biggest concern is study spaces for graduate students. We may not have sufficient spaces to allow for effective social distancing.

N/A - question is specifically related to UG students

Our primary challenge is facilitating collaborative work in our graduate courses. We do not have a solution to this, though we are requesting assistance with establishing 24-hour virtual "study rooms."

No difference from Scenario 3

No difference from Scenario 3

First and foremost, we believe that this scenario is wholly impractical. But since the question is being asked, we'll answer it. For the graduate students, they must be allowed to attend as a cohort, i.e., all MSCEP students attend at the same time.

No difference from Scenario 3

As stated initially, this scenario seems unworkable. For MSCEP students, they would presumably be in the Cambridge area anyway, since most are not on campus or not in UG-style dorms. However, the structure of the program does not allow for an "off-campus" term since it interferes with the required internship. It also presents a challenge for international students who would not have appointments during that term.For faculty and staff, this would require massive restructuring of courses (either to reduce content or spread over two of the terms) AND/OR require that the same classes be taught more than once. Increasing faculty teaching load in our department is not practical. We strongly object to this scenario.

Prof. Chris Love offers a course on design of immunotherapeutics that is extremely well-suited for emphasis at this time. We are also thinking of plans to leverage the BioMaker Space and other curricular elements to offer unique seminar series or courses that may be offered to our students in the age of COVID.

Love's class would work well in the context of a campus-wide effort, and he has offered to engage in coordinated activities across campus.

In our discussions with students, we have come to believe that there would be significant advantages to having students physically present on campus even if teaching and learning are remote. This includes a quiet place to study and strong, stable Internet access. Of course, this must be done safely, but we are supportive of efforts to return students to campus to support their education. If students are not able to return to campus, it may be possible to use local MIT Clubs to help catalyze connections between students in remote locations.

Doctoral degrees in Chemical Engineering (PhD/ScD)

57 first year students (266 total)

We will prioritize the offering of core (required) courses for students. We will leverage the experiences in the current term to guide practices for the Fall term, including the possibility of adding recitation-style class meetings to provide students with more in-person problem solving. In short, we plan to do what we have already done, but in a more organized manner.

We will likely reduce the number of elective courses offered by 2 (possibly 3) to enable those faculty to be re-assigned to the required courses. This should not impact time to degree for any of our students since we offer a large number of elective courses.

The primary issue for first year PhD students (those who take more than 1 course per term) is the loss of community, particularly as it relates to "psetting" together. We have dedicated first year offices that are effectively 24 hour study lounges. These have been critical to student success and stress management, and we are very worried about being able to support students remotely. Though not directly related to teaching, advisor selection (occurs during the Fall term) would be greatly impacted by a fully remote scenario.

The requirement to provide some remote teaching is not substantially different from the need to provide all remote teaching. Thus, the answer here is the same as for Scenario 1.

If some participants are in-person and NOT just on-campus, we may need to adjust class times to enable students to participate across various time zones.

There is no practical way to provide an equitable experience if some students are participating in a normal scenario and others are remote. This is especially true for our doctoral program, where ~30% of the incoming class received bachelor degrees outside of the US. If all are remote learning but physically present on campus, the impediments are minimized.

We would need to restrict the number of students who occupy the first year offices, or close these learning spaces altogether.

No significant changes since there are no required in-person components to the graduate course curriculum.

Our biggest concern is study spaces for graduate students. We may not have sufficient spaces to allow for effective social distancing.

N/A - question is specifically related to UG students

Our primary challenge is facilitating collaborative work in our graduate courses. We do not have a solution to this, though we are requesting assistance with establishing 24-hour virtual "study rooms."

No difference from Scenario 3

No difference from Scenario 3

First and foremost, we believe that this scenario is wholly impractical. But since the question is being asked, we'll answer it. For the graduate students, they must be allowed to attend as a cohort, i.e., all first year graduate students attend at the same time.

No difference from Scenario 3

As stated initially, this scenario seems unworkable. For graduate students, they would presumably be in the Cambridge area anyway, since most are not on campus or not in UG-style dorms. For faculty and staff, this would require massive restructuring of courses (either to reduce content or spread over two of the terms) AND/OR require that the same classes be taught more than once. Increasing faculty teaching load in our department is not practical. We strongly object to this scenario.

Prof. Chris Love offers a course on design of immunotherapeutics that is extremely well-suited for emphasis at this time. We are also thinking of plans to leverage the BioMaker Space and other curricular elements to offer unique seminar series or courses that may be offered to our students in the age of COVID.

Love's class would work well in the context of a campus-wide effort, and he has offered to engage in coordinate activities across campus.

In our discussions with students, we have come to believe that there would be significant advantages to having students physically present on campus even if teaching and learning are remote. This includes a quiet place to study and strong, stable Internet access. Of course, this must be done safely, but we are supportive of efforts to return students to campus to support their education. If students are not able to return to campus, it may be possible to use local MIT Clubs to help catalyze connections between students in remote locations.

If MIT is fully remote, we would teach our lecture based classes remote, and work to convert our laboratory classes as best as possible to a virtual format. Our biggest challenge is teaching laboratory classes remotely. If faculty/teaching staff have access to the lecture rooms and labs, then it would be easier to record content. If we are not allowed to access the labs, then it would be difficult to give students a rich laboratory experience that matches our teaching goals.


In general, for lecture based classes we feel it is easier to teach from MIT than to teach from home (there are more resources and more formal learning experiences), even if students are tuning in virtually. In this situation, we would need an increase in AV/MVP resources and affordability. For all classes, we would offer more recitation times to accommodate student learners in different time zones. Also, will review Spring 2020 feedback to determine if student:TA recitation ratios need to be revised for virtual formats.

We also have concerns about academic integrity, conducting examinations, and how to think through alternative forms of assessment.

For undergraduates, we are able to teach 3.091 Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry (a Chemistry GIR option) virtually, because the lecturer (Prof. Don Sadoway) has extensive recorded content. We would also consider potentially developing an ASE based on students who had already progressed through this content (via 3.091x, 3.091 OCW content). This would require additional information from the other Institute offices about ASE policies AY 2020-2021. We would move our First-Year Advising Seminars, which are heavily experiential, to Spring 2020 (if permissible). We are slightly concerned about Course 3/3-A/3-C because we are launching a new curriculum and several new laboratory classes, but we have faculty who are focused on virtualizing these experiences if necessary, focusing on virtual data analysis and recycling old lab data. It is also difficult to begin thesis projects for Course 3 seniors, but we have adjusted to permit more theoretical and experimental design projects to fulfill this requirement, if needed for AY 2020-2021.

If in-person is difficult, Course 3 would move non-essential laboratory classes to a future semester. We would also consider cancelling some restricted electives with low enrollment and creating more co-teaching scenarios for other subjects in order to create contingency plans and lessen faculty burden in virtual teaching. In general, we follow a 1-to-1 plan in teaching assignments (1 faculty per 1 class), but we may consider changing this to create a better virtual experience for students and faculty. We don’t expect this to significantly affect requirements at any level.

At the undergraduate level, we are able to cancel a few of our classes in the Fall 2020 term without drastically disrupting student fulfillment of requirements . Unfortunately, the classes that must be taught to keep on track with requirements are those with laboratory requirements. We may also need guidance from the Institute about how to postpone/reformat CI-Ms if needed.

We struggle to understand how learning objectives for conventional laboratory experiences (e.g. “manus” in “mens et manus”) can be carried out online. If the Institute had guidance on this, that would be helpful. It’s not impossible, we just miss something with the laboratory environment.

For undergraduates, we have checked different scenarios and expect that temporary virtual teaching still aligns to ABET standards. It is also difficult for us to imagine how to convert an entire undergraduate thesis, start to finish, to a virtual experience.

We really don’t like this scenario – it carries large equity concerns and essentially splits students into two groups receiving different experiences. We don’t know how we would simulcast or record every in person class, and we’re unsure we have the resources to offer all of our in-person classes to a subset of remote learners. It is far more preferable to teach a subject all one way (remote) or the other (in person). We would need to consider how TA’s support both residential and virtual cohorts, perhaps doubling our TA needs and creating a huge financial need. We also don’t know how important academic exercises, like labs, assignments, or examinations would occur in this hybrid scenario.

For our undergraduates, fewer are international so not as strongly affected. In these cases it may be smarter to encourage these students to take a leave of absence. If the student absolutely must enroll, then we could use existing video content for core subjects. Electives are more challenging, as no virtual content exists.

Some practical requirements would be tech-enabled classrooms, larger resources of in-person technical support and video capabilities, and best workflow to get content from the classroom to the students (either synchronously or asynchronously). We would also need to rethink our schedules so that students can connect to more recitation and office hour options from different time zones. Overall, best practices on how students can engage remotely (e.g. hardware, also texbooks/e-books).

Students (both undergraduate and graduate students) could feel discriminated against, feel that they are not receiving an equal experience. There is also a concern about the impact on grades (ex: would on-campus students who are able to come in person to lecture/recitation/office hours reflect differently on grades, be receiving a better experience? Student access to teaching can also be another impediment (especially for remote learners not in EDT). There could also be additional unexpected costs for students to purchase hardware/software. Currently, we view this scenario to be harder for our graduate students than our undergraduate students.

We would need to manage how many people are in the labs at once. Would need to offer more lab sections for the labs to reduce density. The department may need to re-assign teaching staff from cancelled subjects to staffing lab sections.

How do you restart the central facilities in a safe way and with a detailed lab room schedule? We would need to control how many people are in a specific lab and also know when the central facility lab is only open to the subject (no other individual research at the time of lab subject).

In the undergraduate program, a portion of our rising seniors are planning to complete an undergraduate thesis (requirement of the Course 3 program). The department could consider remote thesis scenarios similar to what was implemented in the Spring 2020 term for the latter part of their thesis work. Only seniors would be allowed to register in 3.042 Materials Project Laboratory (Course 3 requirement and CI-M).

We would need to have a smaller number of students in the undergraduate labs per lecture/recitation/lab time (than previous terms) while also considering the teaching staff required to be in the lab. In addition, would need to consider class schedule adjustments to reduce the number of students moving in the hallways in between classes. (ex: the crowded Infinite Corridor hallway and Vest Student Street). Will there be directions to exit/enter rooms (like the way grocery stores have been implementing one direction arrows)? An idea is to live stream a lab lecture from one room to other lab rooms, where the other lab rooms would have other group of students and instructor(s)

Aside from the additional lab staff for additional undergraduate lab hours or rooms, we would need additional TAs/instructors for recitations. The remote recitations should also have a reduced number of students per recitation section. We would need to incorporate cleaning time in between lab groups. Also, we would need to set up large screens in lab spaces that do not already have them for live streaming a lab instructor’s lecture/instruction between lab rooms.

It is our strong preference that all students in Course 3 are on and off campus at the same time. This will permit us to teach coherently and consistently to our audiences (e.g. lecture in first half of semester, lab in second half of semester).

The lab subjects with a square foot per person limit (beyond current EHS rules for each lab space) may require more lab time options and more staff for these lab times. Also, the staff and students would need personal lab supplies (googles, gloves, etc..) that are not shared and personal storage space. Also the lab schedules would need to incorporate cleaning time in between lab times. Lab kits that are mailed to remote learners have been mentioned for remote learners, If allowed, what would be guidelines (including safety) for this? For accredited programs, would this experience be approved towards lab hours?

For the undergraduate subjects, it would be good to revise the policy that protects the 5pm-7pm time for social/athletic activities in order to allow time and space flexibility for lectures, recitations, and lab times.

We would need more staff to fill in slots to encourage this type of social distancing. This would provide a more intense laboratory experience. We would need additional departmental and Institute support to help walk students through this process.

Some potential impediments for students are the uncertainty of a second COVID-19 wave where travel is limited/restricted and/or students are asked to leave the dorms again; additional travel costs (would add a minimum of one additional round trip for most undergraduates); the university/department may need to hold 2 welcome/orientation events; and this would require a complex scheduling to balance the workload for students on and off campus.

Our undergraduate program is scheduled to launch a new curriculum in the Fall 2020 term. This would require a substantial reorganization.

We really do not understand this option. What would students do during the off-campus component? Would we essentially be teaching the same “fall semester subjects” in each trimester? We would need to duplicate our efforts on every subject, and condense/convert these subjects into ⅓ time rather than ½ time of a given academic year. If needed, we prefer to have all of our Course 3 students in person and off-campus at the same time.

This would be quite difficult to implement because if our undergraduate majors or graduate students are not all together, we would need to duplicate our efforts multiple times in different semesters.

Would all the subjects need to be revised, in terms of content, pacing, and units? What is the tentative calendar? Do units convert to this new trimester arrangement? What would be the tuition policies or leave policies? This essentially creates a whole cohort of students who are suddenly in a different timeframe than every other MIT student before and after.

Our department is already stretched thin offering subjects remotely and doing contingency planning in multiple directions, so it may be unreasonable to expect new offerings to be proposed and implemented this fall on such a short timeframe.

While we are not able to provide an idea for this at this time, perhaps reviewing the lessons learned from these recent on-campus experiences would be helpful: First-Year Discovery subject “The Sum of All Courses” – Fall 2019 and Designing the First-Year Experience – Spring 2018

What if MIT is on-campus teaching but a personal home situation requires faculty/staff members to be a home? For example: a parent whose child(ren) K-12 school is remote teaching
- What would be the plans for Fall Career Fair? What advice would be provided to companies? For example: utilize the Spring Career Fair more?
- Reviewing MIT’s undergraduate and departmental graduate policies concerning deferrals (including up until when a deferral can be requested).
- What if a student’s travel is limited and/or cannot arrive on campus (or in the US) on time. For example: visa delays due to consulate closures or limited hours. Can an international student register as a regular student in the Fall 2020 term if he/she cannot arrive in the US?
- Review previously submitted and approved AY 2020-2021 faculty leave request to see if there will be a change in plans
- Will the personal and medical leave policies need to be updated in order to protect a person's confidential information during this related to this pandemic.
- What will be the MIT and departmental policies/back-up teaching plans if MIT does temperature checks and then a person cannot meet their obligations that day (Ex: teach lecture) and the extra time needed by staff and students to enter the campus;
utilize as many departmental open spaces temporarily for other things like spreading out some office staff spaces
- Clarify student health insurance coverage outside of Massachusetts.
- Mental Health Support out of state - MIT staff are licensed in MA. It has been mentioned that some students would like to continue with their MIT mental health support team but they are not able to because the student is out of state.
- Should/Can the Fall 2020 subjects (ex: the ones with labs) that currently do not have an enrollment limit be updated to reflect an enrollment limit (preferably before pre-registration opens and after reviewing MIT Fall 2020 guidelines)?
- All scenarios need to consider situations if a second wave of Covid-19 occurs in Fall 2020. Also, keeping in mind that the community travels to campus from all different areas of the world. Our community’s and local area’s current response and planning are dependent on events elsewhere.
- We should be prepared to experience the unpredictability of local, state, and federal guidelines. For instance, would there be a mandatory 14 day quarantine after travel?

Additional Undergraduate Student Comments:
Housing - We need to consider those that live in FSILGS because some may need on campus housing. What other housing options are available? Hotels near campus?
Undergraduate advising updates concerning double majors/minors and abroad programs for the classes 2021, 2022, and 2023.
First Year Undergraduate Students - CUP Phase 2 Experimental Grading Policy. If Fall 2020 is remote learning, what subjects would they be advised to register in? If they arrive on campus for Spring 2021, would that first on campus term be ABC/NR? Would the spring semester limit still be 60 units?

Social and Engineering Systems Doctoral Program

We continue as we have during the Spring 2020 term. We will need to pay particular attention to building community for the new students, administering Oral and Written Qualifying Exams, and ensuring core subjects are taught and evaluated at MIT's standards.

Most SES students will take the following subjects: IDS.900, 6.436, 18.6501, and 14.121&2 (or 21A.809, perhaps one or two students only). Other core classes represent acceptable substitutes or opportunities for more advanced work, and therefore do not have to be offered every year. The remaining classes are even more flexible and could be taken later if online versions are unavailable.

With additional resources from MIT and effort from faculty, students, and staff -- none.

Lectures will need to be recorded as the majority of our international students would be participating from the China Standard Timezone. Administering a combination of in-person and remote exams is another issue to think through.

Support will be required for every subject taught in a blended fashion -- even small subjects. Technology improvements also seem advisable. Capturing audible sound from in-person students who are widely distanced a/o wearing masks will be tricky.

The blended scenario is the most work and the most failure-prone due to technical challenges. In many cases offering two sections, one in-person and one online, may be more successful.

IDSS subjects can be done remotely.

N/A -- IDSS does not have an undergraduate major.

First year doctoral students should be present during the first term. Second year doctoral students need to be present in the same two terms (perhaps the second and third terms?) to facilitate written qualifying exams. Otherwise personal preference and advisor preference is key, and might be handled with a bidding system.

All components are remote-able if necessary. However cohort-building for first-years and written qualifying exams for second-years work better in-person and would be prioritized for on-campus time.

We'd have to be thoughtful about adapting our core classes to trimesters. Graduate appointments that are out-of-sync with academic terms pose real coordination issues -- especially for TAs. Temporarily updating or even tweaking payroll, billing, and registrar systems, student funding models, etc., to match a trimester system is a huge undertaking. Therefore there is a heavy burden on instructors and administrative staff. Students participating in the first and third semesters also incur greater logistical expenses and disruption -- moving in and out twice during the year is a lot. The plus side is skipping winter in Boston ;-)

If there are more TAs, IDSS would have a unique opportunity to provide our students with teaching opportunities. Not having an undergraduate major normally limits our TA opportunities.

Interdisciplinary seminars on COVID-19 are very exciting.

My answers are based on conversations with students and faculty and my own experience supporting blended events in the past. I wish I could provide more direct faculty input, but answering large surveys tends to be delegated to academic staff.

Average Music enrollments for Fa18 and Fa19: 888* Average Theater enrollments for Fa18 and Fa19: 512 *Music ensembles frequently have students and community members who participate but don’t enroll, so enrollment numbers don’t fully capture the number of individuals involved.

-For teaching staff, reduce teaching load in the fall semester by one class (lecturers go from 3+3 to 2+3, senior lecturers from 3+2 to 2+2) to give time over the summer to prepare classes to go online. Professors’ teaching loads remain the same, but generally will be structured 1+2.
-Rearrange classes so that when possible, classes from spring 20 are repeated fall 20 with the same instructors, taking advantage of the preparation already made.
-For classes with multiple sections, have instructors teach multiple sections instead of a more heterogeneous course load.
-For music performance classes, the focus will shift from group performance towards individual coaching and developing skills to do multitrack recording.
-For theater performance classes, the focus will shift from group interaction towards individual coaching. Students will often use cameras to capture performance work.
-Total number of music performance ensembles to be reduced somewhat.
-Class size of almost all classes, particularly theater performance classes, to be reduced from a max of 20 to 14-16.

We would have to relax our requirements around participating in music performance ensembles, and practica (i.e., productions) for theater arts students. This would change for the music program based upon the scenarios below. It would change less so for the theater arts program.

Performance! These components appear across our curriculum and not just in classes explicitly labeled performance. Script writing students act out scenes to understand content and effectiveness. Music history students perform Gregorian chant together to internalize the pitch system. At present no technologies exist that allow synchronous performance at a distance where all sides can hear each other.

If we understand this scenario correctly, almost all students are on campus without social distancing? This seems impossible, but if it were to happen, we would not be able to accommodate off-campus students. Online versions of most of our classes are so different from in person versions that preparing both would amount to a doubling of the load for our teaching staff.

The only situations in which this hybrid teaching is possible for theater would be in a studio with a fixed camera and microphone and an additional camera and microphone, operated by a UROP or a staff member.

-For music ensembles this would be challenging, but there are opportunities to engage students. For smaller ensembles, such as chamber music and duos, they could rehearse in a space, separating by the appropriate distance. This would make a huge difference. Approximately 150 students per year would have some experience of performing together. We would be able to livestream performances.
-For larger music ensembles, they could do sectional rehearsals, or maybe repertoire for smaller subsets of the large ensemble. If they choose the latter option, livestreaming performances become possible.
-For world music ensembles, they could do rehearsals and performances of smaller groups of students, and livestreamed performances.
-For the theater arts program, performance is still mostly impossible with social distancing in place: movement is central to most performance classes. Solo performance might become possible, but unclear how the actor would interact with technical staff, and maintain social distancing.
-For theater arts design classes, students could access designated spaces in W97 for lab work. We probably wouldn’t teach out of these spaces because with social distancing we wouldn’t be able to accommodate enough students, but students could use the facility for their assigned work, scheduled in small groups.

Students and instructors feel uncomfortable being in a room together, particularly singers, actors, or winds and brass instrumentalists. The distance between musicians will lead to a less satisfactory musical experience, but it’s better than nothing!

Student choice to coordinate with friends and preferred activities (such as orchestra, jazz ensemble, etc.)

We still need to work on this. One possibility would be to divide the classes that require on campus work into 1st and 2nd half semester classes. We offer each half semester both an on campus experience (practical), and an off campus experience (theoretical). Students are required to take both halfs to complete course.

Bifurcates student social experience. But better than nothing.

We are too small a unit to be able to staff three semesters. We cannot consider this scenario.

We are too small a unit to be able to staff three semesters. We cannot consider this scenario.

We are too small a unit to be able to staff three semesters. We cannot consider this scenario.

This is an opportunity to explore emergent and contemporary technology in theater performance. Other universities lack the student population who can implement technological ideas; MIT is rich in this domain. We are planning on a “production” this fall that is totally online, something that only MIT can do.

In terms of social distancing for musicians, there are specific concerns about winds, brass, and vocalists. I suspect these will evolve over time as conservatories and schools of music establish new social distancing norms.. The only current example we know of is a recent performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/arts/music/berlin-philharmonic-coronavirus.html

Relevant passage: No more than 15 musicians could be onstage at a given time, making this a de facto chamber event. The players were kept two meters (about six and a half feet) apart — except for wind players, spaced five meters (about 16 and a half feet) from one another and their colleagues.

The original plan was to have string players and percussionists wear protective masks — but after the first rehearsal, according to an orchestra spokeswoman, health authorities allowed the musicians to perform without masks so long as they wore them backstage. All the participating musicians were tested for the virus before the start of rehearsals.

It’s hard to overstate what a departure from the norm this setup represented. Normally, musicians in chamber ensembles and orchestras try to sit as close together as possible without getting in each other’s way, to add cohesion to the overall sound and help players hear each other.

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Department of Materials Science and Engineering

If MIT is fully remote, we would teach our lecture based classes remote, and work to convert our laboratory classes as best as possible to a virtual format. Our biggest challenge is teaching laboratory classes remotely. If faculty/teaching staff have access to the lecture rooms and labs, then it would be easier to record content. If we are not allowed to access the labs, then it would be difficult to give students a rich laboratory experience that matches our teaching goals.


In general, for lecture based classes we feel it is easier to teach from MIT than to teach from home (there are more resources and more formal learning experiences), even if students are tuning in virtually. In this situation, we would need an increase in AV/MVP resources and affordability. For all classes, we would offer more recitation times to accommodate student learners in different time zones. Also, will review Spring 2020 feedback to determine if student:TA recitation ratios need to be revised for virtual formats.

We also have concerns about academic integrity, conducting examinations, and how to think through alternative forms of assessment.

The graduate subjects have not been previously recorded. Therefore, they would need to be recorded and offered both asynchronously and synchronously. We anticipate that our students would be in at least 12 different time zones. Two of the doctoral core subjects are offered in the fall term. Many of the incoming graduate students expected to enrol Fall 2020 term are international students who are currently abroad. Some elective subjects should be captured in the fall term for recording so that we can develop a library for later use. We have one graduate elective class with a lab component that can be moved to the spring term and another mostly taken by students from other local area universities affiliated with CMRAE.

If in-person is difficult, Course 3 would move non-essential laboratory classes to a future semester. We would also consider cancelling some restricted electives with low enrollment and creating more co-teaching scenarios for other subjects in order to create contingency plans and lessen faculty burden in virtual teaching. In general, we follow a 1-to-1 plan in teaching assignments (1 faculty per 1 class), but we may consider changing this to create a better virtual experience for students and faculty. We don’t expect this to significantly affect requirements at any level.

At the graduate level, we can determine which fall subjects are essential for the degree requirements and are prerequisites for future subjects in the program. In the other elective classes we can review estimated enrollment and effect on AY 2020-2021 academic milestones (ex: TAE/DMSE oral quals, PPSM quals) in order to make an informed decision concerning which subjects to cancel or move to Spring 2021.

We struggle to understand how learning objectives for conventional laboratory experiences (e.g. “manus” in “mens et manus”) can be carried out online. If the Institute had guidance on this, that would be helpful. It’s not impossible, we just miss something with the laboratory environment.

For the incoming first year graduate students, it would be difficult to make a decision on which research group to join without being there in person to meet with group members and visit the labs. The majority of our graduate students are doing research that requires at least some lab based work that cannot be done remotely.

We really don’t like this scenario – it carries large equity concerns and essentially splits students into two groups receiving different experiences. We don’t know how we would simulcast or record every in person class, and we’re unsure we have the resources to offer all of our in-person classes to a subset of remote learners. It is far more preferable to teach a subject all one way (remote) or the other (in person). We would need to consider how TA’s support both residential and virtual cohorts, perhaps doubling our TA needs and creating a huge financial need. We also don’t know how important academic exercises, like labs, assignments, or examinations would occur in this hybrid scenario.

For the graduate students, we would need to ensure that the core subjects are available remotely. It is difficult to plan for students whose research is experimental and are not present in person. Each case will require a different solution.

Some practical requirements would be tech-enabled classrooms, larger resources of in-person technical support and video capabilities, and best workflow to get content from the classroom to the students (either synchronously or asynchronously). We would also need to rethink our schedules so that students can connect to more recitation and office hour options from different time zones. Overall, best practices on how students can engage remotely (e.g. hardware, also texbooks/e-books).

Students (both undergraduate and graduate students) could feel discriminated against, feel that they are not receiving an equal experience. There is also a concern about the impact on grades (ex: would on-campus students who are able to come in person to lecture/recitation/office hours reflect differently on grades, be receiving a better experience? Student access to teaching can also be another impediment (especially for remote learners not in EDT). There could also be additional unexpected costs for students to purchase hardware/software. Currently, we view this scenario to be harder for our graduate students than our undergraduate students.

We would need to manage how many people are in the labs at once. Would need to offer more lab sections for the labs to reduce density. The department may need to re-assign teaching staff from cancelled subjects to staffing lab sections.

How do you restart the central facilities in a safe way and with a detailed lab room schedule? We would need to control how many people are in a specific lab and also know when the central facility lab is only open to the subject (no other individual research at the time of lab subject).

For 3.THG Graduate Thesis, each lab will need a plan for how to carry out research under conditions of low occupancy in consultation with EHS.

The Fall 2020 graduate subject with a lab component can be moved to the Spring 2021 term

The graduate students’ time to graduation could be affected if their lab access is limited. They could focus on finishing as many subject requirements that are taught virtually in Fall 2020 towards completion of degree requirements. They would also be affected by limited peer-to-peer support (especially in preparation for qualifying exams, other academic milestones).

It is our strong preference that all students in Course 3 are on and off campus at the same time. This will permit us to teach coherently and consistently to our audiences (e.g. lecture in first half of semester, lab in second half of semester).

The lab subjects with a square foot per person limit (beyond current EHS rules for each lab space) may require more lab time options and more staff for these lab times. Also, the staff and students would need personal lab supplies (googles, gloves, etc..) that are not shared and personal storage space. Also the lab schedules would need to incorporate cleaning time in between lab times. Lab kits that are mailed to remote learners have been mentioned for remote learners, If allowed, what would be guidelines (including safety) for this? For accredited programs, would this experience be approved towards lab hours?

If graduate students are on campus, we would need some to be TAs/Teaching Interns for on-campus experiences and others to be TAs/Teaching Interns for virtual/remote experiences.

We would need more staff to fill in slots to encourage this type of social distancing. This would provide a more intense laboratory experience. We would need additional departmental and Institute support to help walk students through this process.

Some potential impediments for students are the uncertainty of a second COVID-19 wave where travel is limited/restricted and/or students are asked to leave the dorms again; additional travel costs (would add a minimum of one additional round trip for most undergraduates); the university/department may need to hold 2 welcome/orientation events; and this would require a complex scheduling to balance the workload for students on and off campus.

We really do not understand this option. What would students do during the off-campus component? Would we essentially be teaching the same “fall semester subjects” in each trimester? We would need to duplicate our efforts on every subject, and condense/convert these subjects into ⅓ time rather than ½ time of a given academic year. If needed, we prefer to have all of our Course 3 students in person and off-campus at the same time.

This would be quite difficult to implement because if our undergraduate majors or graduate students are not all together, we would need to duplicate our efforts multiple times in different semesters.

Would all the subjects need to be revised, in terms of content, pacing, and units? What is the tentative calendar? Do units convert to this new trimester arrangement? What would be the tuition policies or leave policies? This essentially creates a whole cohort of students who are suddenly in a different timeframe than every other MIT student before and after.

Our department is already stretched thin offering subjects remotely and doing contingency planning in multiple directions, so it may be unreasonable to expect new offerings to be proposed and implemented this fall on such a short timeframe.

The graduate students and other TAs would have the experience of remote teaching.

While we are not able to provide an idea for this at this time, perhaps reviewing the lessons learned from these recent on-campus experiences would be helpful: First-Year Discovery subject “The Sum of All Courses” – Fall 2019 and Designing the First-Year Experience – Spring 2018

What if MIT is on-campus teaching but a personal home situation requires faculty/staff members to be a home? For example: a parent whose child(ren) K-12 school is remote teaching

What would be the plans for Fall Career Fair? What advice would be provided to companies? For example: utilize the Spring Career Fair more?

Reviewing MIT’s undergraduate and departmental graduate policies concerning deferrals (including up until when a deferral can be requested).

What if a student’s travel is limited and/or cannot arrive on campus (or in the US) on time. For example: visa delays due to consulate closures or limited hours. Can an international student register as a regular student in the Fall 2020 term if he/she cannot arrive in the US?

Review previously submitted and approved AY 2020-2021 faculty leave request to see if there will be a change in plans

Will the personal and medical leave policies need to be updated in order to protect a person's confidential information during this related to this pandemic.

What will be the MIT and departmental policies/back-up teaching plans if MIT does temperature checks and then a person cannot meet their obligations that day (Ex: teach lecture) and the extra time needed by staff and students to enter the campus;
utilize as many departmental open spaces temporarily for other things like spreading out some office staff spaces

Clarify student health insurance coverage outside of Massachusetts.

Mental Health Support out of state - MIT staff are licensed in MA. It has been mentioned that some students would like to continue with their MIT mental health support team but they are not able to because the student is out of state.

Should/Can the Fall 2020 subjects (ex: the ones with labs) that currently do not have an enrollment limit be updated to reflect an enrollment limit (preferably before pre-registration opens and after reviewing MIT Fall 2020 guidelines)?

All scenarios need to consider situations if a second wave of Covid-19 occurs in Fall 2020. Also, keeping in mind that the community travels to campus from all different areas of the world. Our community’s and local area’s current response and planning are dependent on events elsewhere. We should be prepared to experience the unpredictability of local, state, and federal guidelines. For instance, would there be a mandatory 14 day quarantine after travel?

We are extremely concerned about graduate housing. Without secure housing it is difficult for the graduate students to be productive. What are the opportunities of the continuing graduate students concerning applying for on campus housing? Or those with landlords who are not able to cancel housing contracts.

Can we update the policies for thesis research in absentia or doctoral nonresidency status options for Fall 2020 term?

We will teach all of our subject remotely.

All of our regular subjects, undergraduate and graduate, can be taught remotely. The only components of our educational mission that need physical presence is student and faculty research in our labs (child language acquisition, adult language comprehension, phonetics). These activities are in UROPs for undergraduates, regular doctoral research for graduate students, and faculty research. We intend to start these up again whenever MIT allows it.

Until all of us, faculty, staff, and students can safely be back on campus, we intend to teach all of our subjects remotely. We do not wish to teach in any kind of hybrid way.

Since we will teach all subjects remotely, there are no special challenges compared to the previous scenario.

Our lab spaces will be re-opened for research (UROPs etc.) when safely possible for everyone.

Safety for lab personnel and students.

Dangers to safety of everyone involved.

This is not applicable to us, since all of our subjects will be taught online.

No. We do not think this is a feasible scenario.

Same answers as before.

To us, this is a non-starter. We do not have the personnel to staff three semesters.

We are incorporating people from outside MIT in our classes and other activities (reading groups etc). This is an enrichment of our program.

Integrated Design & Management

Engineering Management

We will continue optimizing our curriculum for online teaching, keeping 90-minute lectures tight and highly interactive. Students work on 3 projects over 2 semesters in interdisciplinary teams. We do faculty/team consulting via breakout rooms during Project Time each day. We may adjust class timing to accomodate global time zones. We may adjust our expectiations for physical prototyping to allow for tools and materials appropriate for in-home use.

We have a unique 2-semester Core curriculum that students must complete in their first year. We are not able to reduce that curriculum, and we know that we can deliver that curriculum online without a problem. This answer does not differ for other scenarios.

An important part of each class day is our workshop time which includes lectures on
prototyping and hands-on work. Although some of this includes digital tools, much of it
is physical. We are developing new methods of delivering this content online which
may include having students procure tools and materials for in-home prototyping and
changing workshop topics such that they lend themselves to these tools and materials.
We are also looking into the possibility of students outsourcing some of the fabrication.

We would set up the classroom with large screens/monitors/cameras to allow all students and staff, local and remote, to view one another. We may adjust class timing to accommodate various time zones. We would consider whether to form teams by time zone (they would still need to be interdisciplinary). We have some experience with hybrid lectures.

We will need adequate space to accomodate everyone safely per MIT regulations. We
will need robust communications technology, especially for remote students. We will
need better cameras and microphones to capture in-person lectures for remote students
or have access to classrooms designed for this. We may need assistance from
audio/video technicians.

Remote students may feel left out or that they are getting a sub-optimal education compared with their peers who are able to attend in person. International students will not have the 2 semesters US residency required for summer internships in the US. Students may decide to defer admissions for a year.

We could hold lectures online. During each class, we run a Project Time for teams to
work together and get feedback from faculty. Teams range from 3-6 students and there
are typcially 3 faculty and 2 TAs present, so this could be done in person. Depending on
workshop/makerspace access, we could rotate small groups of students through such
that there would be a very low density of people.

The lectures and team meetings should be fine. Adequate access to shops/makerspaces
may become an issue, especially during crunch times.

Using shops and makerspaces with proper distancing. Additional access to shops
could be beneficial.

Hopefully, our graduate students will not be affected. If they will be, we would operate under
scenario 3.

We would operate as under scenario 3. On campus students would rotate through
shops/makerspaces while remote students use tools/materials at home.

We would operate as under scenario 3.

It may be a challenge to make sure students feel they are receiving equal opportunities
for quality educational experiences. Students may decide to defer admissions for a year.

Our unique Core curriculum for first-year masters students extends across 2 semesters. We would need to have all of our first year students together for 2 semesters (not necessarily contiguous) for our Core.

If each semester is compressed, it may be challenging to revise our Core curriculum to
fit the reduced schedule.

The week before Fall classes, we run a unique orientation experience for students to
bond, get introduced to our IDM culture, and take on challenging design exercises.
We are working on creating an equivalent online orientation experience. Another
opportunity would be teaching students how to be effective on globally distributed
teams using digital tools.

Teaching the use of human-centered design across disciplines. IDM might open our online lectures to other students to broaden their understanding of human-centered design.

Thanks for soliciting our input! We appreciate your hard work on this.

All of our regular subjects, undergraduate and graduate, can be taught remotely. The only components of our educational mission that need physical presence is student and faculty research in our labs (child language acquisition, adult language comprehension, phonetics). These activities are in UROPs for undergraduates, regular doctoral research for graduate students, and faculty research. We intend to start these up again whenever MIT allows it.

The only components of our educational mission that need physical presence is student and faculty research in our labs (child language acquisition, adult language comprehension, phonetics). These activities are in UROPs for undergraduates, regular doctoral research for graduate students, and faculty research. We intend to start these up again whenever MIT allows it.

Until all of us, faculty, staff, and students can safely be back on campus, we intend to teach all of our subjects remotely. We do not wish to teach in any kind of hybrid way.

Nothing different from the previous scenario.

Our lab spaces will be re-opened for research (UROPs etc.) when safely possible for everyone.

Safety for lab personnel and students.

Dangers to safety of everyone involved.

Waiting until we can safely return to our labs.

Since we will teach all subjects remotely, there are no special challenges compared to the previous scenario.

No. This scenario is not feasible for us.

We do not have the resources to staff three semesters in one year.

We are incorporating people from outside MIT in our classes and other activities (reading groups etc). This is an enrichment of our program.

MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering

MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering

The MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering is well suited for teaching almost all courses remotely because we teach them across two campuses (MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, usually via videolink). There are only two courses that may cause difficulties, one that would not be taught until spring 2021, and the other that would be modified to allow for remote teaching including the lab component (see below). Also the majority of our courses have low enrollment.

Yes, we believe so. There is one class in particular that cannot be taught virtually, but it could be delayed for a term or full year.

We think that we can adjust, even for our lab classes.

We have already started planning with our international and US students starting in the summer 2020 term about conducting research remotely along with virtual participation in lab meetings, etc. We could continue this in a hybrid model, and in some instances do this already in our video linked classes, and when students are on a research cruise.

This allows our students to participate no matter where they are.

There is always the risk of a student not feeling fully engaged, but since our students are so highly motivated, and this is already a part of our culture, we do not feel that it is a huge risk.

Individual faculty would manage their labs to meet requirements.

More individualized attention for students.

Overburdening faculty and TAs with additional teaching time.

We do not have undergraduates in our program and prefer to not offer suggestions.

This might be possible for the undergraduate population, but we do not think it is a good solution for graduate students.

It would be difficult at best, especially if the third term ends in June.

Fatigue for all. For academic administrative staff, vacations would almost have to take place in July only since we usually have to be back on campus in August to prepare for the fall. For staff with young children, this could be particularly hard and greatly reduce the benefit of working for a flexible organization.

Exploring creative ideas for teaching and learning.

Expanding the MIT global reach. It would be pretty amazing for the MIT community to be working across the world, not just in research, but in many aspects of our administration.

As always, MIT is doing an amazing job in time of crisis. Please just remember that keeping us all safe and healthy is more important than bringing everyone back to campus too early.

We have combined the three Degree programs (UG, Masters, PhD).

117 Masters; 30 UGs; 52 PhDs

The general thrust of our discussions suggests that it is possible to continue teaching remotely in the Fall semester, but that this is an outcome that no one is looking forward to. A critical concern is that many (or even most) of our Masters students may decide to defer one year if we go online. Students in our professional programs are complaining about the lack of face-to-face interactions and discussions that are fundamental to the learning experience in the context of a professional Masters program. Many are telling us they will not participate in classes if they are online this Fall. We may end up substantially losing enrollments and teaching a very small number of students if we go online in the Fall. This suggests the need to approach the students to understand their plans under different contingencies.

At this point, DUSP Faculty do not feel the need to reduce the number of classes. In the context of a professional Masters program: smaller classes are as necessary as large ones in order to keep a sense of community and to enhance discussion. This may change if enrollments are substantially decreased (should we move the Fall semester online).

Courses that focus on tools and techniques (stats, GIS, design, software) may need to be modularized: taped modules would act as tutorials, with the “regular” class time devoted to discussion and student participation. This will increase the teaching load of instructors.

While Faculty would make a substantial effort to go online if needed, classes that use the studio/design approach and/or client-based practica (field-based courses, working with clients to deliver a final planning “product”) may suffer the most, perhaps even needing to be postponed to the Spring in some cases (about 20-30% of curriculum).

The general thrust of the discussion is that scenario 3 will effectively be equivalent to scenario 2, as some students will decide not to be on campus next semester unless we take extraordinary public health measures to make them feel safe. DUSP Faculty are strongly opposed to “selecting” which students would be allowed to come to campus which, from this perspective, renders this scenario similar to 3.

This model would also require professional videotaping services or re-wiring classrooms with video equipment, so that the Faculty can focus on teaching on-site, while someone (or technology) takes care of the videotaping and broadcasting.

One suggestion is to have students who are on-campus paired with students who are online – a buddy system – in order to make this work.

Since we see this scenario as similar to Scenario(s) 3, please see following responses.

Some students (or – per our discussion – Faculty) may decide not to come to campus or even enroll without extraordinary public health protective measures. We do not know how many. With any education that happens on campus, unless we have very strong testing and positive-test isolation capabilities, we risk seeing students simply not show up on campus. In that case we would have to choose between a dual model (as in scenario 2) or accept more deferrals and a substantially reduced enrollment (which admittedly may reduce campus density).

The on-campus educational offer has to be substantial for students to want to move back to campus. In the case of our professional Masters students, some of them may not want to come to Cambridge for only a couple of hours of in-person class each week.

• Note that we are having students pay rent in Cambridge for 4 months: this has a high monetary cost and will likely only be worth it in the context of a relatively generalized opening (perhaps excluding large classes only, which are rare in our graduate degrees).
• An important point raised by DUSP Faculty is that any scenario that involves on-campus teaching needs to take into account the possibility that some/many/most Faculty may not be able to come back to teach on campus without: adequate public health measures and widely available childcare options.
• Social distancing guidelines need to be realistic and scientific: 100 or 160 sq.ft per students seems disproportionate.

Our Faculty was more opposed to these models, which fragment the semester/year. From DUSP’s perspective these two scenarios seem mostly to be addressing the residential situation of undergraduate students in dorms and the need to de-densify the residential Halls. While making teaching much more difficult, these scenarios do not serve any pedagogical role in our graduate education. We would therefore respectfully suggest the possibility of opting out altogether from this model for DUSP masters and doctoral programs (and more generally in graduate/professional programs). We have to take into account the needs of graduate students who, after all, constitute the majority of MIT’s students (not just DUSP).

please see above and previous responses.

Our basic doubts:
• Graduate students in such situations would have a very hard time working out a housing situation in the private market that would let them appear on campus for half semester periods, and then have somewhere else to live during the other half.
• How would undergraduate students react to the idea of a semester (or more) of an MIT education that is 1) mostly delivered remotely to them in their dorm room, 2) while that room is without their chosen roommate, since dorms rooms are now effectively time-share rentals, and 3) they lack the possibility of carrying on with their sports team or musical ensemble? Will this scenario be so unappealing that they decide to take a leave?

Our comments on this scenario are bundled with the previous.

Some of our emergency responses actions (e.g., mobilizing summer job opportunities for our students) offer a great learning experience for us; experimenting with new ways of doing things.

We generated additional questions/suggestions:
• Who are our most vulnerable students and staff and how do we design an option that takes into account these situations?
• Also, students, faculty and staff are moving through a traumatic time. There will be fall out from this type of intense experience. Already students are reporting eye strain, difficult family situations, difficult learning environments, etc. We need to take into account the psychological health of the community.
• Consider the article:
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/learning-innovation/15-fall-scenarios
• What about shorter classes across day times 7am-6pm (in small increments of class time). That may require design to make classes far less of “wind up and repetition” and far more tactical learning.
• With regard to Fall 2020: can we move back to in-person lectures¬ – at least in the smaller Masters and doctoral programs – like DUSP? Test all members of the community for COVID virus presence in September and then randomly test ⅓ in each month October, November, December? Immediately quarantine affected students and re-test those in contact?
• Same as above, but with regard to serological tests.
• Will privacy issues come to be an issue around testing, exposure to COVID-19 positive cases, disclosing health information, home situations, vulnerable situations?
• Could we teach outside? Create classrooms in Tents? Outside space? Could we use our offices and teach in classrooms, even if there are no students on campus so that we can separate home life and work life?
• If we go back to teach in the Fall or spring, do we have to wear masks to teach? And will students also be wearing masks? Probably. This may degrade our ability to communicate, so that we will need to think about solutions.
• Can we gather more student feedback on how we are ”managing” currently. Is it working? Some students are reporting difficulties in technical classes (e.g., lectures from 10 years ago being recycled now and not working well).
• Can we ask students what they would do under each scenario: we may plan carefully around a scenario only to find that students are not showing up (by deferring one year).
• Wouldn’t we need more office space for staff who are doubled up in offices? Wouldn’t our small classrooms need to be offices for some staff?
• Can we move to a “British” system, where we produce online asynchronous materials for large groups, but then have reduced-size tutorials with groups of students sequentially?

For lecture classes: To accommodate different schedules and try to maximize benefit to the student (and efficiency for the instructors under any split-semester plans), lecture content would likely be split into asynchronous content (notes, online resources, potentially pre-recorded content) for students to examine before a synchronous lecture, with lectures focusing heavily on problem solving, application, and questions.

For lab classes: We will consider two scenarios. In the first, all weekly assignments will be re-written so they don’t require in-person lab work. We’ll find online simulation tools of utmost quality and advanced college level to teach fundamentals of optics and microscopy. We’ll put further emphasis on computational work, including software development for instrument control and machine-learning algorithm for image segmentation and analysis. We’ll provide instructor-generated data sets for students to analyze, as well as videos of the laboratory procedures themselves, for students to better grasp the practicalities of the exercises. Office hours (~ 30 hours per week) will be offered via Zoom, at times covering all students’ needs. In the second, we will explore the possibility of encouraging students to take our lab classes in spring semester. Since our lab classes are already at capacity, this would require us to reduce content by ~50%. So in this scenario, all students would get a 50% exposure to labwork whereas in the first scenario, 50% of our students would have 0% exposure.

This is something that the department is currently exploring. It would be highly problematic to drop any core classes. We do have electives that could be dropped but it’s not clear whether or not those instructors would be able to contribute to the essential aspects of our curriculum.

We offer 3 lab classes that would greatly suffer from a remote-only scenario: 20.109, 20.309 and 20.NEET. An additional lab class, 20.129, operates in spring semester.

For lecture classes: We will make materials available for in-class and remote learning.

For lab classes: We will encourage students (for instance sophomores) to take them later in their MIT years if they cannot be on campus this semester. We will make special accommodations for off-campus students and have them join lab groups as “virtual members”. The off-campus students will still complete all at-home work.

Some of our faculty are concerned if MIT policies disproportionately result in international students having to stay abroad/off-campus, while receiving what can only be then viewed as a compromised/inferior educational experience, as domestic students are being allowed back on campus to receive a more standard MIT experience.

Additional workload associated with having to manage both in-class and remote teaching. For lab classes, it would mean essentially mean offering two versions of the class simultaneously.

This will depend on the class. Here’s an example for one of our lab classes (20.309):
• To respect the 6’ social distancing and 160 sq ft per person guidelines, the 20.309 lab space will only accommodate 6 students at a given time (in 16-352), plus 1 instructor next door (in 16-336).
• PPE requirements (facial masks and gloves in particular) will increase and align with MIT and City of Cambridge guidelines, to further reduce the risk of exposure and contamination.
• All lab stations will be disinfected daily. Common equipment and surfaces will be wiped regularly. We will prepare individual part kits for each student.
• The students will work separately and independently at assigned lab stations and at assigned hours.
o At most 6 students will be physically present in the 20.309 lab at any time.
o Depending on the number of students enrolled in 20.309 each semester, they will work in teams of 2 or 3, “sequentially”. We will define milestones for Student 1 to reach, then Student 2 will take over the work (for instance the build of a microscope) at a different time, etc, until the weekly assignment gets completed. (We don’t have enough parts to build 36 microscopes – only 15.)
o The assignments will be formatted to ~ 6 hours of practical work per week per student (hands-on in the lab or at a computer).
• Instructors will be available 60 hours per week for office hours (or 360 student hours per week): 1 instructor always remote at home, 2 instructors offering each 30 hours per week in person on campus
o Students will have access to a low-cost tablet at each lab station to connect with instructors via Zoom and ask questions during their lab work.
o Instructors will help students remotely on Zoom as much as possible, and will respect the 6-foot distanciation imperative if they need to come into the lab (i.e. the student will have to move away from the lab station while the instructor works there).
o We expect that at least 50% of office hours will serve to answer non-lab-based questions (written exercises, Matlab coding, clarification of lecture points, etc). The “screen sharing” and “remote control” Zoom features will support remote instructor help.
• In-lab work and at-home work will be balanced throughout the semester:
o in lab: first half (microscopy, biological preparation), and part of second half (microfluidics, yeast experiments)
o at home: first half (written problems, Matlab code development) and second half (1. kit including USB signal generator/oscilloscope, electrical breadboard, etc, and 2. written problems, Matlab work).

Content in lab classes would need to be substantially reduced since the teaching labs would only be able accommodate a handful of students at a time.

One concern is that our wet lab class 20.129 offered in spring semester already utilizes spaced used for 7.002/7.003 in Bldg 68.

It is possible that many students might defer lab classes to the Sp21 semester.

Since space in lab classes will be the bottleneck, the division should not be biased towards any particular group (e.g. year or major). For example, if the division is by major, many of our students on campus would not have access to teaching labs due to space requirements.

Similar to the example described in #16 except that while one group is working on the lab, the other would focus on analysis, design, writing, etc.

Content in lab classes would need to be substantially reduced since the teaching labs would only be able accommodate a handful of students at a time.

Assuming this results in condensed semesters with little time between semesters, the logistics here would be challenging. The quick turnaround would make getting the necessary prep work completed between semesters difficult for the Instructors. Given this, our wet lab class would likely only be offered during the first and third semesters.

To ensure students do not register for more classes than are reasonable for what might be a truncated semester, units should be limited.

Significant effort over the summer would be required for restructuring modules for laboratory classes.

For our wet lab class (20.109), students would be partnered such that each team consists of one remote student and one on-campus student. The role of each partner will change depending on which student is on-campus and which student is remote. For the first and third module, the teams will work together to complete the communication assignments (as is done currently) and the on-campus student would complete the benchwork / relay the information to the remote student. Because the students would be only be remote or on-campus for half of the semester, the roles would be switched at mid-semester. To ease the transition, the second module will be restructured to a completely remote format and students will complete communication assignments individually (as is done currently).

Students would have a more difficult time obtaining an internship, if their off-campus semester is not in the traditional summer time.

Faculty would have a more difficult time carrying out their research agenda due to the increased teaching load.

Instructors would need to be appointed for 12 months and some may not be available for such an extended period.

TAs may not be available to provide the necessary support.

[1] It would be significant loss for our students this fall if they could not access teaching labs for hands-on training. To thrive rather than manage under this undesirable situation, we could provide electronics hands-on exercises by enabling students to use low voltage USB all-in-one waveform generator / oscilloscope / network analyzer devices. We propose to mail each student individually one such apparatus, together with other small electronic components, so they can learn practically the signals & systems segment of the course ($350 per student, ~35 students total). The devices would be collected back from students and be reused semester after semester (even well after the pandemic has ended).

[2] To thrive rather than manage in our wet lab classes, we are now investigating the use of remote cloud labs, namely Strateos and Emerald Clouds. In principle, these can support DNA assembly and cell culture (including observations, e.g. microscopy and FACS). With these capabilities, we could potentially offer a truly futuristic version of wet lab classes in the area of synthetic biology. Setting up a framework for remote lab experiments is something that we have been interested in investigating for several years. In the Weiss lab, they already have some experience with liquid handling automation, and are in a good position to invest in this effort. However, it will require a real effort and funding would be necessary

Political Science (S.B., S.M., and Ph.D.)

850 enrollments in all subjects (UG and G)

The department will continue as normal, although without the magic of in-person teaching. None of our subjects requires in-person participation, so we need not adjust our offerings if we are fully remote; however, we might choose to cancel or postpone certain classes -- e.g., those whose instructors are less comfortable with an online format.

Yes. We have quite a bit of flexibility here. Our concern, however, pertains to the externalities of a department's decision to reduce the number of subjects taught. If other departments reduce the number of HASS classes available, students will naturally gravitate toward those that are still being offered. In other words, if History and Philosophy reduce their class offerings, class sizes in Political Science will increase, creating a challenge for faculty who are struggling to meet their teaching objectives online. So let's keep in mind that the 8-subject HASS requirement makes this issue a bit complicated.

The vitality of a proper class discussion is compromised when conducted on Zoom, and lectures lose the benefit of real-time interventions and interpersonal connections. However, there is no specific component of our learning objectives that absolutely cannot be achieved remotely.

Our classes would be online for everyone, regardless of whether they are on campus or not. This would be straightforward for us.

The same as for fully remote.

Because our lab class does not actually require in-person activity, it would be conducted remotely, as would all other subjects in the department.

The impediment is that social science classes (and others that do not require in person learning) would get second-class status.

Having first years on campus right away seems important, and seniors on campus during the last months of the second semester. I'd recommend against dividing by major, given that students frequently switch majors, add double majors, etc., and it would be problematic to tie these decisions to being physically on campus.

same as previous, re: second class status of subjects and departments that do not explicitly require physical spaces.

First year students for the first two semesters; otherwise no feedback.

This scenario causes the most aggravation and concern among the department faculty and staff. It is not clear whether or how our curriculum would change, how we would cover all material in a shorter time frame, and whether outside commitments (conferences, professional associations, etc) would conflict with this new schedule. We do not see this as an attractive scenario.

Members of the department are open to partnering with others on a new Covid-specific class, although many in the department are concerned about an overabundance of Covid-themed teaching and wish to provide students with an education in the standard subjects of the discipline. Some faculty and staff believe that we are well positioned to provide excellent online classes, and we should capitalize on our successes to draw in more students. And some are thinking about inviting special guests more often to online classes, given the ease of doing so (no transportation costs!).

And Hasts Doctoral Program, administered jointly with Anthroploogy and STS

We currently plan to offer ~25 subjects in the fall term, although that number may change slightly as we learn more about fall teaching scenarios. All of our classes feature a mix of lectures, discussions, and project-based learning that can be adapted to remote teaching. The majority of our classes have enrollments under 20 students.

We would prefer not to reduce the number of subjects we teach in the fall. None of our subjects enroll more than ~50 students. All can be taught remotely. This is our response for all scenarios currently being considered. It would be difficult for us to teach our classes, all of which involve discussion, in classrooms set up for social distancing with students wearing masks and other PPE.

We can achieve all program objectives remotely, although not as well as in a residential setting without social distancing.

Frankly, we are not sure how a remote/residential hybrid model would work. Remote students would be at a serious disadvantage, and substantial extra faculty labor would be required to achieve instructional parity for them. We will of course work with students who are not able to be in Cambridge in the fall for visa reasons, health concerns, or other issues, but a level playing field for all, i.e., everyone remote, seems desirable.

Socially distanced classrooms with remote students participating via zoom or skype. NOT OPTIMAL, but we will do our best of this is the eventual scenario.

See our response to this question for the "all-remote" scenario.

It is unlikely we would request socially distanced classrooms for in-person teaching. We would most likely teach all of our classes remotely, even if residential classrooms were available.

This scenario is not feasible for us. All of our teaching would be remote. There would be obvious inequities between units and schools which are troubling for our unit.

See our response to this question for the above scenarios.

No opinion. This is not a desirable choice from our perspective.

We do not think socially-distanced classrooms are feasible for our subjects.

See our response to this questions for the scenarios above.

See our responses above.

All parts of our curriculum are “remotable.”

It is unclear how three semesters of instruction would map onto current faculty teaching loads. We also have concerns about TA assignments for the HASTS grad students spread across three semesters. We worry about burnout issues by the third semester, especially if there is no instructional break for the month of January.

We are in the process of developing a subject for AY21 on the history of pandemics and financial crises. We imagine this would be a 9-12 unit subject, perhaps led by a single instructor who would coordinate guest lectures, perhaps taught by a team of three instructors who would design three 4-week modules on different pandemic-related themes. (This latter structure is how we organize our flagship undergraduate subject "How to Stage a Revolution.") We are also reaching out to Anthropology, STS, and Literature in SHASS to explore team-teaching options with them. In the 8AM calls with Ian Waitz, there has been vague mention of an Institute-wide subject that would accommodate perhaps 1000 students, with smaller recitations led by faculty from across the Schools. We would be interested in participating in such a collaborative effort.

Good luck! This is an unimaginably complex problem.

Office of Experiential Learning

We are a primarily undergraduate-focused program, but we do have masters and doctoral students engaged in classes and research.

Office of Experiential Learning/Edgerton Center

D-Lab will seek to offer as many of its planned classes as possible. We intend to give our instructors a voice in determining whether they think their class should be offered in a remote environment or put on hold. This decision will depend on the ability to find high-quality projects with our community partners, and ensure that these projects can be appropriately scoped for good learning outcomes. It will also depend on the ability to deliver satisfactory project outcomes without access to our workshop and hands-on learning components on campus. The fall classes with a current mandatory makerspace component are:

EC.701/EC.781/11.025/11.472 D-Lab Development
EC.712/EC.782 Applications of Energy in Global Development
EC.713/4.411 D-Lab Schools - Building Technology Laboratory
EC.729/2.729/EC.797/2.789 Design for Scale

Two additional classes (EC.718/EC.798 and EC.733/15.772/2.771/2.871) sometimes have team projects that require work in a makerspace.

To address the need for makerspaces to complete aspects of student projects, we see a few scenarios: a) send students kits of materials and tools; b) offer them a budget to purchase their own materials and tools; c) work with makerspace staff remotely to learn about shop tools and fabricate parts; or d) do a completely digital design.

D-Lab offers 7 fall classes, 3 of which certain students count on to fulfill requirements. One of these is EC.701/11.025, which is a HASS-S class. Another is EC.729/2.729, which is a popular restricted elective for Course 2A. The third is EC.713/4.411, which is an Institute Lab. These classes should be prioritized to continue if possible. Some of our other classes are purely electives and could be canceled more easily, assuming that we can still complete work promised to our global partners through other mechanisms.

Four of our fall classes currently have a shop training component, and expect all students to engage in design and manufacturing work in at least one of the campus makerspaces. Two other classes sometimes have projects that require a makerspace. Remote learning will require us to radically change the nature of the class projects and the expectations of students. They will undoubtedly lose opportunities to learn and improve hands-on skills, even if some of these skills can be practiced at home.

Remote learning will also harm other aspects of experiential learning at D-Lab. Some examples include learning how technologies work by trying out these technologies yourself in the D-Lab space (for example, grinding corn using a prototype attached to a bicycle), and engaging in exercises to understand how difficult many tasks are for people living in poverty (such as carrying water using a variety of unique prototypes, comparing and contrasting the methods and their effects on the body). Finally, most D-Lab work involves a significant teamwork aspect and a spirit of participation that is more difficult to achieve remotely.

D-Lab will seek to offer as many of its classes as possible. Given the participatory teamwork nature of D-Lab’s project-based classes, we are concerned about the imbalances and inequities in learning experiences that may emerge from a hybrid model. If some students have access to a makerspace on campus and others don’t, the students on campus will have a very different learning experience, and be able to learn a major set of skills that remote students can’t. We would have to put significant effort into finding makerspaces and other ways to make sure remote students can have an equivalent experience - and in some cases, it may not be possible. Many D-Lab students are international, and many also come from low-income and/or first-generation backgrounds.

We will probably have to buy and ship a lot of materials, which would require time and coordination. We would need to modify in-class activities and norms to ensure social distancing could be maintained. We probably would not need any additional space in this scenario.

See the above concerns about equity and financial implications. We are concerned that the students confined to remote learning in this scenario would feel pretty bad about it, and may be less likely to engage in our classes as a result.

We would work with our workshop manager to determine what PPE is needed (for staff as well as students) and implement new norms in our workshop space, and we may need to expand the number of shop hours available in order to spread out students across lab sessions. We would limit the types of activities that can be done in the shop to enforce social distancing. Teaching someone how to weld, for example, would require having two people stand very close to each other, so we might not be able to do that. We would set clear expectations about what tools can be used and what activities can be performed in the shop, and modify class and project expectations accordingly. We would need to figure out a way to handle emergency situations that might require breaching the social distancing norms, in a way that allows people to consent to the risk they are inherently taking by going in the shop and using a tool.

In addition to expanding the number of shop hours, another strategy may be to use additional classroom space to allow students to spread out more widely across D-Lab, though this may be difficult given that D-Lab’s classrooms are often booked out each day for classes.

Everything will undoubtedly take more time because of the distraction of coordinating and maintaining social distancing. Expectations about class or lecture objectives might have to be changed.

As with all of the scenarios, the degree to which students can advance the practical aspects of their projects will be somewhat disappointing, and these expectations will have to be managed carefully through thoughtful teaching and leadership. Capacity-building in this area could be very helpful.

There are real safety concerns to working effectively in a shop environment when you can’t get within 6 feet of each other. As mentioned before, it will also be difficult for our courses to meet educational objectives.

D-Lab classes are generally not tracked by year or major in the fall semester. Any given subject will include students of all years, including G, and majors. For this reason, we are flexible on how to divide students.

We hear constantly how important peer support groups are to students. We believe that, as with the unique dorm selection system at MIT, it would be crucial to let students indicate preferences about whom they want to be on campus with, so that they feel supported and engaged in their life at MIT. This is probably the most important consideration to the students; there are dozens of other ways to slice up the pie that ultimately don’t matter that much to this scenario or their ability to succeed.

The same as in the Hybrid scenario. We would operate hands-on shop work through social distancing methods and adjust project expectations accordingly.

The same as in the Hybrid scenario. Definitely more expensive. We’d have to do everything twice.

The same as in the Hybrid scenario, although it would be a more equitable option because it wouldn’t shut out the international students from a chance to get back to campus.

Similarly to Question 20, we hear constantly how important peer support groups are to students. We believe that, as with the unique dorm selection system at MIT, it would be crucial to let students indicate preferences about whom they want to be on campus with, so that they feel supported and engaged in their life at MIT. This is probably the most important consideration to the students; there are dozens of other ways to slice up the pie that ultimately don’t matter that much to this scenario or their ability to succeed.

In this scenario, we also recommend splitting up students based on majors.

We would try to adopt some of the same practices described in the previous methods. However, we have serious concerns about how to decide which classes to offer in this scenario, and how to split them up to make the offerings equitable to the members of the MIT community who are interested in D-Lab.

We see this scenario as requiring a much greater time commitment and more exhaustion from our staff and faculty instructors. It could potentially add a substantial cost burden to us, given that we would might need to pay our part-time lecturers and TAs twice to offer the same course. This scenario would take a radical rethinking of our course offerings, when and how to offer them, and the objectives for each. It seems like a lot more preparatory work than the other scenarios, for questionable gain.

We are already concerned about enrollment in our classes next year, because students will understandably question whether they can get the learning outcomes they wanted from a D-Lab class without being able to travel to the field or get a full experience in the workshop. Complicating course selection by creating three semesters would probably only hurt our enrollment further.

D-Lab staff are interested in offering “bite-size” virtual learning modules that could teach students maker skills or other skills at home. This would be a way of exposing more students to D-Lab’s work in an accessible and fun way, while giving them an opportunity to learn or improve maker skills in an environment where they may not be able to do so easily.

One could also imagine working with students to develop COVID-19-themed projects of relevance to the needs of global development.

D-Lab is eager to collaborate with other experiential learning programs to address the gap in hands-on learning opportunities imposed by a virtual learning environment.

Thank you very much for soliciting such detailed feedback at the program and departmental level!

Supply Chain Management

Center for Transportation and Logistics

The SCM program can operate at all levels in a remote setting this fall. Our SCM Residential student begin orientation in late August, all educational components can be virtualized. Fall term SCM classes can also be virtualized with minimal disruption. thesis and capstone research projects can operate remotely as we have done in the Spring. SCM Blended students begin thesis and capstone research proposals remotely during the Fall term under normal circumstances so there is no disruption in the process. MicroMasters educational offerings are conducted online, so no disruption is anticipated. PhD and Master’s students from other MIT departments advised by CTL researchers, can continue their research remotely as they have done during the Spring term with no disruption.

We teach five core SCM subjects during the fall, four of which are required. We would not be able to reduce our number of subjects taught.

All components can be virtualized in some form or fashion.

A hybrid option would require additional set up and installation of equipment. Sufficient lead time would be needed to order and install equipment and configure space to an optimal level of social distancing. Classes would begin much in the same way as the remote version, with all SCM classes offering synchronous online interaction. Our class of 40 SCM residential students is usually 50% international students so this option provides us with a manageable effort to social distance in person interactional. Our E40 multi-purpose room could meet requirements for maintaining social distancing in an in -person setting. Classes would have to be structured in a way to provide sufficient in person interactions for those in person, which providing a comparable mode of interaction for remote students. This will increase the demand on teaching resources.

The demands of teaching a hybrid class are greater. Instead of using smaller classroom space in E51, we would likely transfer our five classes to E40 where we can insure greater social distancing. We would set up dedicated recording and audio functions to stream to online students. This would require additional equipment, ideally similar to the classroom set up in many E51 classroom. Interacting with both in person and online students would require additional TA resources, as an additional person would be needed to monitor online questions and interactions. The practical goal of this set up could allow students to gradually transition from remote to in-person learning as they arrive to campus. Class assignments may have to be updated to incorporate both modes delivery with dedicated support for the in person students as well as the online students. In-person discussion groups would likely function separately from online discussion groups as the two would likely be a challenge to mix.

Balancing remote and in person interaction would be the biggest challenge, as in person students may dominate the interaction. A 50% split scenario would likely be most conducive as students can engage with others in their delivery mode. A significant imbalance could make it more challenging for remote students to engage. Overall a hybrid model would require more support and resources, so we would also explore if there is an option to “opt out” and still remain fully online if given the choice.

This option would be no different than scenario 1 as all of SCM classes can be done remotely. If students are allowed on campus scenario 2 described our approach to maintain social distancing using our internal room space in E40.

Described in Scenario 1 and 2

One question that arises from this scenario is even if our SCM classes take place fully online, will students be given the option to come to campus anyway? If so, what are the benefits to coming on campus versus staying remote in this particular scenario. Would students doing fully remote programs be barred from coming to campus?

This option would not fit our master’s programs. Our Residential program is only ten months (Fall, IAP, Spring) and our Blended program is only five months (IAP, Spring). We would not be able to stagger the arrival of our students without significantly impacting our program framework. With 40 students in the fall and 80 students in IAP and Spring the social distancing gains by having 2/3 of the class on campus would be minimal

Most components can be virtualized, but major programing during IAP would need to be reimagined. Our spring term student trek would likely need to be cancelled in this scenario.

This scenario would seem to be highly detrimental to the student experience as our cohort model would be disrupted. There is no clear way how we would divide 2/3 of the students. Our classes are taught in specific terms so it may require double the teaching load if classes have to be taught in multiple terms. Research projects also run according to a relatively strict 9-month timeline from September to May, having students on different timelines would be more challenging.

Transitioning to an online model has allowed us to reach a wider audience with a wider range guest speakers and greater alumni interaction. Many of our CTL events have gained larger viewership as well. Operating in an online setting has also allowed us foster greater connections with our partner SCALE centers, bringing together more network contacts and finding ways to cooperate on a larger scale. These efforts could continue in the Fall and bolster our online presence.

The field of supply chain management has increased in prominence during these times, there are continued opportunities to share with the larger MIT community.

Our program does have one general concern that would greatly impact our students’ interest in attending MIT and enrolling in our program. As a one year program, students must attend MIT for two terms in order to be eligible for OPT. Even if students begin applying for visas, and are allowed to enroll at MIT later than usual, our concern is if a visa is delayed beyond December 2020, will students still be eligible for OPT work authorization when they graduate in May 2021.

[Note: this focuses on first year students, as later students are not taking classes, typically] Lecture subjects (75% of the curriculum) would run as usual. All first year students also TA in the Fall, as this is how they are funded. It would be difficult unpleasant and less effective to train them remotely, but we would figure out a way.

Not really. We might be able to shift some subjects to spring (but likely not lab rotations, because students need to join a group to obtain funding before the end of Spring)

The remaining 25% of the curriculum involves lab rotations. Those rotations are key to students choosing a research group and simply cannot be done remotely. We have no reasonable solution if research group rotations are lost.

We are currently on the fence. Either we have students who cannot come to campus enroll and take classes (in which case there is a big inequity between those who are remote and those who are not) or we suggest those students defer until Spring.

There would be about a 25-30% increase in effort and we'd need a ton of AV support. Some faculty would choose to shift to spring rather than do this.

We'd probably revert to the remote teaching scenario except for certain key elements like lab rotations and select training and orientation exercises.

NA (because undergrads)

First year PhD students on campus for the first term, please!

We would complete them in the first term

Research progress would be cut by 33%; If not all first year students had the same schedule, it would be a disaster

Civil and Environmental Engineering

We plan to build on the experience of this spring semester to transition to online delivery, either synchronously or asynchronously. The summer months will give us additional time to prepare for the Fall semester. We do anticipate some challenges in delivering any required in-person elements of undergraduate subjects, especially the subjects with significant laboratory component and/or group projects/communications component.

We do not anticipate significant opportunities for reduction in undergraduate subjects taught; most of these are part of our undergraduate program (as general departmental requirements or core subjects). We do allow for substitutions when a core subject is not offered due to one or more reasons. We will have a better estimate after we survey all our faculty who are teaching in Fall 2020.

We have two subjects which are heavily based on field work (ONE-MA3 and TREX). We have made alternative arrangements for ONE-MA3 but we need to plan for TREX (which is usually offered during IAP). In addition, some faculty in our core subjects take students to field trips, and obviously the associated learning objectives cannot be achieved through remote instruction.

This too would build on current experience for lectures, where faculty are generally recording synchronous lectures and posting them so that they can be accessed asynchronously as necessary. However, for lab/project classes this would represent a clear inequity, where remote students would have a limited learning experience. As a result, in our view, a continuation of current emergency grading will be most desirable.

Additional training on simultaneous in-person and recorded lecturing (video support, tablets, etc.)

As suggested above, this option could result in significant inequities, and may also lead to confusion as to how content is being delivered. Management of instruction would need to be elevated.

If we were to conduct instruction in our lab subjects in a socially-distanced manner, it is likely that this will be done in shifts; i.e., students will be divided into groups with size governed by the lab’s safe occupancy capacity and lab activities will be scheduled with social distancing constraints.

To schedule lab activities in shifts, we may need additional teaching resources (TAships).

Ensuring that students are still able to collaborate on group activities and/or discuss experimental results.

Dividing students according to major will be ideal. We do have some participation from other majors but these numbers are relatively small. Our UG subjects tend to have a mix of students from different years (for example, in a given subject we may see sophomores, juniors, and seniors).

We are still gathering input from our faculty instructors. Clearly, maintaining consistent instruction (across student groups) in the non-remote-able components would be very important in this scenario.

Graduate students who are TAs may be overburdened if have to teach labs/recitations twice (depending on how model implemented). Similarly, this will create additional burden on the faculty if they are expected to deliver the lecture twice.

Consistency of instruction is a likely impediment. The course deliverables and expectations would need to be clearly communicated to all student groups.

At this point, we are strongly against the re-organization required to set up 3 semesters. Furthermore, we must anticipate some potential for flexible transitions in the event of a resurgence of covid, and shrinking classes into shorter semesters will make this particularly difficult.

We are still gathering input from our faculty instructors. It is very likely that instructors will need to carefully think about group lab activities and associated lectures into modules that are well-suited for this model. This will add a lot of extra burden on our faculty and teaching staff.

This would require significant re-working of undergraduate subjects (each semester presumably a bit shorter than usual) and timing of offerings. CEE subjects are typically only offered once per year, so if lectures proceed wholly on campus, then such classes would only be accessible to 2/3 of UG; if remote, no impact on UG. This scenario may also add TA’ing responsibilities associated with re-configuration of semester structure. In general, this scenario would add undue stress and workload to faculty, students, and staff.

May be some opportunities for new undergraduate/graduate seminar-style or project-based subjects on the COVID-19 pandemic (transmission and recovery), or online delivered subjects in partnership with peer institutions. Specifics TBD until fall scenario and teaching needs clarified.

No additional thoughts on this at this time.

No additional thoughts on this at this time.

MBA, SFMBA, MFin, MBAn, MSMS, EMBA, Visiting Fellows

with undergraduate related comments as well

approx 1375 (across all grad programs for both first and second year students)

We plan to offer the majority of our fall classes online including Action/Learning Lab courses
We will review to see if there are any candidates for spring delivery. We will also review spring courses that may work particularly well virtually and consider offering those in the fall
We will adjust the time of day of classes to accommodate participants from all over the world (we will closely monitor and learn from SFMBA, LGO, and MFin summer delivery
We will look at offering more sections / formats of classes to address time change issues

We are reviewing our list of courses that will be offered in the fall to see if there are any candidates for spring delivery or even not to be offered at all this academic year. As stated above, we do not anticipate identifying a lot of courses. We are also concerned that if we move too many courses from fall to spring - students will question the value of the fall curriculum / experience

Team building and community building will be challenged
Access to Bloomberg terminals remotely is still under investigation. We are working closely with Sloan Technology Services to understand the long term remote accessibility options that will be provided by Bloomberg
The creation of Action / Learning team assignments will have to be thought through as it relates to virtual projects and the virtual project teams
Teaching cases is very challenging in a remote setting

This response has a particular focus on our graduate students
Our goal would be to have all students who are able to get to campus (barring visa issues) be in the classroom half time (2 - 3 days a week)
There is an assumption that a percentage of international students will not be able to get to campus of ongoing Visa issues which will reduce the number of students on campus
All courses will have to be available online as well as in person
Students will be split into two groups and will be on campus either MT or WTH
All recitations will be conducted online
We are currently exploring the value of holding some classes on Friday (and potentially Saturday as well)

Faculty will have to become comfortable teaching in a blended classroom (students both online and in person)
Classrooms will need to have the ability to livestream
Time of day for each class will need to be assessed in order to accommodate students connecting from the the world
Delivery of exams will have to be considered for in person vs online
Creation of project teams will have to be thought through - is it better to have teams split between those on campus and those online OR to have all on campus teams and all online teams?

There may be faculty who are high risk or uncomfortable teaching in a classroom
Faculty will need to get comfortable teaching in a blended classroom
Will we have the right level of staff support for the faculty during these challenging times
Creating a comprehensive schedule that can be friendly to all students in a variety of time zones will be challenging
Will there be enough on campus housing for our grad students
Depending on social distancing guidelines for in classroom - will we have enough seats in each classroom (even if we split our cohorts)
Access to enough classrooms to accommodate lower density requirements
(How) will we be able to put effective guidelines in place to ensure the necessary checking (testing) and containment (stop the spread) to ensure the safety of our community
Access to printed course materials has been an issue this semester. We anticipate that it will continue to be an issue as classes may continue to be taught online

similar to our response for Scenario 1 - Fully Remote

similar to our response for Scenario 1 - Fully Remote

similar to our response for Scenario 1 - Fully Remote

To date, we have only identified Access to Bloomberg Terminals as an issue and we are trying to gain a better understanding of Bloomberg's longer term solutions of providing remote access to individuals - STS is looking into this

see response to Scenario 1 - Remote Access

see response to Scenario 1 - Remote Access

We believe that even with the 3 semester scenario, our graduate students would prefer to be on campus a few days a week throughout the year and we would propose that we implement our Hybrid Scenario over 3 semesters instead of 2

If we were to go to 3 semesters, this would have a significant impact on our fall, IAP, and spring offerings (including Sloan Innovation Period which occurs mid-semester in the fall and spring) and we would have to redesign the entire academic year. This would have an impact on all faculty and staff who would need to work through the redesign of the academic year
For faculty and staff, we will need to identify those who are required to be on campus to teach or support student activities and develop a scheme where staff are able to work with the students over the course of the 3 semesters. We will look at staff at a macro level (as opposed to group level) to establish an on campus work schedule that will preserve social distancing guidelines
At this time, we do not see a big impact on students

Action Learning project with a focus on current events
Work with faculty to ensure classroom content incorporates current headlines
Arrange for local alumni to become study partners for current students or to support community building in their geography
Ask senior alumni to coach students on leadership
Engage in more campus collaboration (i.e. sandbox)
Take advantage of ability to have speakers from around the globe 'Zoom' into a classroom for 10 - 15 minutes (no travel time or costs)
Revisit constraints on Sloan students taking classes across campus

Develop a Master Class series from faculty across the Institute
Sponsor Hack-a-thons with a focus on the impact of COViD-19
Create an Institute-wide initiative similar to MITEI or Transportation@MIT around COVID-19 and all of the related activities, projects, classes, etc
Identify opportunities to collaborate on external recruiting and share knowledge and resources to supplement efforts to support onboarding / training of new staff

6-1, 6-2, 6-3, 6-7, 6-9, 6-14, 11-6

There is a strong sense from some faculty that a fully remote semester will not work. One concern is that many students will not return in that situation. There have been many challenges with remote teaching (assessment, keeping students engaged) that are unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved no matter what we do remotely. College is also a hugely social experience, from psetting together, to late-night conversations in the dorm, to extra-curricular activities including UROPs and sports. A fully remote semester without those activities will be a much lesser experience.

There is another cohort of faculty whose subjects are running effectively, and where it seems that fully remote instruction can be fine.

Reducing subjects taught just shifts the load to other subjects. It does not reduce overall butts-in-seats. This is thus not viewed as a useful strategy by EECS unless global butts-in-seats is also reduced.

Accurate assessment, hands-on experiences that require laboratory or test equipment, and integrated interactive lecture demonstrations are all difficult or impossible to achieve remotely. Software-only team projects and hardware projects with limited test & measurement requirements may be done effectively, with closer mentoring than usual.

Some faculty feel like creating and teaching two simultaneous versions of classes (one remote, one on-campus) is too much work, and the remote experience will be much worse than the on-campus one, and more difficult to accurately assess. In addition, as MIT contemplates very large budget cuts, asking much more of the teaching staff while decreasing their resources is not tenable. One solution in that case is to teach to the students on campus and treat off-campus students similar to taking a semester off for medical leave (just at a higher-than-normal rate).

That said, there may be some fraction of classes that can be taught the same remotely as on campus. It would be very helpful to be able designate classes as “residential only” or “residential and remote” so that we can distinguish between the two types of classes.

This would require substantially more resources than currently budgeted, not even accounting for upcoming budget cuts.

Budgetary constraints as well as instructor and staff fatigue.

We would need to repurpose space, somehow, to spread out lab sections in space, or spread them out over considerably more time (including evenings, weekends, the evening times in which we are not supposed to normally hold class meetings, etc.)

It is also important to consider smart social distancing measures that may deviate from the 160 sq ft rule but maintain appropriate safety. Better and more frequent testing, face masks, and other measures may allow for a denser environment while maintaining adequate levels of safety. This is important because an “on-campus” experience whose density is too low will not meet our pedagogical needs, reverting in effect to Scenario 1. For example, if a lab experience in 38-501 (1113 sq ft) is only allowed to have 7 people in it (at 160 sq ft/person), including staff, whereas we normally hold 100-person lab sections in there, then that lab experience will be unworkable for the medium-to-large classes in that we run in EECS.

Need smart social-distancing guidelines so that we can run the on-campus lab and hands-on experiences that we need, using our very limited staff.

It doesn’t seem like doing it by major would address crowding problems in instructional situations.

This scenario is much less favorable for hands-on laboratory subjects than 3.75, because it requires refactoring classes so that lab experiences occur twice each semester. Classes with final projects, or where labs are closely integrated with the rest of the class pedagogy, will suffer. For example, lab experiences usually build during a term as students acquire more knowledge. If some students are only on-campus for the first half of a term, they cannot do the more advanced labs, or a final project.

This option is probably best for laboratory subjects and subjects with final projects since each “trimester” would operate similar to existing classes (though potentially shortened).

In response to the suggestion of having seminars that are focused on the topic of COVID-19: it seems like an interesting option, but we have had some students complain that too many of their classes were talking about COVID during the first week after break and they found it demoralizing. They had been hoping to use academics as a way to distract themselves from worry about COVID and they really resented the intrusion there, as well as everywhere else.

Collaborative teaching with faculty at other universities is an opportunity -- remote teaching means that it's potentially as easy to co-teach with somebody at Berkeley as it is to co-teaching with a colleague down the hall, which can allow refreshing parts of our curriculum with new ideas and new approaches from beyond MIT. We are already exploring this possibility for 6.875, a graduate-level cryptography course that typically enrolls 70-80 students.

Interdepartmental Program in Transportation

Interdepartmental Program in Transportation - same replies for MST and PhD, as such submitting one form

Kiley Clapper; Jinhua Zhao

kclapper@mit.edu; jinhua@mit.edu

In working with faculty in DUSP and CEE we plan to build on the lessons learned from the spring term to transition to online delivery, either synchronously or asynchronously. While we are all learning we do anticipate potential challenges in effectively teaching any required in-person elements of graduate subjects, like group projects, demonstrations, etc.

The interdepartmental program is considering offering a few substitutions, for core classes, if necessary.

We think that projects with teams may be challenging to offer remotely.

Similar to question 8, we could build on the lessons learned from the spring and ideally training would happen over the summer for the faulty to improve online offerings. That said we think a hybrid scenario, especially divided international vs domestic would be completely inequitable as the students off campus would have less access to resources and would not have the same learning experience.

The faculty would need to be versed in the best practice for this style of teaching and may need training on use of tablets – eg an equation is written on a tablet and projected for in-class learning and shared/recorded for those joining online.

As noted, we are concerned about the inequity amongst the students that such a model would reveal.

We read this question in that only lab/project/studio classes would be in person and socially distanced, if that is the case we do not have core classes that fit that profile

As described, this scenario is not relevant to Interdepartmental Transportation program (unclear how graduate classes impacted)

Not clear impediments for MST/PhD students

We don’t see how the classes could be adjusted to 3 semesters for the program.

We don’t see how the classes could be adjusted to 3 semesters for the program.

We just started the process of envisioning a new transportation curriculum before the COVID-19. The current crisis prompts us to think more actively about the possibility of the online education program and hybrid (online-residence) education program in the new curriculum design.

Aeronautics and Astronautics

Hamsa Balakrishnan and David Darmofal

hamsa@mit.edu; darmofal@mit.edu

We expect most lectures to be on-line and offered in a synchronous mode with recordings available. We do not have any subjects in the Fall with learning objective(s) that require hands-on experiences to achieve. However, we do still utilize hands-on experiences to improve learning in our Fall subjects. Thus, these will need to be virtualized and/or removed.

Since we have no classes in Fall 2020 that are needed for students to meet lab requirements, we will be able to minimize such disruptions.

We believe all of our Fall subjects learning objectives can be achieved remotely though potentially with some reduction of effectivity through removal of some hands-on activities.

These plans would likely be similar to the fully remote option. However, the difficulty would be whether or not to offer different versions of the same subjects for remote as well as on-campus students. Some concerns in this scenario would include:
For those subjects that have a hands-on experience that is used to improve learning (though the hands-on experience is not required for learning objectives to be met), would we still offer that hands-on experience for those on-campus?
Would assessments be different for those remote and those on-campus?
Would grading policies be the same for those remote and those on-campus?
We see many issues with sorting these types of problems out. And, given we do not have subjects in the Fall for which hands-on experiences are required to meet the learning objective, the easiest for instructors and fairest for students may be not to offer any on-campus subjects for the Fall. If however we were to have to offer subjects in both an on-campus and remote version, this would imply even greater teaching loads unless some subjects are cancelled altogether.

Again, given we do not have any significant hands-on experiences, this would not prove a significant problem. Some likely options we’d investigate:
* Still virtualize the labs and avoid this particular issue.
* As is feasible, keep labs/hands-on activities in which we can respect social distancing in the space we have available.

Increased time for instructional staff. Note though the questions in this scenario were largely with respect to lab/project/performance/etc subjects, similar issues occur for lectures and recitations. These sessions would be constrained by our existing classrooms. Lectures perhaps could just be done remote. But maybe recitations could be offered more frequently if needed to respect social distancing standards.

Bandwidth (both communications and personnel) limitations.

We have no lab requirements scheduled for Fall 2020.

Similar to the hybrid scenario.

We would like to have students who would take the lab classes on-campus.

Not having half the student on campus in Spring 2021 will pose a challenge that we will need to plan through, since we have two of the lab classes for our capstone sequence at that time.

Planning will be required.

Aeronautics and Astronautics

Hamsa Balakrishnan and David Darmofal

hamsa@mit.edu; darmofal@mit.edu

We expect most lectures to be on-line and offered in a synchronous mode with recordings available. We do not have any subjects in the Fall with learning objective(s) that require hands-on experiences to achieve. However, we do still utilize hands-on experiences and projects to improve learning in some of our Fall subjects. Thus, these will need to be virtualized and/or removed.

Since we have no classes in Fall 2020 that are needed for students to meet lab requirements, we will be able to minimize such disruptions.

We believe all of our Fall subjects learning objectives can be achieved remotely though potentially with some reduction of effectivity through removal of some hands-on activities.

These plans would likely be similar to the fully remote option. However, the difficulty would be whether or not to offer different versions of the same subjects for remote as well as on-campus students. Some concerns in this scenario would include:
*For those subjects that have a hands-on experience that is used to improve learning (though the hands-on experience is not required for learning objectives to be met), would we still offer that hands-on experience for those on-campus?
*Would assessments be different for those remote and those on-campus?
*Would grading policies be the same for those remote and those on-campus?
We see many issues with sorting these types of problems out. And, given we do not have subjects in the Fall for which hands-on experiences are required to meet the learning objective, the easiest for instructors and fairest for students may be not to offer any on-campus subjects for the Fall. If however we were to have to offer subjects in both an on-campus and remote version, this would imply even greater teaching loads unless some subjects are cancelled altogether.

Again, given we do not have any significant hands-on experiences, this would not prove a significant problem. Some likely options we’d investigate:
* Still virtualize the labs and avoid this particular issue.
* As is feasible, keep labs/hands-on activities in which we can respect social distancing in the space we have available.

Grad program; research and not coursework is the main on-campus component

Course 2/2-A/2-OE – SB in Mechanical Engineering/Engineering/Mechanical & Ocean Engineering

We will focus on incorporating our learnings from Spring 2020 to develop the best possible experience in Fall. Many of our hands-on and teamwork classes will be severely impacted, most notably 2.009 in Fall and 2.007 in Spring. Other undergraduate classes with a major hands-on component that will be greatly impacted include: FALL - 2.00, 2.008, 2.729, 2.75, 2.76, 2.980; SPRING 2.00A, 2.00B, 2.12, 2.739, 2.008, 2.72, 2.744. Many other classes have varying levels of hands-on component and will be adversely affected. Our faculty would revise such classes to adapt to remote teaching as we have done this spring; some ways include: (1) shipping kits to students, (2) live streamed labs with instructors, (3) allowing students remote control of equipment, (4) focusing on CAD rather than fabrication, (5) Providing students with a budget to purchase their own materials and tools for working on projects at home, etc.

We do not have the bandwidth to offer classes that are not required, so we only have a couple of U-only classes each semester that are electives. If needed, we could reduce a couple of classes each semester (out of about 20 U classes). Some other classes are U/G; their numbers could be reduced (reported in G programs feedback).

Hands-on and teamwork components are quite extensively embedded into the curriculum and account for approximately 1/3 of the core units in the major. Possibly about half of them (1/6 of core) could be done in a reasonable way remotely. The remaining 1/6 would be severely compromised. These include experiences such as those offered by 2.007 or 2.009 that are nearly impossible to create remotely, and which are sometimes the main reasons for students to join MIT and the department. Key learnings in such classes include the application of theory in ‘reality’ tests, working in teams, hands-on prototyping, iterative design, and demos, public presentations, or competitions – they are key elements of making and embodiment of mens et manus. For example, our Course 2 learning objectives are: (1) Apply a deep working knowledge of technical fundamentals in areas related to mechanical, electromechanical, and thermal systems to address needs of the customer and society. (2) Develop innovative technologies and find solutions to engineering problems. (3) Communicate effectively as members of multidisciplinary teams. (4) Be sensitive to professional and societal contexts and committed to ethical action. (5) Lead in the conception, design, and implementation of new products, processes, services, and systems. All of these objectives, except possibly for #4, will be affected.

Assuming that the fraction of remote students is small, we may allocate special sessions and TAs to involve those students more closely in the classes. The experience of those students would be compromised, since it would be difficult to tailor a class for both on-campus and off-campus scenarios simultaneously, and the majority will take precedence in terms of how the classes are taught.

Students or TAs will be needed to take care of remote students; we therefore expect that this mode will require more instructor time than either fully remote or fully online (besides the efforts needed to change class formats to remote).

There are trade-offs that may result in on-campus experience being compromised due to the need to develop materials for off-campus students, or the other way around.

Lab time will need to be limited. Since many of our labs operate at high capacities (full, or with only 10-15% leeway), it will result in a compromised experience. This scenario will likely require a significant level of adjustment to hands-on classes, although likely less so than being completely remote, but the student experience will be much better than fully remote.

Increased space – both for instructor-guided work and student work such as building prototypes. Safety issues will need to be addressed. Some of the classrooms not utilized by remote classes would likely be needed for use by the hands-on classes (meetings, etc.).

Our hands-on teaching spaces are quite crowded (<50 sq. ft./student). So, if the square footage per student is high, the student time in such spaces could be cut down, making it hard to meet the educational objectives.

This scenario is infeasible for most of our hands-on classes, since there is coursework and progression over the course of a semester. If half the students were to be on campus, WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT IT BE DONE ON A SEMESTER BASIS AND NOT ON HALF-SEMESTER BASIS. E.g., 2.009 is the major hands-on class for 4th year students. So, for MechE, Fall could have 4th year students on campus (taking 2.009), whereas Spring could have 2nd year students on campus (taking 2.007). 3rd year students could be on campus in one of the two semesters, resulting in 50% students being on campus over the course of the year. So, certain subjects could be designated as on-campus only, certain others as remote-only, and others as mixed, based on the subjects. Then, students could be asked for preference which one of the two semesters they wish to attend. Priority could be given to students who need certain classes to fulfill their graduation requirements.

This scenario would not be feasible for most of our hands-on classes. It will also raise serious concerns regarding equity. E.g. If theory material X is taught over the course of a semester and incorporated into building device Y, the only realistic option is to transfer a hands-on project midway in the semester from one student to another. So a team of students may work with one member on campus at a time, but only one member of the team will get to finish the project. For lab classes that synchronize with lectures, the only realistic may be to have half the students do the first half of the labs and the other half do the other half.

See #21. The hands-on components would need to be decoupled from the lecture component, and also need to be doable in half a semester. This arrangement could work for lab-only classes, but nearly all of our classes have labs and lectures that go in synchronization. The only way to handle those subjects would be to teach them in half the semester.

This scenario is extremely difficult to implement, and raises the most serious concerns regarding effectiveness and also fairness.

This would make the most sense if the semesters were divided by department. i.e., departments or programs could offer classes for 2 of 3 semesters, and students with those programs as primary could attend those terms on campus. In all other cases, this option likely makes the least sense.

Spreading classes over 3 semesters (i.e., offering a class more than the normal number of times in the academic year) does not offer as significant an advantage in terms of added student hands-on time compared to the added complexity and the strain that it would put on the department and instructors.

The adjustment to 3 semesters would be very disruptive and lead to faculty and staff exhaustion unless the department offers classes in only 2 of the 3 semesters. Additional TAs or similar resources may also be needed, and this may be the most expensive option. This option will also incur additional instructor support to balance the increased effort of faculty over a longer period. It would also require supporting the efforts through summer salary, as a considerable amount of time normally devoted to service and research will be diverted toward teaching.

Classes could be focused on addressing the pandemic through design of solutions and simulation of the epidemic, e.g. medical device design (the MIT ventilator originally was a class project that was revived).

Perhaps there are opportunities to co-teach classes on related topics, to offer multi-disciplinary classes that bring students from different schools to work on solutions to COVID-19. There could also be opportunities to bring the focus of digital learning to residential, and to collaborate across universities at multiple levels.

The partly or fully on-campus options are the most susceptible to the risk of another shutdown. We need to keep this risk factor in mind and choose an option based on weighted risk. Simpler approaches are better than complex ones that could add overhead or lead to confusion. We also need to consider the options that would be acceptable to students, e.g. tuition rates may need to be different in semesters when the students learn remotely, and the time spent by students on campus should be used effectively, toward educational objectives and valuable student experiences that are compromised in the remote mode. Any decision also needs to take into account the differing needs of students, departments, programs, and subjects. Overall, the department’s preference is, in decreasing order: (1) all on campus, (2) 2 semesters, with any given student attending one of the two semesters based on their department and scheduling of classes that are ineffective in remote mode, (3) 3 semesters, with each department or program teaching in two of the three semesters, (4) fully remote. We STRONGLY OPPOSE the option with half the students on campus for half the semester and the 3-semester option with additional teaching load on instructors.

MS/MEng/PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering

We will focus on incorporating our learnings from Spring 2020 to develop the best possible experience in Fall. Some of our hands-on and teamwork classes will be severely impacted, most notably 2.675, Navy program design classes (2.701, 2.702, 2.703, 2.704, 2.705), 2.737, 2.740, 2.75, 2.76, 2.788, 2.810, 2.120, 2.131, 2.140, 2.680, 2.720, 2.739, 2.77, 2.98. Our faculty would revise such classes to adapt to remote teaching; some ways include: (1) shipping kits to students, (2) live streamed labs with instructors, (3) allowing students remote control of equipment, (4) focusing on CAD rather than fabrication, (5) Providing students with a budget to purchase their own materials and tools for working on projects at home, etc.

Our graduate requirements are quite flexible, except for Navy programs that enroll ~25-30 students. Overall, if absolutely necessary, we could reduce up to 5-8 class offerings in each semester (about 6-11% of total MechE subject offerings, including U classes). This cut will adversely impact our graduate programs by directly decreasing the number of subject options available to our students.

Remote teaching will primarily affect students in the area of design, robotics, control, and manufacturing. Overall, 15 out of ~70 graduate subjects offered in the academic year have a strong hands-on component that typically accounts for about half the credit units. Key learnings in such classes include the application of theory in ‘reality’ tests, working in teams, hands-on prototyping, iterative design, and demos, public presentations, or competitions – they are key elements of making and embodiment of mens et manus.

Assuming that the fraction of remote students is small, we may allocate special sessions and TAs to involve those students more closely in the classes. The experience of those students would be compromised, since it would be difficult to tailor a class for both on-campus and off-campus scenarios simultaneously, and the majority will take precedence in terms of how the classes are taught. If the number of students off campus is large, e.g., in the case where most of our 50% international students are unable to be on campus by October, the experience of the off-campus students will be severely compromised in the case of hands-on classes. In most cases, graduate students who cannot be on campus may be able to take the hands-on classes in the subsequent year without a huge impact on their overall educational experience at MIT, except for MS students graduating in June 2021 and not continuing with PhD, who had planned on taking certain hands-on classes in AY 20-21.

Students or TAs will be needed to take care of remote students; we therefore expect that this mode will require more instructor time than either fully remote or fully online (besides the efforts needed to change class formats to remote).

There are trade-offs that may result in on-campus experience being compromised due to the need to develop materials for off-campus students, or the other way around.

Lab time will need to be limited. Since many of our labs operate at high capacities (full, or with only 10-15% leeway), it will result in compromised experience. This scenario will likely require a significant level of adjustment to hands-on classes, although likely less so than being completely remote, but the student experience will be much better than fully remote.

Increased space – both for instructor-guided work and student work such as building prototypes. Safety issues will need to be addressed. Some of the classrooms not utilized by remote classes would likely be needed for use by the hands-on classes (meetings, etc.).

Our hands-on teaching spaces are quite crowded (<50 sq. ft./student). So, if the square footage per student is high, the student time in such spaces could be cut down, making it hard to meet the educational objectives.

This scenario is infeasible for most of our hands-on classes, since there is coursework and progression over the course of a semester. If half the students were to be on campus, WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT IT BE DONE ON A SEMESTER BASIS AND NOT ON HALF-SEMESTER BASIS. E.g., 2.009 is the major hands-on class for 4th year students. So, for MechE, Fall could have 4th year students on campus (taking 2.009), whereas Spring could have 2nd year students on campus (taking 2.007). 3rd year students could be on campus in one of the two semesters, resulting in 50% students being on campus over the course of the year. So, certain subjects could be designated as on-campus only, certain others as remote-only, and others as mixed, based on the subjects. Then, students could be asked for preference which one of the two semesters they wish to attend. Priority could be given to students who need certain classes to fulfill their graduation requirements.

This scenario would not be feasible for most of our hands-on classes. It will also raise serious concerns regarding equity. E.g. If theory material X is taught over the course of a semester and incorporated into building device Y, the only realistic option is to transfer a hands-on project midway in the semester from one student to another. So a team of students may work with one member on campus at a time, but only one member of the team will get to finish the project. For lab classes that synchronize with lectures, the only realistic may be to have half the students do the first half of the labs and the other half do the other half.

See #21. The hands-on components would need to be decoupled from the lecture component, and also need to be doable in half a semester. This arrangement could work for lab-only classes, but nearly all of our classes have labs and lectures that go in synchronization. The only way to handle those subjects would be to teach them in half the semester.

This scenario is extremely difficult to implement, and raises the most serious concerns regarding effectiveness and also fairness.

This would make the most sense if the semesters were divided by department, i.e., departments or programs could offer classes for 2 of 3 semesters, and students with those programs as primary could attend those terms on campus. In all other cases, this option likely makes the least sense.

Spreading classes over 3 semesters (i.e., offering a class more than the normal number of times in the academic year) does not offer as significant an advantage in terms of added student hands-on time compared to the added complexity and the strain that it would put on the department and instructors.

The adjustment to 3 semesters would be very disruptive and lead to faculty and staff exhaustion unless the department offers classes in only 2 of the 3 semesters. Additional TAs or similar resources may also be needed, and this may be the most expensive option. This option will also incur additional instructor support to balance the increased effort of faculty over a longer period. It would also require supporting the efforts through summer salary, as a considerable amount of time normally devoted to service and research will be diverted toward teaching.

Classes could be focused on addressing the pandemic through design of solutions and simulation of the epidemic, e.g. medical device design (the MIT ventilator originally was a class project that was revived).

Perhaps there are opportunities to co-teach classes on related topics, to offer multi-disciplinary classes that bring students from different schools to work on solutions to COVID-19. There could also be opportunities to bring the focus of digital learning to residential, and to collaborate across universities at multiple levels.

The partly or fully on-campus options are the most susceptible to the risk of another shutdown. We need to keep this risk factor in mind and choose an option based on weighted risk. Simpler approaches are better than complex ones that could add overhead or lead to confusion. We also need to consider the options that would be acceptable to students, e.g. tuition rates may need to be different in semesters when the students learn remotely, and the time spent by students on campus should be used effectively, toward educational objectives and valuable student experiences that are compromised in the remote mode. Any decision also needs to take into account the differing needs of students, departments, programs, and subjects. Generally, graduate programs have more flexibility in class offerings and schedules compared to undergraduate programs, with the exception of the 2-N program with Navy. Therefore, we could skip offering hands-on graduate classes, but the caveat is that many of these classes are co-taught with undergrad subjects that satisfy core or restricted elective requirements in the undergrad programs, thereby affecting the undergrad students. Overall, the department’s preference is, in decreasing order: (1) all on campus, (2) 2 semesters, with any given student attending one of the two semesters based on their department and scheduling of classes that are ineffective in remote mode, (3) 3 semesters, with each department or program teaching in two of the three semesters, (4) fully remote. We STRONGLY OPPOSE the option with half the students on campus for half the semester and the 3-semester option with additional teaching load on instructors.

Chemistry, Chemistry with Flexible Option (ChemFlex), 5-7 Joint Major

Chemistry is able to present its lecture courses remotely, but evaluations of
students’ accomplishments via remote, online exams is not dependable. Chemistry is not able to offer its laboratory subjects. Laboratory subjects make up 33% of credit units for a chemistry major. Laboratory subjects make up 33% of credit units for a chemistry major. It should be noted that some chemistry majors fulfill some of the laboratory required subjects with UROP. Chemistry is not about to offer ~90% of its UROP experiences online. Chemistry will not be able to offer a credible chemistry degree or offer laboratory subjects required for other degrees if MIT remains fully remote for the fall semester.

Laboratory subjects, which constitute 33% of the units necessary for a chemistry major. Chemistry is not able to offer about 90% of UROP experiences. It should be noted that the absence of credible UROP experiences will put our majors (particularly our current juniors) at a significant disadvantage in applications for graduate school.

It is extremely difficult to teach simultaneously a lecture subject remotely and residentially. If a such an arrangement were mandated, it is anticipated that the faculty would revert to teaching the subject remotely

If a such an arrangement were mandated, it is anticipated that the faculty would revert to teaching the subject remotely.

The remotely taught students would not be able to participate in lab subjects or UROP. Hence, they will not be able to complete their degree
requirements in time.

The department would likely be able to socially distance students in the laboratory at the level of 160 sq ft per person.

May require some shifts in the timing of lab subjects such as offering them
in the evenings or on weekends. The likelihood of this scenario is to be
determined.

Because our laboratory subjects for our majors are 4 units, we would be able to offer the laboratory subjects for our majors in half of a semester by teaching them in both of the half semesters of the fall semester.

We would not be able to teach the laboratory subject (5.310) for the non-majors (enrollment about 60) in a half semester because it is a 12 unit subject.

We would not be able to offer credible UROP experiences in half of a semester.

Because we would be squeezing the major lab subjects into a half of the semester, the effective number of credit units would be higher for the residential students in that half of the semester.

The teaching burden for faculty and staff in the lab subjects increases by a factor of 2 in this scenario.

The progress of non-chemistry major students who are required to take the non-major lab will be delayed because they will have to postpone 5.310 until the spring semester.

The teaching burden for faculty and staff in the lab subjects increases by a factor of 2 in this scenario. This workload increase is probably manageable for one semester.

The progress of non-chemistry major students will be delayed.

No. This option is unworkable due to the increase in faculty and staff workload and burden.

We would not be able to operate the non-remote-able components for non-residential students.

This option is unworkable from the standpoint of the 50-100% increase in faculty and staff workload and burden. Faculty commitments to research and to the mentoring of graduate students and postdocs would plummet.

Graduate (and undergrad major and minor) in Architecture

Graduate masters programs: 52

Develop vigorous summer planning for online curricula, explore best teaching methods / practices, tools to support online design education and create solid online teaching platforms. Communicate plan to student community for building experiential learning and online community. Review and analyze current online teaching, gather feedback and implement it for the Fall.

The graduate curricula in our design-based programs can potentially be adjusted to lighten online load and adjust in subsequent semesters. This responds to the reported stress students experience now in participating in remote studios and several other classes. Probably some electives could be eliminated.

Design studios and design education are particularly challenging without having a physical presence. PhD students and others who depend on library access are not able to continue to be productive. Students and labs who need access to fabrication shops are not able to complete their work. 30-40% is essential to be taught physically in normal circumstances?

There is a major issue around EQUITY and equal opportunity for students and how to balance their experience and expectations. This is therefore very problematic over anthing more than a short time period. International students may experience some stigma at being denied the expertience that otyhers have while at MIT

Practically, concern for having to double up on teaching by serving two different groups and class types. Probably means far more faculty teaching time needed to fulfil goals. Equity as it relates to selection of students. We do not want to appear discriminatory. Inbalance as it relates to overall education (robust versus not so robust if they are not on campus with diffrent pedagogy for different population) Hybrid studios require equitable access to instruction, criticism and interaction with peers. A mix of students across different time zones discourages synchronous learning, essential in design studio.

We will have to study the implications of social distancing and if it possible to operate at about 20% capacity in studio spaces. Perhaps each student gets an allotted time per week to be on campus, such taht studio spaces are used by groups of appropriate size? Equity of opportunity for students is also important. - and understanding risk factors for faculty, staff and students for this scenario. Studio space would be allocated to different classes at different days and times: a space now serving three studio sections would serve only one at the most. This could work with our graduate curriculum but not with the undergrads.

Putting everyone at health risk. Managing expectations,. Cleaning / santizing spaces on a regular basis. Avoiding mixing and over socializing.

Being able to teach larger groups while also social distancing is contradictory. Studio education needs a lot of discourse and exchange which is very difficult if everyone is at least 6-8 feet apart. Further, UG design and visual arts classes that serve ~25 students would require very large spaces or multiple simultaneous sections, with associated teaching burden.

Probably by year of study for a major. We have a lot of students who are interested in design minor- so that could also be an option? DIvision by year of study makes sense for community building. This might require students to take the first half of a class remotely and the second half on campus. Many classes serving those enrolled in our design minor attract students from different years or study and different majors, which points to a need for coordinated departmental efforts to meet Institute plans.

Studios and project classes could be configured to operate as hybrids, with half the students on campus and half remote and exercises configured for both. Students would swap equitably (as implied in half on campus, half the time) and experience teaching both ways. But this is far from ideal and would create much potential duplication.

Doubling up on teaching, and teaching instructors by having to teach classes twice...leading to budget issues. Every class may need to be redesigned so it works on half semester units. Having enoughgt space to make major and minor classes work while also having a graduate community to take care of. Non-remotable classes would be taught as now scheduled (fall or spring semester), but would be designed for remote and non-remote participants. This requires that students have equitable access.

No. This seems like a totally unfeasible option that is not applicable to undergraduate or graduate programs in our department.

Option 3.5 is by far the least desirable, due to the necessary reconfiguration of our curriculum. Non-remote-able classes could be operated as hybrids, as in options 3 and 3.5.

Impossible to say except that almost everything would need to be rethought into some kind of modular system. If this were deployed for the undergrad students, we would need to restructure all of our undergraduate classes and studios - and how to budget for doubling up on those that would need to be taught twice.

To develop and experiment with online design education. However, many of our students crave for in-place interaction and discourse. So ideas about being online seem to need to have a completely different pedagogical agenda and not just be a replacement for our professional masters programs

To develop far better tools for learning, experimenting, innovating and building larger communities online- to compliment and supplement what we do on campus and not as a replacement. Bringing design education to the world!

Our community has severe Zoom fatigue and does not want to repeat. This Fall has to be better, different and innovative in so many ways we have yet to imagine!

Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences (EAPS)

Earth, Atmospheric & Planetary Sciences (EAPS)

Responses here pertain mainly to undergraduate program, but many classes have combined grad/undergrad enrollment.

Prof. Taylor Perron (Associate Department Head; Chair of EAPS Committee on the Education Program)

Based on Fall 2019 numbers, roughly 350 undergraduates, counting each student in each class, and including cross-listed classes. We estimate roughly 75-100 graduate students enrolled in classes, counting each student in each class, but not counting students in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program.

Roughly 90% of fall 2020 classes in EAPS (34 of 37) can be taught remotely. Of those that can be taught remotely, ~75% will require minor adjustments and ~25% will require major adjustments. Two or three classes cannot be adapted to a remote format while still offering adequate educational value because they rely heavily on interactions with physical materials (e.g., rocks, minerals) or equipment (e.g., microscopes) or because the instructors have determined that the style of instruction cannot be carried out effectively online. In a fully remote scenario, those two or three classes would have to be canceled or moved to the spring semester (assuming residential education is once again an option in spring).

There are one or two EAPS classes that could potentially be deferred until next year if they are not needed by any graduating 2021 seniors, pending degree audits and conversations with individual students.

● Field trips (several classes typically include field trips, e.g. 12.001: Introduction to Geology, but most could adapt syllabi to include replacement activities)
● Off-campus activities that require ground transportation (e.g. 12.410/8.287: Observational Techniques of Optical Astronomy travels to Wallace Observatory to use telescopes)
● Classes that include hands-on lab activities, e.g. 12.108: Structure of Earth Materials requires microscope and hand examination of mineral samples.

Most classes could be adapted as in the fully remote scenario, provided adequate videoconferencing or video recording equipment is available to stream or record lectures; however, we do not currently have the equipment to stream all of our classes. However, there would be an additional burden on instructors to adapt materials and communication to remote students in addition to offering in-person instruction. For many classes, it would likely be easier to have all students be remote than to have some remote and some in person.

● For some class components, instructors would have to prepare two versions of class content and materials: one for residential students, the other for remote students.
● As noted above, it would likely be easier in most of our classes to have all students be remote than to have some remote and some in person. Thus, the hybrid scenario would likely push us towards 100% remote teaching even if some students are present on campus.

● If most students are on campus, and classes are taught accordingly, there would be some material that would be very difficult to deliver to remote students without making entirely different versions of a class (hands-on labs, field trips).
● The hybrid scenario makes synchronous teaching impractical, especially if the remote students are international and in various time zones. In our experience this semester, synchronous teaching has proven to be the favored format: students value that we are there for them, and with them; that we make an effort to be there. It helps them to stay connected and to stick to a daily routine.
● Students in the small courses that are typical of EAPS benefit from a great deal of interaction with instructors and with one another. These interactions can be preserved reasonably well in 100% remote classes, but in the hybrid scenario the remote students would likely feel left out of these interactions.

In this scenario, almost all classes in EAPS would be taught fully remotely. One class (12.108) that cannot be transitioned online could potentially be adapted to social distancing as long as enrollment is small (less than 8), or could be moved to spring 2021 or fall 2021 pending discussions with students who were planning to take the class in fall 2020.

• Instructors would be preparing alternate versions of classes that might only be offered once. This would require higher-than-usual investments of instructor time.
• Even small lab classes might require different rooms (or multiple rooms) to ensure adequate distancing.

Even if adequate space can be found for the small number of lab classes (perhaps only 1) that can’t be offered remotely, teaching these classes while maintaining proper distancing would be a challenge, because student-instructor interactions focus on equipment or materials.

We do not see an easy solution to this problem. There are many interdependent logistical considerations. However, given that most EAPS classes could be offered remotely, the best solution from our perspective would be to offer semester-long remote classes, even if residential education is divided into multiple mini-terms per semester.

The one lab class that cannot be taught remotely (12.108) would not translate well into a half-semester format, because lab sessions build on lecture material that is delivered over the course of the entire semester. Drastic adjustments could potentially be made to the class syllabus to perform all of the laboratory sessions in half a semester, or the class could be postponed to a future semester and run as usual.

As long as remote classes can run for a full semester, EAPS instructors are prepared to do this. Asking lab class instructors to teach a class twice in two half semesters is undesirable, but the number of affected classes would be small.

If students need to take our one non-remote-able lab class (12.108) to maintain progress toward their degrees, we would need to devise a way of running the class in fall 2020 or identify a substitute requirement.

We do not see an easy solution to this problem. There are many interdependent logistical considerations. However, given that most EAPS classes could be offered remotely, the best solution from our perspective would be to offer semester-long remote classes, even if residential education is divided into multiple mini-terms per semester.

The one lab class that cannot be taught remotely (12.108) would not translate well into a half-semester format, because lab sessions build on lecture material that is delivered over the course of the entire semester. Drastic adjustments could potentially be made to the class syllabus to perform all of the laboratory sessions in half a semester, or the class could be postponed to a future semester and run as usual.

As long as remote classes can run for a full semester, EAPS instructors are prepared to do this. Asking lab class instructors to teach a class twice in two half semesters is undesirable, but the number of affected classes would be small.

EAPS has generated some special online classes and class modules related to fieldwork, climate, and Earth history that might appeal to a wide swath of the MIT community, especially with most of us cooped up at home and unable to travel! For example:

● A virtual field trip to NY and MA to study how plate tectonics assembled Massachusetts, from 12.001: Introduction to Geology (Prof. Oliver Jagoutz).
● MITx class: 12.DTE (Deform the Earth), A virtual rock deformation lab (Prof. Matej Pec).
● MITx class: 12.12 Nature’s Sandbox: A History of Earth’s Environment, Life and Climate (Prof. Kristin Bergmann).
● MITx class: 12.340x Global Warming Science (Prof. Kerry Emanuel).

We asked EAPS instructors if they would feel comfortable teaching on campus in the fall if public health guidelines still recommend social distancing, provided that all the necessary precautions can be taken. Of the 20 responses to this particular question (~50% response rate), 50% said they would feel comfortable, 35% said they might feel comfortable (depending on the course of the virus, the availability of testing, and how public health guidelines are implemented and enforced on campus), and 15% said they would not feel comfortable or had serious reservations (due to either personal health concerns or concerns about household members). We suggest that instructors’ concerns about on-campus instruction should be weighed in evaluating different fall scenarios, particularly those instructors who are (or have household members who are) more vulnerable to COVID due to age or health.

System Design & Management (SDM)

Core course synchronous at a distance. Need to identify critical team building blocks during the semester that is integral to the curriculum

EM courses are required and cannot be reduced
Reduction in Engineering required courses may force changes in degree requirements
Reducing number of Sloan courses will not have a significant impact

Cohort building and some team based instruction

Will deliver courses synchronous remote, with the need to repeat and/or alter class times to address time zone differences

- Time zone differences for synchronous teaching model
- If we move to asynchronous, support is needed to help redesign curriculum for "flipped classroom"
- Need to assess if additional TA's are required to support student time zone differences

- Career services/support - critical component for self-sponsored mid-career masters students
- Reduced diversity of cohort
- Burn out from faculty/staff managing around the clock requirements

- Lecture based components can be delivered online
- Break team-based work into chunks. Double the duration (2 weeks instead of usual 1 week) so full cohort can participate in multiple sessions. Need larger space for social distancing.

- Need more flexibility on classroom time outside of traditional class hours
- Need ability to rotate students through lecture
- May need to increase frequency of lecture and shorten the lecture time
- Time zone issues for remote students

- Availability of large team spaces
- Technology in some classrooms that don't have the ability for synchronous communication

N/A - SDM is strictly graduate program.

- SDM regularly operates with 40-50% of students at a distance - reducing the on campus cohort may negatively impact team dynamics
- Many students are company sponsored. Would need to work with companies on impact of timing of on campus trimesters
- Geographically clumping would help class scheduling, but would impact diversity that is critical to learning pedagogy

- Lectures in current synchronous abled classroom (1-390)
- Access to large flat classroom space for 2 week sprints each term
- Create multiple orientation programs during the first two semesters for team building exercise

- Time zone issues for teaching
- Need to increase number of TA's to manage 3 terms
- Many students use TA or RA appointments to fund their education (SDM does not have fellowships). Not clear how they would cover cost of tuition for remote term
- International student ability to pursue CPT based internship if they were only on campus 2 of the 3 terms
- Availability of classes in Engineering and Sloan required for SDM degree if all classes are not taught the term they are on campus

- Increasing coopetition and competition elements with distance teams
- Additional alumni engagement can be beneficial long-term by tapping into them as mentors/TAs on a regional basis
- Increase remote learning events (especially career events) utilizing alumni

- Extra alumni engagement can be beneficial long term

- Need to rethink the calendar - incorporating gaps in class schedule (times or days that don't have classes/zoom work). Look into adding days/weeks during the term that have down time to minimize the "ground hog day" effect that's been prevalent this spring.
- Time zone response is huge. Recognizing critical mass sub cohorts around the globe, working with alumni and local university to make the education better
- Grades - what is the right way to manage? Need to create better signals on what is an acceptable level of work rather than just P/F
- Department flexibility in short term hiring (based on budget capabilities) to manage around the clock teaching and support. More work is needed to teach and counsel 95 students remotely than on campus
- Explore potential opportunities with MISTI - hiring and supporting local students in country
- If we do return to campus with a full cohort, need to think through how we manage/address students that are not able to come due to visa or health issues. How do we continue to be inclusive and provide same quality of education for all?

Linguistics and Philosophy

We will run our intended slate of classes with a mixture of approaches: Zoom, Canvas, Stellar, synchronous/asynchronous, etc., depending on instructor needs and preferences.

Class times might be an issue for synchronous classes if some instructors want shorter and more frequent lectures.

We could cut a handful of small courses but no more.

Discussion is essential to learning philosophy. It is important to get the students to feel comfortable enough to share their philosophical views with the rest of the class. These views are almost always controversial. When a student takes a position on any interesting philosophical problem, it is nearly guaranteed that some of the other students in the class will disagree. One of the most important skills we try to foster in philosophy classes is the ability to respond to disagreement in a civil and open manner, with reasons and argument. Establishing the kind of classroom community that encourages this kind of engagement is harder to do when teaching remotely. We are looking at creative ways of mitigating this problem as much as possible.

We presume that on this option classes will be given online with some students being on campus and others not. (“If it can be done remotely, it must be done remotely”, below.) We don’t think it’s a good idea to hold classes in person with remote webstreaming for the rest. Students who are live streaming into a class are often missed for Q&A, and may have trouble hearing audio (especially questions being asked in person). Making classes in person if possible will also further disadvantage those at-risk members of the community who are working remotely for exactly this reason.

See Q14. Also, if classes are officially “in person” with the option of being remote, this puts immense social pressure on people to conduct their business in person rather than remotely. As a result, it risks socially shaming members of the community who do not want to risk their health for the sake of in-person meetings. If MIT chooses to do “in person but opt out” it would be good to message that in-person meetings are truly optional and at the discretion of student and instructor, in order to push back against the development of social norms that may sanction vulnerable community members.

If it is feasible to run recitations (discussion groups of 10-15 students) we would probably try that, with the lectures being remote. If graduate seminars could be conducted in person we would also try that (depending on instructor/student preferences -- some students could participate remotely). But on a strict reading of “it must be done remotely if it can be done remotely”, then we would operate according to Q8.

We don’t think this is a good idea -- unless available resources are significantly increased.

We presume this would involve a lot of extra work for faculty and staff.

Remote teaching makes it easier to have philosophers around the country and the world visit our “classrooms.” We might also hold joint events with philosophy students from other institutions.

No specific suggestions, but we're thinking about it.

Medical Engineering Medical Physics

If MIT teaching is fully remote in the fall, we will work with individual faculty members to continue the migration to online course offerings that began this spring. We will focus our efforts on courses that fulfill curricular requirements for HST’s PhD program. While many HST classes can be translated to the online format with considerable effort and only partial loss of learning objectives, two HST courses are of particular note in this context:

HST.010: Human Anatomy, which takes place at Harvard Medical School (HMS), involves dissection of human cadavers. This class is taken by HST PhD students in addition to the HST MD students based at HMS. The faculty who teach this class currently believe that revising it for remote teaching would “extremely difficult and ineffective.”

HST.201 and HST.202: Introduction to Clinical Medicine. This immersive clinical experience is tailored specifically for HST PhD students and is a distinctive feature HST’s Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) PhD program. It is typically offered at two sites – Mount Auburn Hospital and West Roxbury VA Medical Center. We have begun exploring how to create a fully remote version of this class, estimating that at best it will accomplish approximately 50% of the learning goals relative to the in-person version.

Yes, some of our classes are offered as part of IMES’s broader mission to offer opportunities for biomedical perspectives to students in other MIT degree programs. It may be possible to reduce such elective offerings in the fully remote scenario.

as noted above - human anatomy dissection and some elements of immersive introduction to clinical medicine in the hospital environment

If only some students are remote, those students will be advised to postpone certain classes until they are back on campus. This would include the two classes mentioned in our response to question 8, as well as a number of project-based classes listed in other departments that fulfill concentration area requirements for HST PhD students.

This hybrid option is daunting because it requires more faculty/TA effort to manage logistics than either in-person or remote teaching alone. It might also require substantial social engineering, for example, assigning partners and creating assignments that foster interactions between students physically on campus and students participating remotely.

Time zones; poor/unpredictably internet connectivity; the fact that everything takes a bit longer when teaching remotely, which is merely annoying when everyone is on zoom but will be even harder to manage with a subset of students are on zoom.

We are extremely concerned about a potential divide, effectively creating two classes of students within a single classroom. Despite good intentions and best efforts, the students on campus will likely receive a better experience than students participating remotely.

For Human Anatomy, we would explore the possibility of only two students per cadaver at any given time, with one student dissecting and the other reading instructions from an appropriate distance. Prosections might be possible using a go-pro and large monitors with students at appropriate distances.

For Introduction to Clinical Medicine, even if students are permitted on campus, they may not be permitted in our partner hospitals. And while some clinical skills (e.g. auscultation) can be practiced on healthy volunteers (i.e. other students), it is not clear if such contact among students would be permitted with strict social distancing guidelines in place.

It will require tremendous faculty and staff effort to revamp the curricula for the two classes mentioned in question 8 - Human Anatomy and Introduction to Clinical Medicine. This is true if these classes are offered fully remotely or mostly remotely with on-campus elements.

One major concern is the prospect of planning for and starting the academic year with on campus socially-distanced education, then having to pivot yet again to all-remote instruction if there is a resurgence of covid infections.

Not clear if this question applies to graduate programs. In any case, we would advocate priority for PhD students who need to be physically present on campus to conduct their research, particularly those students within 12-18 months of graduation.

Given the size of the HST PhD student population, we would suggest that they all be allowed on campus during the same 50% of the time for socially-distanced networking and community building events, as well as the in-person educational components discussed in question 16.

Assuming this scenario still requires socially-distanced education, please see answer to question 18.

Assuming this scenario still requires socially-distanced education, please see answer to question 19.

While this approach could provide a framework for rotating graduate students who need to be physically present to do their lab research, it would present significant challenges for HST students taking required classes offered in conjunction with Harvard Medical School (HMS). Assuming that HMS does not adopt the same three semester schedule as MIT, this would create a host of logistical and administrative challenges for our inter-institutional program. These challenges apply to all classes taken by HST students 0 even those offered remotely.

Please see answer to question 16. A major planning/scheduling exercise would be required to explore how course scheduling would work for HST PhD students program if there are three semesters at MIT overlapping with two semesters at HMS – even for remote classes.

This scenario would be extremely disruptive for HST PhD students required to take classes at HMS (normally in the first 2 years and sometimes extending into the third year of the program). It would also create tremendous scheduling challenges for MIT-based faculty who co-teach HST classes with Harvard colleagues and/or have teaching responsibilities split between one semester in an MIT department and one semester in IMES/HST on the HMS schedule.

This presents an opportunity to address longstanding disparities in the Introduction to Clinical Medicine experience offered at two different hospital locations. By shifting some or all elements of the course to online instruction, we can insure a more uniform experience for all enrolled students as they learn basic clinical skills such as taking patient histories and performing physical exams. Unfortunately, without a hospital-based experience, only some of the original learning goals will be met.

IMES faculty are uniquely positioned to contribute to new classes on pandemic-specific topics, for students in HST as well as other programs across MIT. We plan to explore these possibilities in more detail after the spring semester has ended.

8. A fully remote MIT would entail re-designing our Fall offerings substantially, in order to remain adequately responsive to the needs of our different student ‘audiences’ (from introductory and writing intensive to advanced), even as we recognize that the core of what we do cannot be replicated online. Such a re-design would involve:
• substantial changes to the Fall curriculum as a whole to emphasize classes that are easier to re-conceive in remote form, and re-think the balance between how many classes are offered at each tier of our curriculum.
• capping class enrollment at all tiers of the curriculum to 12 students. This reduction of class sizes would especially have to include our CI-H offerings, as the discussion and writing intensive nature of those classes cannot be sustained over Zoom at the current levels.
• modularize a subset of our classes so that the two halves can be taken independently for credit, to offer students greater flexibility.
• on a case-by-case basis, explore the possibility of team-teaching particular classes and/or changing their delivery format (e.g., to a lecture/discussion section model) to accommodate the shift to remote teaching.
• finding alternatives for aspects of a class such as field trips, performance work, creative and team projects, in-person peer exchange, and library visits.

10. We certainly expect that there will be opportunities to squeeze the curriculum in response to student needs in this new environment as well as to make the most effective use of faculty time. Since Literature’s requirements for majors and minors are relatively flexible, we do not anticipate a great deal of difficulty on this score – the constraints here are more likely to be financial, as we may not get the institutional support at a time of budget cuts to hire the people we had planned on. Indeed, our need to cap class sizes will work against whatever staffing reduction is achieved in reducing the number of classes, as we may be compelled to offer more sections of our more popular subjects in anticipation of student demand. So, while the number of subjects may indeed decline, there may not be much change in the actual number of sections we need to offer.

11. Let us be crystal clear at the outset: our accommodations for remote teaching are intended to be provisional and temporary, an “all hands on deck” response to extraordinary circumstances, and do not signify a long-term commitment to substituting online modes of instruction and learning as adequate or in any way comparable to our residential offerings. Nor does our attempt to help signal a change in the fundamental nature or purposes of humanistic education. It needs to be emphasized that the core components of our current learning objectives can be achieved only imperfectly online. Concretely, in so far as intensive face-to-face discussion and the teaching of written and oral communication are essential to our mission, small class sizes and live interaction are essential, and we do not see Zoom or its equivalents offering more than a basic adequacy.

We will offer alternatives, as will others across the Institute, in order to try to relieve the situational pressure on residential learning for a term or two. But an environment that encourages close discussion with peers; that forces one to linger with texts so as to hear what they can tell us; that allows students to slow down their lives in order to experience those lives more fully; that fosters a non-instrumental relationship to knowledge and value; that inculcates an insatiable curiosity: these are among the fundamental goals of humanistic education. And we do not think that they can ultimately be achieved remotely—at least not at the high level at which we operate. Our students, who deeply value and indeed need these more intimate educational experiences, agree.

Indeed, our students hunger for the kinds of personal relationship we have prioritized, and to which we remain dedicated. Many of our students tell us we are the only professors who know their names during any given semester; often we are offering their only subject that involves extensive exchange with a small cohort, helping them build the trust and practice the skills that help them thrive as articulate thinkers and community members. Thus, even as we work to create online tools and remote experiences that add value, we know these are best offered as supplements to our core residential mission.

12. A hybrid scenario is in many ways the worst of both worlds, but it seems increasingly clear to us that it will be the likely outcome, not only because some students will be remote but also because the health risks will require some of our faculty to teach remotely. Our plans under such a scenario will depend upon the details of the hybrid scenario, as we would need to respond to the actual mix of students on campus and the conditions under which they are allowed to reside on campus.

We do, nonetheless, want to make clear that some of the positive attributes of small (6-12 student) subjects we offer mean they could contribute even more powerfully within a hybrid model, and we would be eager to participate. For example: students on campus will need guidance for authentic social and intellectual dialogue under new social distancing protocols, and we can help model those. In our oral communication work, we teach students to project their voices, to listen and be heard: never have such skills been more essential, and with larger spaces available, we could modify discussion classes to encourage otherwise isolated students. First-year students especially will need help in understanding college-level habits and expectations, help and support we provide in abundance. And all years of students crave intellectual community, which many of our classes could offer this in a hybrid context.

We do also have certain classes that are trend-setting in terms of use of digital tools, and others (such as classical language-learning classes) that are relatively easy to move online. At the other end of the spectrum, we have offerings that involve performance and project work comparable to the subset of classes that have routinely been prioritized as “essential” alongside labs if we have a hybrid model. These must be included, then, among such offerings.

Of the three scenarios envisaged, we reject the 3-semester model entirely as utterly unworkable and thus not worth wasting time on (see my responses to question 24). But for any of the other scenarios,
• we would need to plan on having a portion of our curriculum fully remote, and a fallback plan for all classes, no matter what scenario ultimately prevails.
• we would need to build in the possibility of asynchronous engagement, especially if international students are to be properly accommodated.
• we would probably need classes with multiple sections, to experiment with having both ‘live’ sections and ‘remote’ sections.

14. The practical requirements are:

a. recognizing the substantial disruption to our normal teaching methods and practices, one crucial requirement is to desist from grand experiments that will end up disrupting our lives further and distract us from the job we need to accomplish (more on this below in response to question 24);
b. recognize the differences between kinds of classes, and thus avoid coming up with one-size-fits-all models based on the needs of the dominant disciplines at MIT. In particular, we require a recognition that intimate, discussion-oriented classes are as central to the humanities as performance classes are to the arts, or laboratory classes to the sciences, or project-based classes to engineering.
c. the suspension of all forms of instructor evaluation that have consequences – either for the particular instructor or for the forms of teaching MIT emphasizes going forward. To change the rules of the game in mid-stream and to evaluate instructors on a pedagogical structure they would not have chosen seems to us perverse. And to use that as a basis to encourage or discourage particular forms of pedagogy seems to us equally malignant. (Even recognizing a putatively ‘successful’ on-line element is suspect, since what seems successful under current circumstances may not be so when the context changes.) All data needs at minimum to be triangulated, that is, instructor and departmental feedback needs to be incorporated as a third perspective to balance student-oriented perception studies and whatever large scales models of online learning are used as the frames. Exactly what the data will be used for needs to be specified and the permission of those potentially affected needs to be obtained.

In addition to some of the concerns above, there are other real impediments, including teacher burnout; differential student outcomes dependent on their actual living circumstances; and exacerbation of inequalities among students.

16. It would depend upon the actual number, but obviously if figures such 160 or 100 sqft drive the conversation, any discussion of holding on campus discussion classes seems entirely pointless and we would be forced to adopt an entirely remote model. That said, we do not find these the most likely models for safe small gatherings, and would be eager to participate in more reasonably distanced small-class models: indeed, we believe these will be essential offerings if we are to promote learning and mental health among our undergraduates on campus—especially but not only our first-year students, who need the intellectual and personal classroom exchanges that add value to residential education. Several of our instructors would be delighted to help test the possibilities of improving our students' oral communication skills under these challenging conditions, and to think about performance and project models that could be successful. We DO believe that small discussion-based classes are as essential a part of what must be offered "live" as any of the listed categories above, for a successful residential undergraduate education.

18. See response to question 14

19. See response to question 15

While some faculty favor first-years being given priority because of the need to establish an understanding of and the tools for success for a residential college education, others think a random distribution drawing equally from the four years is best. Whatever is decided upon, it should be simple to implement, impersonal in execution, and avoid numerous complex criteria that could leave everyone feeling aggrieved.

21. To a large extent, we wouldn’t be able to. However, recognizing that one of the important functions of humanities subjects at MIT is to provide and sustain communities and modes of interaction that are not the dominant social modes at MIT, we would seek to reach out to students, offer virtual readings, and other such activities that would at least gesture to what has been (temporarily, we hope) lost.

22. See response to question 14.

23. See response to question 15.

Rather than going through the details of this scenario, let me simply say that our faculty is united in thinking that this is a truly terrible option which should be taken off the table immediately.
• It introduces yet another totally unnecessary layer of complication to which teachers must adjust even as they are working hard to achieve what can be achieved in far from ideal circumstances, especially for our kind of teaching.
• What one gains through this disruption is entirely unclear.
• Our faculty are employed for nine months, and any expectation that their teaching for the year extend beyond that, especially after all raises have been suspended, is simply exploitative.
• Having to teach multiple versions of the same class (as would almost certainly be the case with this model) is even more deadening than having to teach it once on Zoom.
• Imposing a 3 semester (or even a quarter) type structure on a university which functions in all other aspects on a two-semester model is a recipe for confusion.

While the death toll mounts, some of our faculty have remarked that this is not how we would recommend communicating to the wider community.

We hope for more collaboration, and more thoughtful listening to different constituencies. We hope for greater attention to the needs of our undergraduates as social beings who learn through human interactions, and value creating the conditions in the future for them to increase such interactions.

Some of us have basic skepticism regarding the nature of the modelling upon which this document is based. The models proposed seem increasingly driven by definitions of the problem that render it amenable to be solved in a quasi-engineering way: e.g., if we define a sanitary space for each individual, we can solve mathematically for what density can be sustained in any given physical space (recognizing that we need to modulate our results somewhat depending on the nature of the space under discussion). None of the modelling seems to recognize the differential responses to the virus among different age groups or, more broadly, envisage more realistic ways of living with the virus than have been proposed thus far. The approach taken here seems thus to neglect much of what is central to defining the problem to be solved: rhythms of social interaction, the different categories of human beings who are differentially affected etc. We focus on the particularity and diversity of human interactions as our subject of study, and are well equipped to adjust to complex conditions and to offer help to students trying to negotiate radical disruptions to their daily lives. Moreover, our curriculum is entirely focused on undergraduate education, and therefore we have much at stake here—and every reason to do as much as we can to afford students the fullest residential educational experience possible in a safe, responsible, and humane way.

Physical Education and Wellness

Department of Athletics, Physical Eduation and Recreation

Department of Athletics, Physical Eduation and Recreation

1500 students: Quarter 1 750; Quarter 2 750. Typical enrollment is 1000-1200 per 6-week quarter. Quarter 1 schedule September 14-October 22 Quarter 2 schedule October 26-December 9

If fully remote, 20-25 types of courses could be offered with 50 sections to teach up to 750 students each quarter:
10 sections - asynchronous including Fundamentals of Fitness, Wellness Foundations: stress management and nutrition.
40 sections – synchronous including yoga, group exercise, golf, swimming, fencing, self-defense, run/jog, fitness/stress management, fitness/ nutrition, fitness/meditation, hip hop, salsa, swing, martial arts and Parkour

There are usually 40-50 types of courses and 70 sections for students to choose from each quarter. If fully remote, only 25 types of courses will be offered with 50 sections which includes 10 asynchronous courses on 40 synchronous courses.

It is challenging to address the social learning objective remotely that is important to physical activity and sport but possible with Canvas and using Zoom. Certain courses will not be taught such as sailing if fully remote.

A combination of synchronous, asynchronous and in-person courses with social distancing can be offered in a single quarter if conditions permit. Offering the three teaching modes will allow students flexibility to choose what works best for them. If the number of international students is known and their associated time zones, a schedule could be tailored to offer remote synchronous courses to boost engagement with MIT rather than just relying on asynchronous mode of teaching and learning.

It is important to offer courses for students to earn points to satisfy the Physical Education and Wellness General Institute Requirement to stay on track for time to degree. This scenario offers students the most flexibility.In-person courses provide greatest opportunity to provide direction, demonstrations and corrections to movements of the body. Also, in-person instruction offers that best environment to achieve the social learning objective important to physical activity and sport.

It is difficult to create community and to accomplish the social learning objective when teaching remotely in 6-weeks. Learning, supervising and managing 3 teaching modes would be challenging.

If able to teach on campus, 35-40 types of courses with 76 sections at approximately 30%-50% of normal capacity to teach up to 750 students each quarter. For example, tennis would have 8 students learning to play singles rather than 16 learning to play doubles.

70 sections of in person courses that can be offered remotely or in person include yoga, group exercise, golf, swimming, fencing, self-defense, run/jog, fitness/stress management, fitness/ nutrition, fitness/meditation, hip hop, salsa, swing, martial arts and Parkour.

Courses that could not be offered remotely but can only be offered in-person with social distancing include: badminton, pickle ball, tennis, pistol, sailing, and weight training.

To provide more opportunities, six asynchronous sections would be offered including Fundamentals of Fitness and Wellness Foundations: stress management and nutrition.

Team sports (unless skill based) and Extreme PE (backpack, SCUBA, Climbing, Kayak, etc.) would not be able to be offered remotely or with social distancing.

More types of courses will be offered to meet the needs and interests of students. In-person courses provide greatest opportunity to provide direction, demonstrations and corrections to movements of the body. Also, in-person instruction offers that best environment to achieve the social learning objective important to physical activity and sport.

Teaching, supervising and managing 2 teaching modes would be challenging along with cleaning and providing masks.

It would be valuable to have seniors deficient in Physical Education and Wellness GIR on campus in the fall so they have more time and support to complete their General Institute Requirements and other major requirements. Consider bring fall varsity student-athletes back (approx. 200) and winter varsity student-athletes back (approx. 200). These intact teams can be directly supported by their faculty/coach that is scheduled to be with the team during this time period. Also, if conditions improve, they would be on site to practice or compete.

These types of courses would not be offered until conditions allowed.

It is important to offer courses for students to earn points to satisfy the Physical Education and Wellness General Institute Requirement to stay on track for time to degree.

Supervising and managing 2 teaching modes would be challenging along with cleaning and providing masks.

It would be valuable to have seniors deficient in Physical Education and Wellness GIR on campus in the fall so they have more time and support to complete their General Institute Requirements and any other major requirements.

These courses would not be offered until conditions permitted.

The traditional five 6-week quarters could be offered over 3 semesters so as not to increase teaching load or budget. A possible schedule may be one 6-week quarter in the fall and two 6-week quarters during semester 2 and two 6-week quarters during semester 3. DAPER would need to re-draft teaching schedule of faculty/coaches to work in concert with varsity sport coaching schedules. Student, staff and faculty would likely need to adjust their traditional plans for breaks.

Experimenting with asynchronous and remote synchronous teaching and learning is an unintended outcome of the COVID-19 response that could prove valuable option to continue incorporating in Physical Education and Wellness as an option pending student satisfaction. Conceptual learning which drives the asynchronous teaching mode itself to reflective practices and developing personal wellness, fitness plans and life coaching. Further, recommended use of personal equipment (like tennis rackets) versus shared equipment model currently employed may facilitate more activity and learning after the course is completed.

It is a critical time to consider digitizing our wellness curriculum with interactive components through campus resources or a publisher. It is an interactive but a hard copy student handbook is necessary for the students to learn about important life skills including stress management, nutrition, meditation, healthy relationships, as well as healthy finances.

It would be helpful to have visiting faculty this summer with strong experience teaching in our field instructional physical activity courses remotely share their expertise so we can adapt quickly.

I appreciate the coaching model set up with 600 volunteers – there seems to be a pent-up desire to help students. It might be worth considering maintaining the model of volunteer life coaches to supplement first year and academic advisors.

Remote teaching may allow for easier collaboration because there are “no walls” – Emma Teng proposed a Buddhism course that is paired with a meditation course offered through Physical Education and Wellness that may be easier logistically to accomplish together remotely.

The creation of an MIT app could be valuable to track activity, nutrition, sleep, provide meditation, and of course infection to tether students, staff and faculty to the MIT campus.

Thank you so much for extending Canvas to the whole campus – this may unify the campus in many ways. I am looking forward to learning from Global Education and Sloan how they have leveraged Canvas for highly interactive three-dimensional courses.

Please consider courses that satisfy the Physical Education and Wellness GIR when scheduling the semester and space planning as large DAPER spaces are needed for instructional physical activity.

Thank you for your inclusive and creative leadership!