Officials from each school at OCU have adjusted the classroom experience to accommodate for new COVID-19 policies.
George Sims, interim provost, said an emergency operations council created by OCU President Martha Burger has been making policy proposals to create a safe campus environment since March. For more information on campus-wide policies, see our article here.
“We’ve had all summer now to plan and prepare, and, of course, the basis of that is the safety standards that the university has adopted. And for classes that means social distancing in the classrooms, and that means having masks; everybody has to have masks. And then some of the classrooms, depending on what they’re doing, have some plexiglass shields that are put up, and we’ve rearranged furniture so there are fewer desks and seats,” he said.
Housekeeping will also be increased to twice a day, and cleaning supplies will be provided for students and faculty, so they can sanitize the classrooms when entering or leaving a space. Buildings such as the Clara E. Jones Administration Building have signs indicating proper flow of foot traffic to help maintain social distancing. Some buildings, such as Goldstar Memorial Building and the Kramer School of Nursing, also have ultraviolet lights installed in the ventilation system to help sanitize the air.
Amy Cataldi, dean of the Petree College of Arts and Sciences, said the classrooms used for Petree programs have been adjusted to allow for social distancing. Cataldi said there are currently no curriculum or degree requirement changes occurring due to the new policies.
“Some degree tracks require internships, and by working with the internships and the students to find a comfortable middle ground, if we can do it in a safe way, we will; if we can’t we will postpone it or find a replacement for that. We’re just not going to put our students, or our faculty or our community partners in danger,” Cataldi said.
Cataldi said the university administration’s preference is for classes to be held in-person, but there are avenues for faculty and students to participate in remote learning.
“My feel for it is that maybe it’s about 15% of folks are in situations where they really have important reasons why they can’t teach in person, but we’ve gone into it with the whole idea that because we have invited the students to come back to campus, the faculty members really need to be here. And so, we’re trying to be flexible and to make allowances for good reasons, but we really are expecting the faculty members to be here, unless there’s a good reason for them not to,” Sims said.
Gardner Roby, political science sophomore, said most of his courses haven’t changed, and he thinks courses will go smoothly with the health and safety guidelines and the technology available to professors to use services like Zoom.
“It definitely helps being in person, because I think everybody knows being able to be in person and have the conversations, they feel a little bit more real, and I think it’s easier to collect information that way,” he said.
Lois Salmeron, dean of the Kramer School of Nursing, said in addition to implementing sanitation policies, socially-distanced classroom settings and signs to indicate flow of traffic, the school has adjusted each of its programs to require minimal in-person coursework. The master’s program is high-flexibility, Salmeron said, meaning much of the course can be completed via Zoom. Their Ph.D. program students only come in-person for intensives. The greatest changes have been made in the undergraduate tracks requiring students to gain field experience.
“There are some virtual clinical experiences that our Oklahoma Board of Nursing controls. They don’t do the conducting of that, but they allow us to do a very minimal percent of clinical virtually,” Salmeron said.
She said the school’s Meinders simulation lab features 10 mannequins programmed by faculty to simulate a series of experiences in a clinical setting, and hours spent there count as credit hours.
“It doesn’t take away the quantity amount that you have to take care of real people. The hospitals are in a position now that any student that goes in, or undergraduate students that go there, that we have them in the units that are not the units that have any kind of COVID in it,” she said. “They’re not in any of the quarantine-type units. Yes, our students do go into intensive-care units, but not the quarantine. And the students have to follow all the procedures that the nurses do there.”
Blake Bulger, nursing junior, said aspects of their program do not work as well in a digital format. He said half of his clinicals this semester are in person and half are online.
“I know last semester was my first semester, and we had to do online clinicals, which is really weird for a nursing major because that clinical experience is really crucial to applying what you’ve learned in the lab,” he said. “Doing online clinicals, I think, probably really hindered some of those tactical skills, but I don’t really think it inhibited critical thinking skills of managing patients and things like that.”
Bulger said half of his clinicals this semester are in person in hospitals, and half are online.
“It just depends on the site and whether they’re going to allow students back on and whether they have the proper amount of PPE (personal protective equipment) to let students come back on to campus, so that’s probably the biggest way it’s affected our learning” he said.
The Wanda L. Bass School of Music and School of Theatre have similar in-person limitations due to the nature of their courses. To accommodate guidelines, students cast in theatrical or musical productions will wear masks throughout rehearsal, and to the discretion of the director, performances. Mark Parker, dean of the School of Theatre and School of Music, said the schools are lucky because their classrooms are larger, so they can move locations to allow for social distancing.
Parker said the one-on-one lessons and large group performances in the School of Music, such as orchestra performances, present the largest issue.
“In a one-on-one lesson situation in studios, we have a clear screen between the student taking the lesson and the teacher teaching the lesson. We have what we think we’ve found is the best air purifiers in each and every one of those studios, just like we’ve put those in acting rooms and movement rooms,” he said.
The School of Music has also worked to minimize potential spread of COVID-19 through wind instrument performances. Rooms where wind instruments are played or high-movement activities are done will be misted with a high-quality sanitizer each night.
“Everything we can think of, everything we’re learning about, we’re trying to do, and the main reason is so that we can act and we can make music and we can be artists: do all these things so we can be together. I don’t want it to be the focus of what we’re doing, but I want us to do this part well, so we can do the part we really want to focus on,” Parker said.
Parker said a study has found certain wind instruments project aerosols through their openings, so the School of Music has commissioned modified masks, and wind defenders and bags to prevent air being blown toward nearby performers.
“Wind players, for the most part, are going to do a slit mask, so they’re going to take a mask and be able to put a clarinet mouth piece through a slit in the mask. And then when they’re not playing, when they’re entering the room and exiting the room, they’ll switch to a regular mask,” Parker said. “We’ve had masks made for the brass instruments. So over the bell is a three-layer mask with elastic that masks up the instrument just like all of us walking around.”
Similarly, the Ann Lacy School of Dance and Entertainment will provide students with portable dance floors, so they can participate in dance courses remotely. John Bedford, dean of the School of Dance, wrote in an email that dance classes will be conducted in a rotating, hybrid format where half of the class’s students will attend in person, and half will attend digitally.
“To be able to move forward with dance instruction and to minimize the length of breathe plumes from our students in dance class, we are restricting each student to moving within a 6 foot square space marked by tape on the studio floor. For our large studios, we can teach only 11 students at a time in the studio,” he wrote.
On the other hand, the School of Law has had to make choices in its course offerings. Jim Roth, dean of the school of law, said 60 course sections are fully in-person, 18 are online, and 4 are in a hybrid format and split between in-person and online formats.
“For what’s considered a rigorous legal education, in-person is the preference just because, particularly for first-year students, the dynamic of a group conversation, the dynamic of the student getting called on live and being accountable, that’s hard to replace online. But we have to begin with obviously what health and safety requires,” Roth said.
Roth said most of the classes online were chosen to move into a digital format due to their status as electives, their small class size or because they do not require an experiential or clinical application. He said some courses were limited by rules set by the American Bar Association.
“We had to file and seek a variance from the ABA’s standards for distance education for some of those courses. We did receive that variance for this academic year. It has allowed us to make adjustments in our clinical courses,” he said.
Roth said the School of Law has its own version of an Emergency Operations Council, the Emergency Preparedness Task Force, which takes the EOC’s recommendations and applies them to the School of Law.
“We’ve limited the hours of access to our buildings so that we can have even deeper cleaning at night. We’ve taken chairs out of classrooms so that there’s not the temptation to sit closer to each other; these are fixed chairs now. And what we’ve also done that I think is unique is a student will start in a classroom in their same spot, and they will stay there through the day; faculty will rotate in and out,” Roth said.
Students who test positive or have been exposed to COVID-19 may be required by the clinic to refrain from attending classes. Students with health conditions will also have the ability to seek remote study through the clinic as well. Students with other reasons can seek remote learning accommodations through Student Affairs, Sims said, or the OCU website.
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