Coronavirus Ohio: UC, Miami students scramble amid looming suspension of in-person classes

Fear of the novel coronavirus isn't the only unsettling topic floating about University of Cincinnati's campus.

Classes met Wednesday morning for the first time since the university announced a planned suspension of most in-person sessions until April 13. The suspension begins Saturday.

At Miami University in Oxford, students also were experiencing a degree of uncertainty one day after officials announced they too planned to suspend in-person classes.

The decisions by the universities followed Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's recommendation to implement remote learning at institutions of higher education. He also declared a state of emergency Tuesday after the first people in the state tested positive for the novel coronavirus, which causes a disease called COVID-19.

Many classes were held Wednesday at UC, with the announcement not seeming to disrupt the normal bustle of students on campus. But multiple students who spoke with The Enquirer conveyed concern about their educational and financial situations.

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Despite the worry, students also seemed to hold a shared recognition of the overall health benefits to shuttering school buildings.

"The University of Cincinnati made the right decision to move classrooms to remote learning for the next month," said Christin Godale, a Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program. "The administration has prioritized the health of its students, staff and faculty in taking this proactive approach."

Jillian Ketz, a first-year student studying psychology and Spanish, praised the closure and how it could benefit people like her close friend, who has a compromised immune system.

"I understand it's not just the safety of the Cincinnati community as a whole but our personal safety," she said.

Ketz lives in a dorm and said students will be allowed to continue living on campus. 

While recognizing the rationale for the closure, several students said it will hamper learning.

"Teachers are sort of scrambling right now," said Ethan Rudd, a first-year law student. Rudd said law professors often use the Socratic method, a call-and-response approach that keeps students engaged but would be difficult to simulate online. 

For other disciplines, the suspension could create even more barriers.

Lilly Knopp, a third-year student in the College of Allied Health, is studying to become a physical therapist. She has a lab-based class that meets weekly. In it, she's tested chemical reactions, hands-on learning that has helped her comprehend certain topics, like how acids and bases interact in a chemical equation.

"I'm a very visual learner," Knopp said. "I don't know how we're supposed to video chat a lab."

Instruction that involves labs, studios, music lessons and clinical experience may meet at the discretion of deans provided social distancing is respected, UC said in its announcement.

But Amanda Bowman, in her third year studying medical laboratory science, said one of her instructors wrote by email that labs, normally attended by groups of four students, will now have only two members attending from each group.

"Doing things on my own, I don't know how I'll fare," Bowman said.

Godale, the Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Graduate Program, acknowledged the difficulty the suspension will pose to students in science performing lab work, but "being safe is more important," she said. "COVID-19 is dangerous."

Godale, who is also a graduate student trustee on UC's Board of Trustees, encouraged students to focus on other aspects of their respective disciplines, such as improving their skills in data interpretation and experimental design and reading peer-reviewed articles.

"All of these activities are essential to a successful career in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and do not require access to the lab," she said.

Certain obstacles for teachers are also expected.

Nancy Jennings, a professor of communications, has taught both online and in-person classes at UC. She wrote by email that instructors will need time to adjust to online teaching.

"And time is of the essence during this rush to go online," she wrote.

Instructors may not have the necessary equipment or training for converting lectures to video, Jennings wrote. Support staff for technical issues may be overwhelmed. And this will likely be the first time many instructors use features such as online testing in a learning management system, like Blackboard.

Though students could face challenges of their own, Jennings wrote, such as lacking proper equipment like a laptop or high-speed internet, they may actually see some benefit from the suspension of in-person classes.

"They may be able to practice and acquire new tech skills and really apply time management skills to stay on track with assignments," she wrote. "They may also find themselves communicating more clearly since there is no room for nonverbals in their text communication (email, discussion boards, and the like)."

Jennings agreed with the timing of the suspension, writing that "as a faculty member who is immunocompromised, it helps protect me and my family."

Could suspension hurt students' wallets?

Bowman, the medical laboratory science student, pointed out that tuition is higher for in-person classes versus online ones.

"I'm not sure if I see them (UC) doing any form of reimbursement, but you know we're not paying for online classes," Bowman said. "I'm not sure what I'd want to see but it would definitely be wrong in my opinion to charge us for something we did not sign up for, even given the circumstances."

Ben Lewton, a second-year physics student, said the suspension will force him to purchase Mathematica, a computing system, since he will no longer be able to access it on campus.

"The bigger issue is that faculty may have to purchase things like webcams and other tools to modify their lesson plans," Lewton wrote by text. While not a large barrier to tenured professors, "for adjuncts and graduate TAs (teaching assistants) who make less than a living wage, it could be a bigger challenge," he added.

Lewton repeated a line that he said one of his professors used Wednesday morning about the suspension: "It'll basically mean more work for both students and faculty with less learning."

For Lilly Grismore, a first-year psychology student, she fears the suspension will jeopardize her newly secured job at a local restaurant, especially with students leaving the area to return home, decreasing demand for services in the area.

"The reason I got a job: I'm a broke college student," Grismore said.

And Knopp, the student studying to be a physical therapist, works at a hearing and speech clinic within the College of Allied Health, and she fears the suspension could block her from her source of income, "adding to pressure and stress, especially if it's suspended a month."

How do school closures help public health?

School closures can reduce attack rates of a virus by up to 40% during a pandemic, according to a study in Nature magazine, though closures have “little impact on overall attack rates, whereas case isolation or household quarantine could have a significant impact.”

Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and physician at Yale University, recently spoke of the utility of school closures in an interview with Science Magazine. He said reactive closures, or those undertaken when a student or staff member is sick, reduces the infection rate and delays the peak of an epidemic.

“When you postpone the peak, you also typically flatten the epidemic and space out your cases,” Christakis said. “This has value. It means that the incidence on any given day is lower, so we don’t overburden our health care system.”

Christakis said proactive closures, or those implemented before a person is infected in a community, also have value, as they can halt interactions between adults and students, protecting communities from exposure.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association analyzed the effect of interventions such as closing schools on combating the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic.

The study found that school closures and public gathering bans implemented at the same time was associated with a reduction in deaths during the pandemic that killed at least 50 million people worldwide. Those cities that implemented such interventions earlier had lower peak mortality rates and lower total deaths.

Uncertainty among Miami students

Sophie Mattocks, a senior from California studying interactive media at Miami University, fears commencement could be canceled.

“I'm just assuming that's gonna happen for us just because I see this getting worse before it gets better,” Mattocks said, "which sucks because I already have family who bought $2,000 plane tickets and hotels and stuff. I think that it would be nice if they were going to do anything drastic like that, to tell us sooner rather than later.”

Miami hasn't announced its plans for commencement. UC said its public health response team hasn't yet made a decision on the matter.

Mattocks also works in dining services on campus. Miami is not currently requiring student employees to report for work but asks them to do so if they are still on campus and don’t feel sick.

Emma Svatos, a senior focusing on zoology who is on a pre-med track, is among students who are unsure how their lab science, studio art and performance classes will translate to an online setting.

“I’m in a field botany class that started yesterday, and we’re ‘fieldless botany’ so they don’t know how it’s going to work,” Svatos said.

For Taylor Rathe, a junior studying diplomacy and global politics, most of her classes emphasize class discussions.

“Those are the classes that are having the hardest time because how can we talk like deeply about big topics without being face to face?" Rathe said.

The softball player said she can't return home because she still has games and practices.

Rathe is not worried at the moment about whether she'll receive any form of tuition reimbursement due to the suspension of her in-person classes.

“At least right now it’s not a concern,” she said. “But like two days ago, we were still sitting in class and so anything could change. That could be a concern tomorrow.”