Page 19 - Campus Technology, May/June 2020

breaks of measles, for instance, over the years. When you bring people into close confined quar- ters and don’t honor social distancing, that’s exact- ly what happens.
What we’re looking at now is what we can do to continue social distancing at a safe level. And that means not being bringing people into lecture classrooms for some time.
But at some point we need to return to learning integrity. That means our health science students have to actually start handling patients again. There’s just so much we can do with science lab virtualization, and at some point they have to learn how to handle a micropipette. We know that in fine arts classes the instructor has to be able to see the hand movements of the student in a drawing class to be able to coach them and guide them. We know that ceramics pieces need to be baked off in a kiln, and most students don’t have kilns at home.
Anything else that can be taught virtually we’re going to try to teach virtually, because you know what? We are getting better and better at it, and I think there’s going to be a long-term change as a result of this.
CT: Early on, the courses at Saddleback were moved online with some exceptions such as the labs and studio classes. How did that work out for the college? Did students show up? Were those classes shut down?
Stern: Our last day of open campus for classes was March 13. That was the last day of midterms. We had spring break that followed immediately after that Friday. And we were just hanging on, looking at the numbers really closely, knowing that if there was a case of community-acquired disease in Orange County, we would get everybody out of there immediately.
And here’s the interesting thing. If you look back at the data, we got lucky. There was not a single community-acquired case in Orange County until the evening of the Friday the 13th. That was our
“The data is in front of us and all the public health experts are saying the same thing — that social distancing is around for a long time.”
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