On Sept. 25, all students received an email announcing that the College will be transitioning to online learning following the Thanksgiving break.
In her email to the student body, President Denise Battles said that the dining and residence halls would remain open for those students who requested and needed the facilities offered on campus.
While the school is currently unsure about how many students will be requesting to remain on campus, the group will likely be mostly made up of students who do not have access to the resources they need to continue with school outside of campus, according to the email.
Dean of Academic Planning and Advising Celia Easton said that the school’s main focus through this transition is maintaining and supporting each student and their needs. Since there are many students from rural or remote areas where they do not have access to technology or internet, their continued ability to participate in their classes is a major concern, she said.
"We want to make sure that those students don't get excluded as we pivot to something like that," Easton said. “No student should be in a position of losing access the course material if they don’t have either good technology in terms of hardware or the connectivity."
Other students that will likely remain on campus after Thanksgiving break include those with housing insecurity, international students and students who are "involved in in-person student research projects or creative projects that they need to be physically present on campus,” according to Easton.
While this announcement only arrived last week, this is an accommodation that the school has been preparing for months. According to Easton, staff members have been training for this change in anticipation.
"Faculty have been going to workshops since June on online instruction and assistance,” Easton said. "It’s enabled people to think about how do you translate some of the early work and you in person kind of work into something that’s going to work for students."
Easton added that professors have thus "front-loaded" many of their in-person assessments, projects and experiments, in order to allow students to work more independently while taking classes remotely.
"In some cases, faculty might have their Canvas courses prepared enough to let students then just sort of work through things asynchronously [and] independently,” Easton said.
This level of independence "very much depends upon the subject,” Easton said. While some lectures or introductory classes may have an easier time adjusting to completely remote learning, classes that rely more heavily on in-person experiences, such as laboratory classes and seminars, may be harder to adjust.
"There's no substitute for in person lab," Easton said. “But because of the fact that we’ve been kind of anticipating that some of the other things or a little bit easier."
In order to accommodate for some of these potentially more difficult transitions, the school will keep many of their academic resources accessible online so that students can access them from home. Star New York, for example, is an online SUNY tutoring consortium that students can access at any time, according to the email.
Easton said that as this transition to online schooling, and isolation and quarantining in general, can have large impacts on students' mental and emotional states, students will also have access to all of the counseling services that they would have on campus. Geneseo's counselors have already switched to remote and online meetings, so they are already accustomed to this virtual method and will continue to be available after the switch to online learning is made.
“While the entire faculty and staff of Geneseo understand the many challenges that this transition to online learning might entail, they have been hard at work to get ahead of these many obstacles and address how they will impact the students and their learning objectives,” Easton said.