NMU faculty from both the NMU-AAUP and the NMUFA have stepped up to transition face-to-face courses to provisional distance educational experiences for NMU students. However, according to Matt Smock, the Director of Instructional Design & Technology for the Center for Teaching and Learning, most faculty had a running start before the novel coronavirus shutdown face-to-face classes at NMU. “About 315 instructors are (Distance Qualified,) meaning that they have completed at least the minimum preparation requirements for online teaching. About 80 of those instructors have completed at least Program 1 of the Online Teaching Fellows,” said Smock. He added that over 400 instructors (that includes all people assigned as primary instructor on a course, not just NMU-AAUP faculty) were using EduCat this semester prior to last week.   

While there are no required standards in place, Smock recommends at least posting assignments and lecture slides on EduCat as a minimum standard for these provisional distance ed courses. “I think the most important thing is that courses remain rigorous and interactive. Posting assignments and PowerPoint slides would be a way to accomplish this,” said Smock. He added that Zoom could be a good choice to enable students to interact with each other and the for the instructor to use the lectures they had already planned. In some cases, however, Smock says faculty might want to seek alternate solutions, such as posting recorded lectures and having online discussion forums, or having interactions asynchronously via VoiceThread to better fit the needs of their particular students while still providing a good level of interactivity.  

In addition to Smock’s dedicated staff, faculty members have taken it upon themselves to assist with this transition. Within a few hours of the announcement last week to move content from face-to-face courses online, History Instructor Kathryn Johnson created and shared a document for the History Department to support the online transition. “It contained step-by-step directions for tools most relevant to support the History discipline. I also created a system to pair our eight undergraduate teaching assistants with faculty who need additional assistance,” said Johnson. In addition to helping her fellow faculty members in history, Johnson held a workshop for tutorial assistants last Saturday in conjunction with the CTL. “We are amazingly fortunate to have the infrastructure to help our students transition to online learning on little notice,” said Johnson. 

Associate Professor in Mathematics and Computer Science, Amy Barnsley was also quick to help her colleagues. “I had 6 people from my department attend. I showed them how to use document cameras with Zoom and how to record their synchronous class meetings, upload the recordings and post them to EduCat,” said Barnsley. Stacy Boyer-Davis from the College of Business and Lisa Flood, the Teaching and Learning Scholar for the CTL, have both offered to reach out to faculty who need some extra help as well.

NMU has joined other Michigan universities that have altered delivery of course content due to the coronavirus. President Erickson notified faculty on Wednesday, March 11 that classes and all campus-wide meetings were cancelled on March 12 and 13 with non-lab courses resuming as online versions on Monday, March 16 – April 3.

Members of the EC were not included in the meeting that prompted the suspension of face-to-face course content. However, President Erickson did respond to a memo drafted by NMU-AAUP President Wendy Farkas requesting input from the faculty on such decisions. President Erickson invited Dr. Farkas to meet with him yet this week.

As we consider rolling out a new method of course delivery, I spoke with Director of Technology Support Services Chris Lewis, about the feasibility of moving classes online. “Our bandwidth is capable of handling this and Zoom is hosted on Amazon Web Services which is scalable, so we should be o.k.,” said Lewis. The real issue, according to Lewis, will be getting the proper documentation to faculty so they can properly use the tools to deliver course content.

To provide some context and risk assessment for NMU faculty, I spoke with Associate Professor of Biology, Josh Sharp. Dr. Sharp, who teaches medical microbiology and virology at NMU and has conducted extensive research on pathogens. “Today’s news about cases in Michigan is a clear example of how fluid the situation is with this outbreak,” said Sharp. He also added that critical planning on how to best serve students and faculty that belong to high risk groups, such as those that are immunocompromised, 60 or older, or a primary-caregivers to those in high risk groups. Nevertheless, Dr. Sharp cautions against over reacting to the virus. “You hear about the 3 to 4% mortality rates, but I think it is important to remember this is an average mortality rate across all age groups. If you’re 10-29 years old, the mortality rate is two tenths of one percent. But if you’re 70-79, it’s about 8 percent and 14.8 percent for those 80 and up,” said Sharp.

Whether we totally shutdown or not, Dr. Sharp says everyone should practice frequent handwashing. “Handwashing is the number one thing that can help reduce risk of exposure. These viruses have an outer lipid envelope, so soap is really destructive to them.” Dr. Sharp recommends washing hands for twenty seconds and avoiding crowded areas as much as possible.

Even before the announcement from the adminstration, chemistry professor Brandon Canfield started moving some of his courses online as a test, but now he will likely need to keep them online. He is still meeting face-to-face with his students in his laboratory course, but this week he tried out the Zoom meeting module on EduCat. “I’m still coming in to work every day, but Zoom allows classes to meet simultaneously and remotely,” said Canfield. Canfield says he informed his department head that he would be trying this out, and he contacted AV to have them put a reminder sign on his classroom door. “I have not yet decided how we will proceed next week. In the meantime, I’m sitting in my office for my scheduled office hours, but I have informed students that they must find me online.” Canfield says he has provided both google hangouts and Zoom links to allow students to reach him, and he has already had a virtual office meeting with a student that went well. “This all seems like prudent action to take: testing out the system before such measures might be required, something which we ought to now expect as a likely possibility,” said Canfield.

Given the short notice, it may not be feasible for everyone to ramp up fully online courses. There is also Section 6.7 of the Master Agreement that states faculty members cannot be forced to teach online. The NMU-AAUP will continue to dialog with the membership and the administration to provide the best possible outcomes for our students.

While the slow response to the coronavirus in the United States was a point of concern for Dr. Sharp, he feels we are now moving in the right direction. “The infrastructure, just wasn’t there because it’s been poorly funded. When you don’t fund public health infrastructure, and something like this comes along, it really exposes you. South Korea responded with thousands and thousands of tests within a few days, and we’re now just getting to that point, weeks into it,” said Sharp.

To offer some historical context, the Spanish Flu caused Northern Normal School to close its doors in the fall of 1918. According to Ted Bays and Russ Magnaghi of the NMU Center for U.P. Studies, Northern Normal reopened January 6, and no students or faculty members died at that time. However, later that year, Samuel Magers, professor of biology [and namesake for Magers Hall], died from the virus. According to a recent article in the Marquette Mining Journal, there were 1,759 cases of the Spanish Flu reported in the city of Marquette in 1919, and 51 residents died. The population of Marquette at that time was around 10,000, so nearly 18 percent of the population had the virus, and 2.8 percent of those infected died. This means Marquette’s average mortality rate from the Spanish Flu in 1919 was slightly lower than the average mortality rate for global infections of COVID-19 today.

To access up-to-date information on the coronavirus and an interactive map from Johns Hopkins University, check out the following link. https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

The CDC has two websites that might be helpful as well. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/summary.html 

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html 

When Wendy Farkas joined the NMU-AAUP Executive Committee this year, she just wanted to help out as the vice-president and learn more about the union. However, with the resignation of Brent Graves in early February, Dr. Farkas found herself serving as the interim president. “I was a little scared at first because the outgoing president had years and years of experience and institutional knowledge that I didn’t have, but I had amazing support from everyone on Exec, so I thought this is something that I wanted to be a part of and showcase what I can do as far as building those relationships and what I can contribute to the membership and the Executive Committee,” said Farkas. 

Upon her appointment as interim president, Farkas immediately started researching the history of the NMU-AAUP and drew upon her background in leadership training. “In all my leadership classes, I lean toward the style that you are only successful by how well you support people and provide the tools they need to empower themselves. That’s the strength of a good leader, seeing all of the great qualities of the people you’re working with and then encouraging them.”

Even though it was a bit stressful at first, Dr. Farkas was able to lighten her teaching load with help from Joe Lubig. Dr. Lubig is the Dean of Teacher Education, and he hired a teaching assistant to cover her Global Campus Course for the remainder of the semester. Wendy is also getting a lot of help from her husband Dave. “My husband is great. When one of us gets overburdened, the other picks up the load. So, he’s pretty much doing all the cooking, the cleaning and all of those things right now. If it wasn’t for him, life would be really hard.” 

Wendy grew up in the small town of Glennie, Michigan which is about thirty miles inland from Tawas City. She graduated from Oscoda High School and went to college at U of M Flint and taught in several school districts in the Flint area, and earned her Ph.D. at Oakland University. In 2014, Farkas left her position as a tenured K-12 teacher in Lower Michigan to take a position in the department of English. “I’ve always been in the greater Flint or Detroit area, and I know it’s the same state, but it feels like a completely different climate and culture here, but in a good way. I was so used to being five-minutes from everything while I lived in Flint, and then when I moved up here it was a lot like where I grew up because it was very rural. But the climate, that took a while to get used to. Now that we have a home up in Ishpeming on Little Perch Lake, we can’t imagine ever leaving or living anywhere else,” said Farkas.

As a teacher, Wendy stresses critical literacy skills and the role technology plays in that. “I feel like students are so overwhelmed with information, especially information coming at them digitally that I really wanted them to not only hone their critical reading skills, but how they synthesize information and affect change,” said Farkas. To engage students in her Academic Literacy and Study Strategies course (EN 103), Farkas created a multimedia meme project where the students could pick any social media issue covered over the semester. After students completed their research and evaluated their sources, she had them create a rhetorically powerful meme for a target audience that may think a certain way about a topic based on emotion and opinion instead of fact. The meme was then linked to their credible sources, and the students had to synthesize that information in a ten-minute TED Talk. According to Farkas the results were startling. “Many of the students had vastly improved their reading levels, and so this was a project that really resonated with them because they were using digital tools they usually use for social activities but not academically.”  

When Farkas is not serving her fellow union members or teaching, she enjoys traversing America and whitewater rafting with her family in the summer months. “One of the very best times we have had as a family was on a trip out West. We put 8,500 miles on our truck in one month, and we visited eight National Parks,” said Farkas. 

Wendy started whitewater rafting at age nineteen when she took a trip to West Virginia. “The training scared me more than the actual rafting because the guides warned us not to get your foot entrapped, cause that’s a for sure drowning. Nevertheless, we took the plunge, and it was the most scary but exhilarating thing I’ve ever done, and after the first time, I was hooked. I’ve gone at least 15 times since. It’s like a natural roller coaster ride,” said Farkas, who now involves her family in her passion for whitewater.

While Farkas has enjoyed her time as interim president, she plans on going back to being vice-president. “I can’t tell you how many people reached out to me and said we are really glad you are in this position, and that was really nice,” said Farkas. However, she said she loves teaching too much to serve as the president long-term.