What if students can’t get connected?
On a campus that’s arguably the most isolated among the 14 state-owned colleges, Mansfield University President Charles Patterson raised a concern this week that could foreshadow how well rural Pennsylvania students can learn remotely during a pandemic.
He didn’t mince words.
“This decision is about CHOICE,” he wrote in a message to his 1,700 students as he announced a suspension of in-person classes due to COVID-19.
Students can opt to move out of residence halls — trusting that in the tiniest of north central Pennsylvania communities, they can connect to the internet from home with their laptops and mainframes to hear lectures they will need to complete their degrees.
But just in case, he said, the dorms would stay open.
“We are giving students these options because each student’s situation is different, and some students (including international students and those who do not have reliable internet connectivity at home) may prefer to stay on campus,” he said.
In recent days, much attention has focused on how effectively professors and support staff on big city campuses can
use state-of-the-art web infrastructure to send course content to students who suddenly are dependent on remote classroom feeds.
Major campuses in Pittsburgh and nationally are embarking on what could be an unprecedented push into online instruction, hoping to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
But all that could be for naught educationally if students are unable to connect. And that battle for bandwidth will be waged in locales far outside metropolitan areas.
The challenges of bringing the internet to sparsely populated parts of Pennsylvania are well-documented.
A study by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania found median broadband speeds in the state’s urban centers were slower than the FCC standard. But they were better than in rural areas: 17.1 megabits per second of data in Allegheny County compated to 6.8 megabits per second in Centre County, for example.
Some of the State System of Higher Education’s 14member universities are in suburban communities that ring Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Harrisburg. For those students, connectivity is a secondary issue.
But others who attend more rural universities — Clarion, Mansfield, Edinboro and Lock Haven among them
— can find that venturing far from campus leaves them disconnected.
It is one more potential headache for universities now getting a crash course in knowing how well their students can participate in classes and complete assignments online, and how well their campus infrastructure holds up — not to mention how skilled professors are at uploading video and other content for courses that are traditionally held face-to-face.
David Pidgeon, a spokesman in Harrisburg for the 96,000-student State System, deferred to individual schools when asked Friday about the issue of connectivity.
“Those decisions are being made at the local university level because university leadership, faculty and staff know their campuses and their students best,” he said. “This is a challenging time for everyone, and it’s critically important for all of us to be patient, to collaborate where possible and to search for creative solutions.”
He said State System Chancellor Daniel Greenstein would continue to provide what each university requests as far as guidance, information and support.
Mansfield, in Tioga County, is about 250 miles northeast of Pittsburgh near the New York state line. About half its students live in residence halls.
Mr. Patterson’s announcement late last week follows those of many other State System schools, among them California, Clarion, Edinboro, Indiana and Slippery Rock in Western Pennsylvania.
He said internships, clinicals, field experiences and student-teaching assignments will continue as scheduled, “provided that the host institution has not suspended operations or otherwise discontinued such experiences.”
He told students to continue reporting to those sites “as long as they are feeling well.
“Likewise, faculty should continue to supervise student teachers, interns, those in clinical settings, and those conducting field experiences provided that the sites remain open and the faculty member is well,” he said.
There are now nearly 138,000 cases of the novel coronavirus globally, and it has claimed almost 5,100 lives as of midday Friday, according to an interactive tracker from Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to Mansfield, Clarion, Edinboro and Lock Haven, the 14 State System campuses include Bloomsburg, California, Cheyney, East Stroudsburg, Indiana, Kutztown, Millersville, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock and West Chester universities.