Fall semester toggle terms so far

Greetings from a warm and humid Virginian August weekend. I have spent the past three days working at home on four different computers and wondering if I should rethink all work travel for the next season. Today has a very spring 2020 feeling to it.

But that’s not what I’m posting about here. At least, not about my personal choices. Instead, I’d like to update you on campuses deciding to start fall classes online, rather than in person, and making that choice from fear of escalating COVID-19 infections.

To explain: most of academia has planned on fall 2021 being a time to return to in-person education after nearly two years of the pandemic. Yet the sudden explosion of COVID’s Delta variant has thrown these plans into question. One response is to return to some of 2020’s in-person public health measures (masking, low-density spaces, social distancing) plus vaccine mandates, encouragement, or assuming enough people on campus will have gotten jabs to make things safer.

Another response is to quickly throw classes online for a short period of time. We did this in fall 2020 and I dubbed the practice the “toggle term.” Since nobody has come up with a better label, I’ll stick with toggle for now. The idea is that a campus experiencing a sudden and local COVID-19 upsurge can suspend in-person education for a short period of time, switching classes to remote instruction modes until the danger recedes enough to resume face to face experiences. The toggle is rarely publicized or celebrated, but the pandemic has…