Daily Lumina News 090120

The pandemic forced professors to quickly teach online when colleges moved to emergency remote instruction this past spring. In the process, the changes prompted many to completely rethink the way they teach.
They’ve pared down assignments, covered less content, spent less time lecturing, given more-authentic assessments, and provided more flexibility around grades. They’ve decided what’s most essential for students to get from a course and found a way to make it possible. Those changes were made under duress. But in many cases, professors have found, they turned out to be improvements.

America is in the middle of a perfect storm: the largest pandemic of our lives, a major acceleration of the future of work, and the biggest recession in decades. Employers, policymakers, and credential providers must work together to design the “new normal” in the nation's economic recovery.
Lumina Foundation's Holly Zanville and David Leaser of IBM offer a four-point plan to meet this challenge.

Northeastern University has spent more than $50 million planning for students' safe re-entry to campus. That investment is now being put to the test as approximately 8,000 undergraduates begin moving into campus residence halls.
The university has built its own labs for frequent testing with fast turnarounds, continually sanitizes buildings, and created a flexible-learning system that allows students to move back and forth between virtual and in-person classes in a richer, more interactive way than in a typical Zoom class. But is it enough to beat COVID-19?

It’s been a rocky start of the fall semester for several colleges resuming in-person instruction.
Robert Kelchen, an associate professor at Seton Hall University, is tracking how colleges respond to the pandemic. He offers his perspective—plus advice on what college leaders can learn from the experiences of others who started classes early—in this interview.

The 2020 College Guide and Rankings is out from Washington Monthly magazine. Find out which colleges best serve the country as a whole—by recruiting and graduating non-wealthy students, encouraging student activism, and producing research and technologies that create high-paying jobs and address threats like climate change.
This year, the Monthly also is listing the schools that make sure majors popular with Black students lead to well-paying jobs, the first time any publication has done so.

Resident advisers have always played a key role in how colleges implement behavioral policies—from limiting parties to helping new students settle in. Now, colleges are drafting them to another front line.
In the era of COVID-19, many resident advisers find themselves responsible for patrolling dorms for students hanging out in groups larger than four, enforcing universal mask mandates, and reporting fellow students who are violating social distancing rules.