CAMPUS NEWS
CONVERT,
Don’t Cancel Fort Hays State University’s 2020 mantra by SCOTT CASON
O
n New Year’s Eve 2019, the Municipal Health Commission in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, reported a cluster of pneumonia cases to the World Health Organization (WHO). Five days later, a WHO press release announced to the world the identification of a novel coronavirus. A five-hour drive north of Wuhan lies the city of Zhengzhou, the home of Sias University, Fort Hays State University’s partner in global education. Sias University would be ground zero for the university’s initial response to COVID-19. Close to 4,500 Chinese students at Sias University enroll each year in oncampus FHSU degree programs. The spring semester at Sias was slated to begin on Feb. 24, but by late January, university officials at Sias decided to postpone indefinitely the start of the term due to the rapid spread of the virus in China. Online education, so much a part of the higher education landscape in the United States,
photography by KELSEY STREMEL & TREVER ROHN was nearly non-existent in China. But a seismic change was coming, and FHSU faculty and learning technologists would be key agents in that change. Before the rise of the COVID pandemic, the Chinese government’s practice was to limit students access to information and digital communications. Forced to move home due to the pandemic, many of FHSU’s students in China didn’t have access to computers or the internet at home, but most had cell phones. To add to the complexity of the issue, most Chinese students had no experience in online education. Dr. Andrew Feldstein and his Teaching Innovation and Learning Technologies (TILT) team knew that the only way to save the spring term in China was to convert 29 on-campus Sias courses to a mobile-friendly, online format – and he and his team only had three weeks to get it done. “We looked on this seemingly immense challenge and sense of ROAR
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urgency as an opportunity to greatly expand the teaching and learning tools available to our faculty involved in our partnership programs in China,” Feldstein said. The spring term began at Sias on Feb. 24. Using what the team learned or developed in transitioning Sias courses to online delivery, the TILT team was able to do the same for students at FHSU’s other major global partner, Shenyang Normal University, in time for its spring term to start on March 30. “Convert, don’t cancel,” a term first coined by FHSU President Tisa Mason that has guided the university’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic since the early spring, was born out of this effort to save the spring semester on our partner campuses in China. On March 16, with the COVID-19 pandemic now beginning to spread across the United States, President Mason announced FHSU’s plan to transition the university to remote operations. The majority of students
