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Friday, March 13, 2020 VOLUME LXXXV ISSUE VI SINCE 1935 www.oswegonian.com
SUNY, CUNY schools suspend in person classes
Professors, students switching to online courses indefinitely per Cuomo’s announcement
Concerns about online classes rise Hannah Leonard Asst. News Editor hleonard@oswegonian.com
Patrick Higgins | The Oswegonian
Alexander Gault-Plate Editor-in-Chief aplate@oswegonian.com
CONTENT
All SUNY and CUNY schools will suspend in-person class meetings on March 19 to prevent the spread of COVID-19, a coronavirus that was declared a pandemic this week by the World Health Organization. In a press conference at 1:45 p.m. on Wednesday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made the
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The Internet and Blackboard outages Oswego State students have experienced a few weeks ago left Student Association senators concerned about the transferring to online classes due to COVID-19 outbreak fears. At Tuesday’s SA meeting, program directors addressed the senate in efforts of explaining the purpose of specific broadbased fees, attached to nearly every student’s bill, and the reason for the potential increases. “Are there going to be problems if classes go online? I would say that the response of the faculty here at the time [of the outages] were all working together and faculty were very understanding and looked to find ways to ensure that students have time to get their work in,” Sean Moriarty, chief technology officer at Oswego State, said. Moriarity explained that the outages came as a result of authentication attacks but he assured the senate that his team has implemented a system to protect Blackboard as best they can from future attacks. Moriarity said that during a normal school day, Blackboard receives thousands of requests an hour. During the outages, the system was getting 35 million requests an hour and was simply unable to keep up. “I feel like we really put in some good remediation to protect ourselves and I think those services remain stable,” Moriarity said. Moriarty explained the technology
announcement that SUNY and CUNY colleges will need to migrate as much of their educational programs online and “reduce density” of campus populations. The governor’s original announcement stated that inperson classes would be suspended for the remainder of the semester. “They will be releasing for the rest of the semester, to do distance learning,” Cuomo said in the press conference.
Statements from individual colleges, including Oswego State, have given a more conservative timeline of until midApril. Scott Furlong, Oswego State’s provost, sent faculty an email on Wednesday suggesting that the campus may resume in-person classes by April 13. “Our hope, assuming stability in the public health situation, is that we return to somewhat normal operations on April 13, 2020,” Furlong’s email
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said. The governor said that individual campuses have the latitude to choose how to proceed with in-person classes suspended, including which programs to suspend, which departments to close and what options to offer for residential students. Wednesday evening, Vice President for Student Affairs Jerri Howland sent an email
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