Just about every educational institution has had to make adjustments to its schedule and modus operandi since COVID-19 began to sweep across America.
Most schools have taken same precautions, particularly after Gov. Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order issued March 27. Central Carolina Community College has been no different — closing campus, canceling on-campus events and continuing classes online. Chatham Provost Mark Hall said that, in a lot of ways, the school was somewhat in good shape heading into that situation.
“I will admit, our college was uniquely positioned to have to deal with something like this because we are required to have an online platform for all our curriculum,” Hall said. “Some classes didn’t do a lot of work on that, but it was easy-ish for some of us to transmit stuff.”
But not every class, and Hall admitted that.
“We can’t build a house virtually, so we’re still trying to figure that out,” he said, referring to the Pittsboro campus’ Building Construction Technology program and its Chatham College project.
Hall said the college has been working on online platforms since 2004 and has been doing distance work since before then. As a teacher in the 1990s, he said his students would mail essays to him. He would grade them and send them back.
While some classes have made that adjustment, it’s more difficult for others, like Kaan Ozmeral’s math classes.
“It’s nuts,” he said. “It’s completely transformed how I teach.”
Ozmeral has been a teacher since 2005 and at CCCC since 2011. He said that he teaches math classes online every summer, but it’s not the smoothest transition for a subject.
“I’m aware that it’s not as effective for math as in person,” he said. “It’s just not as fluid. The efficiency of it, it’s surprisingly not as good. Math is particularly challenging.”
Ozmeral is teaching Calculus 2 online for the first time and he said the “pretty intense course” presents a need for students to have “someone to talk things over with” them. But feedback is not as immediate, and communicating complex math problems with various symbols, exponents and equations is not as simple as grading an English paper. However, he said, the college has been a positive place to work during this time.
“The students and all of the people involved in the college have all been very supportive and understanding,” he said. “This pandemic is awful and it’s really a struggle day to day to think about all the pain going on in the world, but I feel like as a community we’ve really embraced each other. It’s nice to see how the community reacts to something like this.”
CCCC President Lisa Chapman told the News + Record that she sees the college’s role right now unchanged — serving the community.
“One of the things that we’ve been talking about for over a year now is, we take care of our family, the college family, and if we take care of the family and take care of our students, we take care of the community,” she said. “Every day, I see more and more of what our college family is doing to try to ensure the safety and support of our students, and the generosity I’ve seen with the family in terms of reaching out to the community in any way we can. It makes me incredibly proud.”
Chapman said college employees created a Facebook page where they can share encouragement, information, support and humor, trying to recreate “all of those things that we get every day when we come to the office regularly.”
And some of those employees went beyond. Earlier this month, teachers in the college’s Health Sciences and Human Services departments gathered health supplies like hand sanitizer, face shields, gloves and disinfectant wipes to donate to local healthcare providers, including FirstHealth of the Carolinas and Chatham Hospital.
“Our partners cried happy tears of relief to receive the supplies and I know that I teared up delivering them,” Lisa Baker, CCCC’s Dean of Health Sciences and Human Services said in an April 2 press release. “We have a collaborative relationship that allows a reciprocal relationship where we were proud to step up and help our community partners and graduates of our programs who now work at these hospitals and long-term care facilities.”
So while graduation has been postponed — potentially until August 6 — and face-to-face instruction has been suspended, education is still happening, similar to Chatham County’s public school system. Hall said he’s been in touch with teachers who are doing what they always do, just on Zoom.
“People have been holding class sessions with that,” he said. “It’s been really lonely around campus, but we’re keeping everyone safe and healthy.”
Reporter Zachary Horner can be reached at zhorner@chathamnr.com or on Twitter at @ZachHornerCNR.