Slow and steady

CLOVIS - Slowly but surely, things are ramping up for Clovis Community College.

The campus is sparsely populated, even factoring in the late July timeframe. The college is still taking every precaution it can with the COVID-19 pandemic - one entrance and one exit, temperature checks, maintaining a visitor's log for contract tracing the college hopes it won't have to use.

But things are going on. Students are coming in to talk with advisors on their plans for eight- or 16-week classes by appointment only, the same way that all business operations and student services are currently handled. Not every desk is filled with staff or future students, but many have Plexiglas for whenever that is the case.

The bookstore staff is getting things ready, as the CCC T-shirts are stacked by their different shades of blue. Boxes of dissection kits are already stacked up on a wall. Each is marked with "nonrefundable," leading one to wonder if anybody's ever tried to return an elk brain.

Summer registration has been ongoing since April 13, roughly a month after the college moved to an online-only model it has continued ever since.

That is, cross your fingers, going to change sometime in the fall semester. The fall semester begins Aug. 24 for the full 16-week term and the first eight-week term, and all classes are online until at least the week of Sept. 7.

Robin Jones, vice president for Academic Affairs, told The News that CCC is looking at three ways to offer courses to students. The three modes are:

• Online only: This is how all classes will operate for at least the first two weeks of the term. "We offer the majority of our classes in this format in addition to those that we offer face-to-face," Jones said, "so we are very experienced in online education and do a great job with it."

• Hybrid instruction: The instructor assigns classroom and online presence to the students in whatever method is necessary for current public health orders. For example, if a Tuesday-Thursday class has 20 students but public health orders limit instruction to 10 students per instructor, the instructor would split the class into one 10-student group that comes on campus Tuesday and attends online Thursday and vice versa for the other group.

• Mixed modality: Jones calls this the most flexible one for students. In this mode, the faculty member and a student decide together what days they will be in person or online.

"Both hybrid and mixed-modality class conversions will require an on-campus presence at some point during the fall 2020 semester," Jones said. "If the student is not comfortable with the on-campus presence requirement of the class, they should enroll in an online class instead."

The second eight-week term begins Oct. 19, and all instruction ends Dec. 11.