What the pandemic taught the professor

At the time of this writing, there have been more than 170 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, and over 3.5 million deaths. Nearly half a million new cases have been identified each day for the past week, and the true number is surely somewhat higher due to a variety of data collection challenges.

Meanwhile, here in California, there is some very good news. Due to significantly lowered infection rates, we are emerging from the public health restrictions of the past 15+ months and starting the journey to “normality.” More than 57% of the California population has received at least one dose of the vaccine, and COVID-19 deaths are down 92% statewide from our peak levels earlier this year. Even closer to home, the Bay Area is on the cusp of becoming the first region in California to achieve herd immunity [1].

At a global level, more than 2.15 billion vaccine doses [2] have been administered worldwide as of June 6. Sadly, however, this aggregated data hides many much sadder stories. In my home country of India, less than 6% of the population has been vaccinated, and the rapid spread COVID-19 variant “Delta” has led to skyrocketing infection rates, causing the country’s medical infrastructure to be overwhelmed, with beds, oxygen, and other supplies in short supply. While India’s official death toll is well over 350,000, the actual number of cremated bodies will never be truly known. “It’s a complete massacre of data,” according to Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan [3].

At a personal level, since the last issue of Analytics was published, I have lost another aunt and uncle to COVID-19 and had several cousins in India test positive. As such, even as my beloved San Francisco Giants prepares to admit enough fans to fill all of Oracle Park later this month, this pandemic is far from over from my perspective.

Teaching Offers Refuge from Tragedy

For me, teaching has been a much-needed space of refuge from the tragedies associated with COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, we suddenly found ourselves teaching all of our classes online, and I quickly realized how important teaching was to my own mental health. As I wrote in a column last year, “My spirits are buoyed by my students’ enthusiasm and commitment. I am grateful for their inspiration, and for continued professional employment that also provides a sense of purpose. For their sake, I dare not succumb to my own sadness or sloth” [4]. Becoming aware of this sense of interdependence – and striving to hold up my end of the bargain with my MBA students – is a positive pandemic memory that will be with me forever.

Fifteen months later, the MBA students that I was teaching when the social distancing guidelines took effect last spring have just graduated. Sadly, I have not had a chance to thank them in person for being there with me – and for me – as we made our way through this strange and unsettling time, virtually but still somehow together. On the plus side, I am very excited to have the opportunity to meet the first-year students who were in class with me this past year, some of whom were faithfully logging on from faraway points around the country and around the globe. Most of all, I am eager to be back in the classroom with students when we return to school in August.

But the classroom to which we will be returning will be slightly different, as we will be operating in “hyflex mode” [5], an instructional format in which students have the option to attend class meetings in person, online or a combination of both. While we expect the bulk of our students to be in the classroom with us and learning synchronously, the hyflex approach will enable us to accommodate international students who are unable to begin the semester in person due to visa issues, as well as domestic students who are either unable to attend class due to their unique personal circumstances or unvaccinated. (We are requiring all students, staff and faculty on campus to be vaccinated.)

Other students, I suspect, will simply choose not to “attend” class synchronously. Early in the pandemic, one of my best students (let’s call her “Terry”) stopped joining our regularly scheduled online class meetings. At first, I had assumed that this was because Terry had returned home to India (meaning that our class times were in the middle of the night for her), but I learned later that she had instead decided to watch the recorded versions of our class sessions, stopping whenever needed to rewind and replay particular sections, and also pausing the recording to do work on exercises on her own. Meanwhile, she regularly asked me great questions during (virtual) office hours and was an active and valued teammate for group assignments (based on data provided during our usual post-course confidential peer reviews).

Flipping the Classroom

Terry’s decision to engage with my course in an asynchronous manner served as an unexpected natural experiment in delivering a “flipped classroom” experience [6]. This – along with too much time alone with my own thoughts during the pandemic – has caused me to reflect on the evolving role of the instructor in analytics education. At the very least, it is clear that in the 21st century, the “sage on the stage” paradigm feels largely outdated and inefficient, given the massive amount of information directly accessible to my students from a few simple web searches (or, alternately, through low-cost e-learning experiences). Innovating – both in what we teach and how we teach it – is imperative rather than optional.

Along these same lines, I recently came across two Medium articles, one entitled “Data Scientists Will be Extinct in 10 Years” [7] and the other “Will There Be a Shortage of Data Science Jobs in the Next 5 Years?” [8]. Both pieces include some interesting insights about the rapidly evolving world of data science (of course, the provocative title claims are gross exaggerations). For example, both articles cite the rapid emergence of many smart and flexible software tools for complex tasks such as data preparation, feature engineering, model building and output analysis. While the first post imagines that the data scientists of today will see their roles evolve and their leverage increase (“there will be a need for data scientists who can help industries build automation systems that can automate the task of machine learning and deep learning”), I took special note of the money quote from the second piece: “Going forward, the skill set collectively known as data science will be borne by a new generation of data-savvy business specialists and subject matter experts who are able to imbue analysis with their deep domain knowledge, irrespective of whether they can code or not.”  These are exactly the type of roles that my colleagues and I are preparing our MBA students to take on when they graduate.

As a result of COVID-19, the evolution of how we teach these students has been accelerated. And while the pandemic is not yet over, it is clear that many things – including my classroom – will be different on the other side. Stay tuned.

References

1. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/bay-area-could-be-first-region-in-california-to-reach-herd-immunity-ucsf-doctor/2542558/
2. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavirus-deaths.html
4. https://pubsonline.informs.org/do/10.1287/LYTX.2020.03.06/full/
5. https://www.wiley.com/network/instructors-students/teaching-strategies/what-is-hyflex-course-design
6. https://www.teachthought.com/learning/the-definition-of-the-flipped-classroom/
7. https://towardsdatascience.com/there-will-be-a-shortage-of-data-science-jobs-in-the-next-5-years-9f783737ed23
8. https://towardsdatascience.com/data-scientists-will-be-extinct-in-10-years-a6e5dd77162b