semi Weekly Message to the Physics Community, September 4, 2020

Dear Physics Community,

Things have been happening fast this week and I’ve gotten behind on the messages.  I will catch up with Anjali and Stella in the next few days, but here are some things from today’s 8 am Academic Continuity Meeting:

  • Experiential Learning Opportunities – elo.mit.edu – everyone should look at this.
  • New displayed ID requirements – when on campus, need to display your MIT ID, preferably from a lanyard around your neck.  Can pick up lanyards in Lobby 7, residential halls should have lanyards.
  • Q-week ends 6 am on Tuesday
  • Move-in statistics: 670 undergraduates have arrived, 784 expected.   The normal undergraduate population in MIT housing is 3,200.  1,311 graduate students have arrived out of 1,450.
  • Biology, 7.00, on the pandemic,  open to everyone.  (Fauci is listed as a speaker!)
  • Rules and Regs. for the start of term
  • Pulse survey – Janet Rankin has developed a Pulse Survey for instructors to use in Week 2-3 Guide is here, qualtrics form here.  I mentioned this a lunch yesterday and this will save some time setting up. An early survey can help a lot in improving new online courses.
  • Students who have signed up in-person classes for COVIDPass but who do not yet have access to campus will be added to the access list on Saturday, most likely.
  • There are now circles around circles various places around campus (Killian Court) for informal gatherings of up to 10 people.

Dashboards

Here is a collection of local university dashboards (and Bates College because my kid goes there).  I’ve love to see someone make a web crawler to produce a consolidated webpage with all the local data.  Please be in touch if you are interested in doing this – I think it would be very popular.

Peter