By DAVID J. HILL

There are probably other phrases that would do justice to the spring semester transition to distance learning. But this one seems most appropriate: zoom, zoom!

UB faculty, staff and students participated in 46 days of remote learning, a change necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the course of those five weeks, 31,380 UB students took part in more than 5,580 courses in Blackboard.

And, heres the real whopper of a stat: 78,953 sessions using the Zoom videoconference platform accounting for 32,414,240 minutes. Thats over 540,000 hours, according to the computing prowess of Google. And if you keep going down that rabbit hole which UBNow of course did it amounts to 61 calendar years worth of Zoom sessions.

Shifting course content to distance learning was no easy task, and I applaud the efforts of UBs dedicated faculty and staff who made that happen without sacrificing the quality of education, says Graham Hammill, vice provost for academic affairs and dean of the Graduate School.

Here are some other amazing stats provided by UBIT:

To be sure, the technological undertaking of all this was no small feat.

I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to our 2,509 professors and other instructors. To UBIT, including our 400 staff and student workers, my heartfelt gratitude for your professionalism and commitment to UB. Without you, the spring semester might have been much different. Finally, to the 150 IT professionals across the schools, colleges and administrative units, thank you for your partnership, says Vice President and Chief Information Officer J. Brice Bible.

Bible attributes the smooth transition to these keys to success:

Dilpreet Kaur, a first-year student in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, praised Jacobs School faculty members in a story that aired on Spectrum News Buffalo about how medical education changed this spring.

Its definitely a difficult transition watching patient interactions on YouTube. Its not how I thought Id be doing medical school for the first year. But I think UB has done a great job integrating the programs that they had available, Kaur said.

See the original post here:
Breaking down the stats on UB's spring of distance learning - UB Now: News and views for UB faculty and staff - University at Buffalo Reporter