Dozens of institutions are cancelling in-person lessons for online teaching and even asking students to move out of campus facilities

Universities and colleges across the US are halting teaching, moving lessons online, and even asking students to move out of campus accommodation in an attempt to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Dozens of institutions – including UCLA, NYU, Yale and Princeton – are cancelling in-person lessons in favour of online teaching. Harvard and Amherst have gone as far as to ask their students to move out, disrupting the lives of thousands of students in the process.

At Harvard, where two members of the community are being tested for the virus, the plans prompted outrage after students were asked to move out with just five days’ notice and asked not to return after spring break.

In an open letter, student groups wrote: “The last several days have left me and many of my peers in a state of shock, confusion, awe, and fear … These students have not been given the time, resources or support required to comply with these directives.”

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Amherst first year student Sikkiim Hamilton, 18, was left with no option but to crowdfund the fare for her trip home to Los Angeles after she said they were given just a week’s notice to pack up and leave.

As a low-income student, she said she contacted the finance office, but was told she should take out a loan to pay for her trip and transport her luggage. Since then, she said they have offered funding, but she had already crowdfunded the approximately $400 total on social media.

She said: “They said to pack like you’re not coming back … I probably won’t be back until August because even if they do resume school, I probably wouldn’t be able to afford to fly back again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sadia Demby moves her belongings through the campus of Harvard University where students have been asked to move out of their dorms by 15 March. Photograph: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

The experience has been stressful and left her plans for the coming months in the air.

“I’m grateful that I have a family to come home to and a home to come to and that I know that at the end of the day I will be OK. But I’m just really anxious for my summer plans because I’m trying to procure some kind of internship or something to bring an income, but a lot of places in California, especially Los Angeles, are being shut down or cancelled for the time being.”

Amherst College today said they are paying for students who need financial support to get home, and that information was released by their chief financial officer 24 hours after it was announced that students should leave the campus, but that some students had already booked their travel.

An Amherst spokesperson said: “We are eager to work with this student and any others in a similar situation to provide the funds to them retrospectively that we are promising to our students with financial need.”

Even at universities and colleges where students have been allowed to remain, but were required to switch to online teaching, many said it has been a big culture shock.

Varsha Sarveshwar, 21, a senior political science major at UC Berkeley, usually spends most of her day on campus. But for the last two days her in-person lessons have been replaced with Zoom conference calls, recorded lectures and teachers’ transcripts. It has been, she said, a “significant adjustment”.

“It’s kind of interesting because we’re all sort of used to being on campus for most of the day and now we’re all kind of stuck at home which I think is a bit of a difficult thing to get used to.”

While she has people to spend time with, she is already missing her former life.

“Some students are going home because they don’t have to be here, a lot of students are going back to where they’re from. A lot of us are still here,” she said.

“But when you’re not going to class on the daily basis you’re not seeing people as often as you would, you’re not getting out of the house as often as you would. After a couple of days, that starts to get a little bit difficult, so we’re all trying to figure out how to cope with it and get used to it, because it’s possible we’re going to be dealing with this for a while.”

While she agrees with the university’s decision to suspend in-person teaching, she said “none of us like online learning, to be perfectly honest”.

Junior Cabral, 34, a psychology major at Bronx Community College, which is also switching to online teaching, agrees.

“For me it has caused high levels of anxiety because I’m very dynamic, I’m outspoken and I’m one of those people that changes the vibe of a room by stepping into a classroom,” he said.

While he understands the decision is in their best interests, he finds online learning challenging. “It is so hard because I took classes online in the past and I hate the online modules. It feels like you’re talking to a machine, you’re typing, there is no interactions with other people, there is no type of activity going on. It feels empty.”

In the final semester of his senior year, he also feels like he’s being robbed of a proper ending.

“I’m supposed to graduate. So I have this sour memory of my last day in my last semester, like ‘Oh wow, my last day in class I didn’t get the chance to say bye to anybody’. I feel like this is it.”

But for some people, the virus outbreak has led to more positive outcomes.

Just two days into online learning, Logan Miller, 27, a first-year law student at UCLA, has found he prefers it to in-person lessons and is taking the opportunity to go back home to Alaska to do his studies from there.

He said: “It gives me more flexibility for when and where I can engage with the material that we’re learning. I actually talked for the first time all semester in one of my classes yesterday. Maybe I just felt more comfortable because I was participating in the class from my apartment … It’s a less stressful environment because law school first-year classes are notoriously high stress and so to be removed from that environment actually makes it easier for me to concentrate.”