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Infectious disease outbreaks bring new challenges to campus operations at institutions of higher education (IHEs). At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a precaution against COVID- 19 transmission on their campuses, many colleges and universities shifted to entirely remote courses in the Spring 2020 semester. As these institutions prepared for the Fall 2020 semester, their administrations evaluated the extent to which remote courses should continue. While remote courses may reduce the number of students who interact on campus and thus mitigate the risk of disease spread, there are academic and financial downsides. With de-identified enrollment, course schedule, and student profile data from the Fall 2019 semester at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), we construct a co-enrollment network, which is a representation of student connections through courses. In this co-enrollment network, we observe the small-world property in which the average path length among reachable student pairs is small and nearly all students are connected to each other in the main component of the network. We also see high connectivity between different majors. Then, we apply various hybrid instructional mode strategies to this co-enrollment network and analyze their effects. Although these strategies result in decreased health risk, they do not remove the small-world property. When comparing the strategies from a health perspective, we find the size, centrality, and hybrid split strategies to be the most favorable. Even under these strategies, the percentage of on-campus students that could be exposed rises quickly with initial infection rates. When comparing the strategies from an academic perspective, we find the subject code strategies to be the most favorable. We also consider the impacts of these strategies on various groups of students. In general, we see more academic burden for lower-level students than upper-level students. In addition, we find that strategies with more remote courses result in less differences in health risk and academic burden between these groups. Regarding the trade-off between health risk and academic burden, the only strategy which is suboptimal under all scenarios in this study is the 1000s and 4000s only strategy. However, campus administrators may prefer this strategy if the in-person experience for first- year students and seniors is priority. They may prefer the subject code strategies if distributing the remote courses evenly across students of all majors is priority. We compare these strategies from both health and academic perspectives, by their effects on various groups of students, and based on the trade-off between health risk and academic burden, to inform IHEs’ responses to infectious disease outbreaks. |
