At the College of the Muscogee Nation, faculty and staff carefully laid out printouts of every student’s class schedule on a table. They slipped the schedules into envelopes along with each student’s homework assignments for the next two weeks and mailed them out. It took a couple of days.
The tribal college in Oklahoma serves many students from rural areas where internet access is scant, so mail was a quick fix as the college moved online. As the coronavirus began to spread, instructors tried to safely continue teaching in person for as long as possible, but the campus is now closed until the end of the term with students taking their classes remotely to the extent they can.
For the campus community, it’s not only logistically challenging. It feels like a loss.
“The in-person, face-to-face contact is probably one of our biggest strengths here at the tribal college because of the emphasis on Muscogee culture, values and language embedded into all of the curriculum,” said Dean of Academic Affairs Dr. Monte Randall. “It’s been a challenge to move that online.”
Tribal colleges and universities – which serve more than 16,000 Native American students – have been hard hit by the coronavirus, as they try to support some of the poorest student populations in remote rural areas with limited technology and funds.
For one thing, tribal lands have notoriously spotty access to the Internet, which makes widespread online education no easy task.
In 2018, the Federal Communications Commission found that about 35% of Americans living on tribal lands don’t have broadband service compared to 8% of Americans overall. And the broadband these schools do have is often poor-quality and expensive. Tribal colleges pay between $40,000 and $250,000 per year for internet access, according to a survey by EDUCAUSE and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC).
