Israel’s second-largest academic institution, the Bar-Ilan University announced on Sunday that it was moving to remote learning until the first semester comes to an end. This decision was made in light of the Omicron variant leading to an increase in cases of the coronavirus in Israel rapidly and in high numbers. In a statement, the University announced that beginning from Tuesday, they would switch to the Zoom video conferencing app in order to conduct classes and this policy will be applicable until the end of the semester on January 14th. The University said in a statement that even though the government guidelines had not changed so far, they had decided to minimize contact as much as possible to keep the contagion under control, which meant switching to Zoom.
It further elaborated that it was in contact with the Council for Higher Education and the Health Ministry in Israel. The university further added that practical training, research activities, tests and laboratory studies that had been scheduled to be conducted on campus would continue as per usual. However, the reception at administrative units and departments was also going to move online. The university also elaborated that it would send out an update in the coming days about the arrangements for examinations.
Bar-Ilan went on to say that face masks need to be used on campus diligently and that Green Pass rules would also apply on campus, which means that entry would be limited to those who have recovered from the coronavirus or have been vaccinated in the past six months. Those who test negative in the last 72 hours would also be permitted to enter. However, this change was only applicable at the main campus of the university in Ramat Gan and not the medical faculty in Safed. The statement said that the local administration in the northern city would decide their own arrangements.
No such moves have been made by other universities in Israel, including the largest one i.e. the Hebrew University located in Jerusalem. On Sunday morning, the statistics published by the Health Ministry showed that 4,197 new cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed in Israel on Saturday, a figure that was low because of reduced testing during the weekend. However, the rate of positive tests had still gone up and reached 4.57%. Likewise, Israel news also reported that the number of daily new cases, which had been less than a thousand just 10 days ago, had now reached 5,500 on Friday.
There had also been a tripling in the total number of active cases in the country. The only positive sign is the fact that serious cases have not increased at the same pace because December 22nd’s statistics show the number at 77 and had only risen to 110 by Sunday. The death toll also remained unchanged, with the last four deaths related to COVID happening on December 21st. Yifat Sasha-Biton, the Education Minister, intends to continue pushing for high school students to take physical classes as much as possible instead of switching to distance learning.
Likewise, the Education Minister will also seek to ease the traffic-light rules that are currently applicable to students from Grade 7 to 12. As per the existing rules, schools have to switch to distance learning if less than 70% of the students are vaccinated and they are located in a ‘red’ jurisdiction, meaning one that has high coronavirus infection rates. On Saturday, Sasha-Biton said that the method was resulting in too many schools being closed and she wanted the rules to be more selective like being applicable only to classes where there is a confirmed case of the coronavirus.
She said that it didn’t make sense for entire classes to have to switch to distance learning when there are no confirmed cases. But, the Health Ministry prefers to continue the existing arrangement. The spread of the virus on Sunday and Monday resulted in almost 1,500 classes switching to distance learning.
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