The De Anza Academic Senate discussed issues arising from COVID-19 student testing and complications with online learning materials on Monday. 

Regarding students who have returned to campus, Faculty Association Representative Mary Donahue brought up students’ concern over their unvaccinated peers. To be on campus, each student must show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test, but she worries about those who neglect to get tested and still show up to class.

“If an unvaccinated student shows up in our classroom, we can know to tell them ‘Hey, you can’t be here because you were supposed to have gotten that test within three days before each visit to the campus,’” Donahue said. “And that can happen each and every class session.” 

Donahue warns that these unvaccinated or untested students pose a serious health concern to other students and faculty members. She hopes the school creates a streamlined system to protect the safety of the community. 

Mae Lee,  an Asian-American studies professor, raised concerns over the disappearance of once free course materials and videos from Kanopy, an academic video service linked to De Anza’s library, and its sudden monetization of essential course content that she uses in class. 

“There’s a new model on Kanopy which is fee-based and certain videos which are popular and have high demand are easily and freely accessible to students and faculty,” Lee said. “But for videos that have smaller demand, those are fee-based.”

Wendy White, a history professor at De Anza, not only noticed the disappearance of certain content in Kanopy, but also a trend of the type of content vanishing from the database. 

“All the films that all of a sudden disappeared had a very progressive slant, dealing with issues of race, climate change, and gender,” White said. 

Both White and Lee are concerned that the lack of content in their courses will take away from their students’ learning experiences. They do not know why Kanopy changed and are currently working with the library to retrieve the materials. 

The Academic Senate will meet Monday next week to discuss solutions to these issues.