Quantifying the Effects of COVID-19 on UofT Staff & Students
By Sharon Alex, Yunni Qu, Faiza Robbani, Charles Swaney and Yushu Zou
Published July 23, 2023
1. Research Results
COVID-19, a global pandemic, first made its way into Canada in early 2020, permanently altering the lives of millions of Canadians. Almost immediately, there were heated debates over the ramifications of an entirely remote workforce. Our project was designed to quantify the effects of COVID-19 on UofT staff and students as they relate to working, learning, and attending conferences in-person vs. online. As a result, we divided our research into two parts. In the first part of the study, data was collected via surveys administered to students and staff at UofT. The second part of our study used data already available in an open-source format from the American Math Society. This paper will focus on the time and energy that both UofT students and faculty would save if they were to work and study from home. Specifically, we attempted to answer the following questions: Referring to the time spent commuting, how much time could be saved by working at home? Referring to the energy saved on the different methods of transportation used by our survey respondents, how much energy could be saved by learning at home? Our target population was staff and students from each campus of the University of Toronto. We administered a survey of relevant questions that were sent out via Google Forms to this population. The data collection process resulted in 151 responses from students and 17 responses from staff and faculty. The students that responded to our survey were mostly from the UTSC campus, with a small minority from St.George and UTM campuses. The staff/faculty members on the other hand were entirely from the UTSC campus. The survey indicated that the majority of the student respondents took public transport as their main form of transportation. Half of the staff/faculty used their own personal vehicles with the other half using a combination of public transit and bicycles. Despite the majority of respondents to our survey saying they would be highly likely to work/learn from home if given a choice, a large number did not. This is due to personal preferences, with many factors affecting these choices. Depending on their preferences, some people place greater emphasis on being social, while others prefer to stay at home to save valuable travel time. The following graphs (Figures 1 & 2) show roughly the time it took for students to commute to and from campus. We have a unimodal distribution where the value representing the highest point is also the most frequently occurring value in our data set. Most of the values lie within an interval of [0,100] minutes. This means that on average, students spent 82.32 minutes daily, with the average commute times for public transit being much higher than any other form of transportation.
The third graph (Figure 3) above shows that most students were on campus 4 to 5 days each week. This means that given an option to learn at home, they would have saved approximately 5-7 hours weekly on their commute. We already mentioned that a majority of the students took public transport, which consumes less energy than private modes of transport. However, the students that did take personal vehicles spent on average $78.90 weekly to commute to campus. Then for $78.90 you get approximately 43 litres of gasoline, and burning this much fuel generates 98.90 kilograms of CO2 emissions on average. The first two graphs (Figures 4 & 5) below tell us the amount of time it took faculty members to commute to and from campus. The average total time spent commuting for faculty was around 85 minutes, with outliers of 165 to 180 minutes. As with the student survey, the third graph (Figure 6) indicates that the majority of staff/faculty members worked on campus for 4 to 5 days a week. This means that they would also have saved approximately 5-7 hours a week if there had been an option to work from home.
As mentioned before, half of the faculty members took a personal mode of transportation, which consumes far more energy than public transportation, walking, and cycling. Faculty survey respondents spent a weekly average of $72.70 commuting to campus. Then for $72.70 you get approximately 40 litres of gasoline, and burning this much fuel generates 92 kilograms of CO2 emissions on average. To perform this calculation we used the price of 1 litre (1/4 gallon) of gas in Toronto, which was CAD$1.82 on March 19, 2023. This average was based on 34 price points. Our study communicated clear answers to the questions we were trying to answer; however, there is still room for improvement. Our survey for UofT staff members was only completed by seventeen respondents, and if there had been a larger sample size, the results might have been different. Additionally, all 17 of our respondents were from the UTSC campus, which means that if the other two campuses were included, we could have gotten more diverse results. While our study focused solely on quantifying the time and energy saved by online learning, the future direction of this project could focus on answering subsequent questions that arise from these results. It is evident from our study that students do on average save time commuting by remote learning. However, how much of this time is being used productively? It is also important to be aware of the potential differences in time saved based on their proximity to campus. The question of how much time is saved commuting becomes less significant the closer to campus they live. These comparisons could be explored through a large-scale data collection process. Additionally, we could expand this study to consider the following: How effective is remote learning and what are some of its drawbacks? One potential route for analyzing the effectiveness of remote learning would be to conduct a comparative study between remote and in-person learning.
The same approach could be applied to analyzing how productive it is for staff members to work from home vs. in person. Our study concluded that on average, students who commute to campus save a significant amount of time if they are given the option to attend lectures remotely. For the staff and students who commute via personal vehicle, they save time and money if there is a hybrid option in place. Additionally, staff and students who travel by private vehicle conserve a significant amount of energy in terms of CO2 emissions if given the option to work from home. However, it is crucial to recognize that there are some obvious drawbacks to working and learning entirely from home. Although remote learning has its advantages, not all subjects are compatible with this type of learning environment. Courses that require hands-on experience, in-person interaction, and access to specialized equipment are not suitable for remote learning. Similarly for remote work, faculty/staff members may need help with creating a feasible structure and routine that a traditional office environment provides. While it is understood that working/learning remotely every day of the week is not feasible, having a hybrid option in place for 1-2 days a week can be beneficial to both faculty/staff and students in maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
2. References/Links
1. Canada, Natural Resources. “Links between Fuel Consumption, Climate Change, Our Environment and Health.” Natural-Resources.canada.ca, 21 Apr. 2009, natural-resources.canada.ca/energy/efficiency/communities-infrastructure/transportation/idling/4419.
2. Canada, Natural Resources. “Fuel-Consumption-Guide.” Natural-Resources.canada.ca, 30 Apr. 2018, natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-efficiency/transportation-alternative-fuels/fuel-consumption-guide/21002.