July 22, 2020 Update: COVID-19
Fall Update #6: Understanding Your Course Schedule
Dear Students,
Your preliminary course schedule is now viewable in Student Planning. We’ve developed two videos to help you access and understand your schedule:
On August 3, you will receive an email with more specific details about each of your classes. We encourage you to log into Student Planning weekly to review your schedule as we will make additional changes over the course of the summer. Your Academic Specialist in the Registrar’s Office is available to help you if you would like to make any changes to your schedule.
The following details will help you understand your schedule:
Flex-Hybrid Fully Virtual: Courses listed as “Flex-Hybrid Fully Virtual” will be taught virtually; however, there may be an optional classroom-based component to the class. Some examples include:
- a classroom is reserved for students to use to log into the virtual instruction;
- the instructor is available for students to ask questions in-person about pre-recorded materials;
- a classroom is available for students to work on group projects.
Your class syllabus will indicate if there is a classroom component to the course design.
Flex-Hybrid Mixed: These courses will have a mix of in-person classroom and virtual instruction. Students who opt to participate from home will be able to access the in-person elements of the class remotely.
Class Split: The capacity of each classroom has been updated to allow for 6 feet of social distancing, which limits the number of classes where all of the students can meet in-person at the same time. In some cases, the faculty have split their course into two groups, so each student group can have an in-class experience once a week. For example, a class that would normally meet twice a week, such as Tuesdays and Fridays, may have a classroom assignment on one day and virtual instruction will be indicated on the other.
Class Time Stagger: In order to reduce the density of student, faculty, and staff movement between classes, we will be staggering the start/end times of our courses. After carefully considering a variety of options and collaborating with the Faculty Senate Leadership, the SGA President, Adjunct Union Leadership and the Registrar’s Office, we defined the following plan to stagger the start/end times of our courses:
- Every other classroom on a building’s floor will have an alternative start/end time.
- The start/end time between classrooms will be staggered by 10 minutes.
- Classes will start earlier in the day, moving from the original 8:30 AM to 8:00 AM or 8:10 AM.
- Evening classes scheduled to start at 5:30 PM will now start at 6:00 PM or 6:10 PM and will end at 8:55 PM or 9:05 PM.
The start and end times for many of our afternoon classes—our most popular class periods—will be impacted by only 10 minutes or not at all, while morning classes and evening classes—our least popular class times—will only be adjusted by 30 minutes. We believe these changes meet our goal of causing the least disruption for the fewest people, although we regret that the earlier start and end time for some classes may negatively impact some students and faculty. You will see these adjustments in future iterations of your schedule.
Thank you for your patience as we worked to define the fall schedule in the midst of a rapidly evolving environment. Please do not hesitate to reach out to your Academic Specialist with any questions.
Sincerely,
Tara Arneson
Registrar
