Fall 2020 Planning

Thank you again for all of your hard work and dedication that led to a smooth end to the semester. These last few months have been unique in their challenges and you have all done a wonderful job rising to the occasion.

A rather long email follows, which is intended to provide you with a fuller picture of the planning for Fall 2020, which is ongoing. There will be an opportunity to discuss this in your colleges and during a virtual forum that I will hold on Monday, May 11th.

We are now deeply engaged in planning for Fall 2020 and I need to ask you again to go above and beyond to ensure that we continue to offer a first-rate education to our students, maintain enrollment, and help us move through what are going to be some difficult financial times – all while we work to protect the health and safety of our students, faculty, and staff. At this time, we expect that for Fall 2020, classes at UIC will be divided between live and remote instruction.
What follows does not apply to the Colleges of Dentistry, Medicine, Nursing, Law, or Pharmacy.

The committee that is looking into this planning is doing three main tasks:

• Recommending what classes will be on-campus and what class will be remote/online in Fall 2020
• Recommending resources to assist faculty in building robust and well-designed remote and online classes
• Understanding the student perspective on these issues

Here is the current plan:

1. Faculty who are scheduled to teach lecture courses in Fall 2020 that enroll more than 70 students will teach these courses asynchronously online. This means that all lectures must be recorded ahead of time, preferably in digestible chunks alongside other content and activities that help students structure their learning around their schedules. These classes will not be taught at a regular class time in a remote fashion, as classes were taught during the 5-weeks of remote instruction in March and April 2020. However, these classes may be hybrid insofar as they have live on campus lab sections, or faculty take the opportunity to teach discussion and review sessions synchronously. I am asking faculty who teach these large lecture classes to dedicate significant time this summer to achieve this goal, which could take up to 8 hours per week for 12 weeks. In order to assist you with adapting your lecture classes to an asynchronous mode, we will provide resources described more fully below.
2. Classes that have been identified by the college deans, in consultation with department heads, as having learning goals that require live instruction will be scheduled to be live on campus if at all possible. These include many lab classes and sections Additionally, all first-year students will have at least one class that is held live on campus in order to build a connection to the campus and a sense of community with their new peers. To the extent possible, live classes will be recorded so students who cannot come to campus can continue their progress.
3. The other classes that will be taught live on campus will be determined based on the type and amount of space available and recommendations provided by the Colleges. The Office of the Registrar is working very hard to model the possibilities. More information about the live classes, and the ability of faculty to opt-out for health reasons, will be forthcoming soon. All of the planning for on-campus classes takes into account social distancing and other safety precautions as required by state law and recommended by the CDC and our own experts from UI Health. If at some point these requirements change and it is not safe to have classes on campus, all classes will pivot to a remote platform.
4. All other classes not designated as live on-campus classes will be taught remotely. Resources will be provided for all faculty teaching remotely, whether asynchronously or synchronously. All remote synchronous classes will have to be recorded so that students who are not able to attend a class have access to the material.
5. We are going to ask faculty teaching remotely to utilize a standard template for designing courses in Blackboard. The only exception to this will be for faculty who have already created and taught their class asynchronously.The standard template provides students with a seamless user experience. This approach is aligned to evidence-based best practices for delivering high-quality online learning. By minimizing student-success barriers related to an inconsistent course template experience, students instead can turn their full attention to what matters most: your learning goals, subject matter and curriculum. Although the standard course template will help students more easily understand how to navigate Blackboard, Zoom, Webex or other course materials when accessing content online, it does not in any way dictate the content and curriculum that you are creating and delivering.
6. The General Rules Concerning University Organization and Procedure allow the university in these particular circumstances not to exercise its ownership rights over the intellectual property that faculty create for Fall 2020 online and remote classes, including online or remote course material, recordings of lectures, discussion questions, etc. This is the course we are planning to follow for Fall 2020, given this unique situation.

The main rationale behind this plan is, as stated above, to offer a first-rate education to our students, maintain enrollment, and help us move through what are going to be some difficult financial times, while we protect the health of our students, faculty, and staff. More specific reasons for moving all large lecture classes to an asynchronous, online platform are listed below. Many of these reasons also apply to the need for all remote classes, whether asynchronous or synchronous, to utilize the templates in Blackboard. The reasons are as follows:

1. Lecture classes by their very nature, are well suited for online instruction, as the didactic coursework provides faculty an opportunity to reconceptualize delivery into shorter pre-recorded, relevant and well-packaged, video-collections of core content. Doing so allows students the opportunity to access, replay or reengage with essential curriculum in a manner that suits individual learning styles as well as the goals of larger, lecture course formats.
2. Providing students with the best possible remote learning requires offering classes that are designed as online or remote classes, not as live classes that are simply moved to a remote platform.
3. Offering large lecture classes asynchronously will allow students and faculty to have some flexibility in their daily schedules, which may involve work and significant family responsibilities and unavoidable distractions at home.
4. Taking the large lecture classes off the scheduling grid will provide more flexibility for scheduling on-campus classes at times that are most beneficial for students, including during times that do not require students to use public transportation during peak hours.
5. Making a large set of classes asynchronous will ease the burden on international students who are not able to be in Chicago for the Fall 2020 semester.
6. Learning how to adapt a class to asynchronous online delivery is an opportunity that will open up new ways to teach and will help faculty be more versatile in their course offerings going forward.

I will be holding a forum for faculty to discuss this planning on Monday, May 11, from 10:30 – Noon. More information on that will follow.

Resources & Support for Faculty:

• Faculty will be assigned a Graduate Student “course builder” who will support them in developing an asynchronous online course.
  • Faculty are still responsible for generating the content for their course.
  • Graduate students will assist faculty with Blackboard and all other online teaching tools.
  • Graduate students will support the development of the course in Blackboard by populating content areas and organizing digital content.
    • Graduate students will start May 18th.
      • Week of May 18th: Training with ACCC
      • Week of May 25th: Begin Illinois Online Network (ION) online course titled “Overview of Online Instruction.”
    • In early June, faculty will meet with their graduate student to review the course and discuss plans.
    • In June, July and August, faculty will meet weekly with their graduate student to develop the course.
• Faculty will utilize a pre-built template in Blackboard to structure their online courses.
• Faculty will have the opportunity to complete the Illinois Online Network (ION) online course titled “Overview of Online Instruction.”
  • Date of the course:
    • June 8 to July 3
  • Time commitment
    • 3 to 4 hours a week for 4 weeks, includes 1 hour weekly synchronous zoom sessions
• Faculty will have the opportunity to meet with an ACCC Instructional Designer for a one-on-one consultation on their course.
• Faculty will have access to a self-paced 1 hour tutorial covering the basics of teaching online.

Graduate Students:

• Graduate students will have a fulltime, 3-month appointment to support 8 courses OR a part-time, 3-month appointment to assist with a designated number of courses.
  • In early June, faculty will meet with their graduate student to review the course and discuss plans.
  • In June, July and August, faculty will meet weekly with their graduate student to develop the course.
• Graduate students will be hired by the college and managed by ACCC.
• Graduate students will receive ongoing training from ACCC.
  • Training will start May 18th
• Graduate students will complete the Illinois Online Network (ION) online course titled “Overview of Online Instruction.”
  • Date of the course:
    • May 25 to June 19
  • Time commitment
    • 3 to 4 hours a week for 4 weeks, includes 1 hour weekly synchronous zoom sessions

I look forward to discussing this plan with you on Monday and in the coming weeks.

Sincerely,

Susan Poser
Provost