Weekly Briefing from Provost Riley

March 18, 2020

Welcome to our first weekly briefing from the Offices of the Provost and Executive Deans (it could become bi- or other-weekly), which will provide you with updates on processes and policies, tips for teaching and advising, and other relevant news important to faculty. This is a team effort with support from ITS and our Online team and many others.

We appreciate your ongoing dedication to the College and to our students in these challenging times, and we share those difficulties of balancing our personal lives with that work. Please remember to take care of yourselves.

Some updates:

A.    Advisement and registration for students will be pushed back one week (beginning with advisement for graduate and Online students effective March 30 rather than March 23) and with the sequence otherwise preserved. Class schedules for students in Web Advisor will be available on March 26. Please see the attached revised schedule.

B.    Remember to check the Carry On Teaching page that went live last week. It provides an abundance of resources for teaching remotely; remember, you do not need to have a perfect site in Canvas and you certainly are not expected to have mastered online instruction at this point. Training opportunities can be found here.

C.     The Carry On site will soon have an additional area for student advising, which will provide ideas and tips on how to remotely advise students, as well as updates on processes for registration (e.g., lifting academic holds).

D.    The search for our two new Executive Deans is currently suspended. We narrowed the pool to four finalists for each position and were planning campus visits for each; all of the candidates remain interested in us, and are aware of our campus situation. We will consult with you as we make decisions about how to proceed.

E.     Live chats with Technology Education provide opportunities to join a chat session to answer quick questions regarding Canvas.

F.     In partnership with the Office of Information Technology Services, the Director of Online Learning, the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning and the Faculty Technology Committee, we will host small group chats to engage in casual conversations about how faculty can be best supported to "Carry On" Teaching.

These 30 minute sessions will be held via Zoom and will be limited to six faculty members per session to foster better communication. We hope to get information from you about what tools you are using to transition your face-to-face class sessions to an online format and listen to your questions and challenges in doing so. While we may not have all of the answers to your questions, we want to support you at this challenging time.

Please feel free to contact the Executive Deans, who have been tirelessly working on our behalf, with questions: Raymond at [email protected] or Eileen at [email protected]. Finally, please watch for additional updates in the coming weeks.