May 8, 2020

This message is sent from your Faculty Senate leaders, the UM president and the UM provost to all faculty, staff, administrators and affiliates. Although this information may not apply to you directly, we feel it is important you be informed about how UM is preparing to deliver instruction in the fall.

Dear Faculty,

As your Faculty Senate leaders, president and provost, we are deeply grateful for how hard you have worked to adjust to the changes COVID-19 has brought our campus, community and nation. This work has occupied a non-trivial amount of time and energy, both intellectual and emotional. You have not only made possible our students’ continued learning but also simultaneously transitioned to working from home, supporting family and friends who are working or studying through this transition and facing a host of other uncertainties.

We recognize the toll this work has taken on each of you, and we appreciate every expression of determination we have seen and heard from you, our colleagues, during the past two months. We’ve each had to dig deep within ourselves to remain positive and steadfast for one another, our students and the broader community. Truly, we are in this together.

Yesterday, you received an email outlining the University’s work to prepare for the fall. We want to share some more detailed information to help you plan your courses for the fall semester. Throughout the summer, you will continue to receive updates on campus plans to ensure a productive environment for working and learning next fall.

While we continue to face uncertainty, we are planning a successful return to in-person instruction for the fall.

A team of our colleagues has spent the past few weeks considering in detail the best ways forward for the fall. The mission-based team has highlighted the importance of offering in-person instruction for the fall whenever and wherever possible. Alongside colleagues on the MUS Healthy Fall 2020 Task Force and the UM Health Advisory Committee, which includes faculty in our School of Public and Community Health Sciences, we are in the process of planning for this transition back to in-person instruction.

Given the imperative that we deliver some form of in-person instruction, the mission-based team has recommended that faculty build high flexibility into their fall courses.

This will allow us to respond to changing conditions and account for health concerns, possible restrictions regarding classroom spacing or group sizes and anticipated changes in student decision-making.

Building this flexibility into our course delivery will allow us to:

• mitigate the spread of COVID-19 by allowing us to avoid large gatherings;
• provide a contingency if there is a large COVID-19 outbreak in the fall;
• provide options for students who cannot (or don’t want) to learn in a face-to-face setting due to health or other reasons; and
• provide options for faculty who cannot teach face-to-face due to health concerns.

Building flexibility into fall courses will require a concerted and communal effort by faculty as they adjust their courses and place course resources online. Faculty will be supported in their efforts to do this important work.

The spirit of resilience, resourcefulness, cooperation and determination that has carried us through this spring semester must continue into the fall semester if our students and we are to be successful during this challenge. We all surely need some time to rest and recuperate, but we must also recognize that this crisis will continue to affect and challenge us in unpredictable ways.

The Office of Organizational Learning and Development and UMOnline will offer video tutorials, faculty peer discussions, samples and other resources especially designed for you. Please look for more information about resources and opportunities via email as well as on the UMOnline and OOLD websites in the coming weeks.

If you have additional ideas for how UM can support you in your efforts to transition your classes to a flexible, hybrid model, please communicate those ideas with us.

While we know faculty are always updating their courses to maintain quality and meet student needs, we recognize that for some, the transition to a more flexible model will require additional time and attention. We are deeply grateful for your willingness to build contingency into your course preparation as a way to serve our students during this unusual time.

It is important that each of us recognizes the power of our own positivity in our classrooms, whether we express that virtually or face-to-face. We believe that our students are best served by our candid acknowledgment that despite the current circumstances, the UM community is making solid plans. Those plans will need to be inherently flexible, allowing us to serve our students and the campus community, which is at the heart of all we do.

With gratitude,

Chris Palmer, Faculty Senate Chair
Kimber McKay, Faculty Senate Chair-elect
Seth Bodnar, President
Jon Harbor, Provost