Associate Dean Van Vranken Message on Fall Instruction - 9/13/21

Fall 2021 UCI Instructors in Physical Sciences-

Here a few last-minute items for the Fall:
1. UCI’s TeachAnywhere web site reminds instructors that the campus may shift ALL instruction to remote if the COVID situation worsens. We are expecting and hoping that won’t happen, given the improvements in vaccinations (90% UG to date), awareness and preparation. Keep in mind that many large semester universities, including UC Berkeley, are well underway with in-person instruction without noteworthy problems.

2. The School and campus assume that some individual students WILL request accommodations. We HOPE that instructors of lecture classes will provide remote content (lectures, homeworks) to students who request an exception (see #3).
a. If you are using POWERPOINT, etc, for your lecture, then it should be relatively easy for you to record your live classroom lectures as you did from home over the past year.
b. If you are giving HANDWRITTEN lectures, then recording those in-person classroom lectures could be technically challenging. OIT is working to develop comprehensive instructions. In the meantime, we prepared a set of instructions for recording handwritten lectures in two formats: Zoom + Tablet or YuJa + document camera. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RipTsNFryAjxVn3k_HSPzB86dZnOHJVW-wxEqdaI51w/edit?usp=sharing

Most classrooms are open and available this week so that instructors can test their ability to record live classroom lectures.

3. If a student contracts COVID during the quarter, instructors should tell the student to contact DSC and request accommodations. If that happens, the instructor can assume that proctoring will be provided through DSC, DTEI, the Testing Center, or some other mechanism.
TeachAnywhere offers language to include in the syllabi: https://sites.uci.edu/teachanywhere/home/standard-syllabus-language/

4. Students, instructors and TAs are required to wear masks in classrooms. The campus will put masks in classrooms for students who forget.

THANKS for all of the thankless effort you invest into our students!

David L. Van Vranken
Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education, School of Physical Sciences
University of California, Irvine