Academics during Spring Onboarding
January 15, 2021
Dear AS&E Faculty,
We write this letter to help you prepare for classes in the first part of the Spring 2021 semester, and to ask that you take the following into account in planning your courses:
- The timing of the current onboarding process for students returning to campus will require some students to be in quarantine at the start of classes. It is also possible that public health decisions, as well as travel or health circumstances related to individual students, may delay students’ ability to attend classes in person, particularly at the outset of the semester.
- As you did in the fall, please put in place contingency plans and flexibilities to account for students affected by these variables who will need to attend remotely for an undetermined time.
Resources for teaching in all modalities is available at the ETS/CELT Teaching@Tufts website: https://sites.tufts.edu/teaching/. These include sessions throughout the month of January, on features of Zoom and Canvas, virtual drop-in help sessions, in-person orientation sessions to classroom technology, online course design, online assessment, and CELT roundtables about the first day of classes and lessons learned from the fall. See below for some of these resources.
Our success in the fall semester has been due in large part to your excellence and commitment to our students. We are confident that our community is up to the challenge for the spring.
Sincerely,
James M. Glaser, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences
Jianmin Qu, Dean of the School of Engineering
Helpful resources:
Student Survey: What Worked in the Fall
CELT/ETS Training and Development Schedule
StARR Center Resources for Faculty
Classroom Technology Support
In-Person Classroom Orientations
First Time Teaching Online?
Online Course Design Tutorial on Canvas
Getting Started Teaching Online
Dual Modality Teaching Resources
Students in the Room and Students on Zoom
Teaching Tips: Dual Modality Teaching
Round table on Lessons Learned from Dual Modality Teaching January 25, 10 - 11