COVID-19 Campus Mitigation Plan / Teaching and Travel

March 11, 2020

Dear Arizona Staff,

I am writing to follow up on President Robbins’ email of this evening with more details on the COVID-19 mitigation plan.

Our top priority is your health and safety. We are working to balance that with the need to support our students’ academic goals, and, to the best extent possible, continue to deliver life-changing educational experiences.

Important: Staff who are at risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19 infection should consider moving to performing their job duties remotely, effective Monday, March 16.  Please work directly with your supervisor to make such arrangements and consult with Human Resources as necessary.

As you will have seen in President Robbins’ email, the start of classes has been delayed until Wednesday, March 18, to allow us some time to move away from in-person instruction. Effective immediately, we have asked all faculty and instructors to devise and implement strategies for transforming their in-person classes into distance/remote/online modes of delivery. All available campus resources will be directed to support them in this effort. The University will reassess the situation not later than April 6.

 

Instructional delivery changes

  1. The Office of Instruction and Assessment will lead campus efforts for the migration. Look for a message from OIA shortly.
  2. Faculty / Instructors who are at risk of becoming seriously ill from COVID-19 are the highest priority for support in moving to remote instruction.
  3. Faculty / Instructors who are able to readily move classes to remote learning (on-line or other forms of non face-to-face teaching) are encouraged to do so as soon as possible.
  4. The deadline for migrating classes to remote learning modes is Monday, March 23.
  5. Special accommodations will be made for labs and studio classes, working collaboratively with the faculty / instructors involved – approval by College Associate Deans for Academic Affairs required.
  6. Changes in the delivery of classes and syllabi will be communicated by faculty directly to their students.

Also, next week, staff, faculty and instructors will be prepared to offer reasonable accommodations for students who are concerned about their own health and safety, or who have self-quarantined.

 

Travel limitations

Please limit the number of individuals from any given unit attending any one event, to reduce the risk of wide-spread disruption to campus operations.  International travel and out-of-state travel will be strongly restricted. We encourage you to use alternatives for virtual meetings, such as ZOOM, Skype, Go To Meeting, etc.  Essential travel must be approved by the Dean/Director and the SVP for the reporting line. As appropriate, a risk review will be completed by the International Travel & Safety Oversight Committee.

 

Campus Climate

We ask for your help in promoting calm communications across campus.

The University’s Critical Incident Response Team (CIRT) is closely monitoring the changing circumstances of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and the impact to our community, and together we are making decisions to ensure the health and safety of all students, faculty, and staff. Please encourage people to read the updates on the Campus Coronavirus website.

I appreciate your dedication and support at this challenging time. My hope is that at the end of this we all will be proud that we kept teaching and our students kept learning.

 

Regards,

Liesl Folks, PhD, MBA
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost