Additional Considerations for Remote Instruction Flexibility

[Senate]

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To:       Members, Riverside Division of the Academic Senate

Fr:        Jason Stajich
             Chair, Riverside Division of the Academic Senate

Re:       Additional Considerations for Remote Instruction Flexibility


Dear Faculty Colleagues,

As we reach the final two weeks of this Fall COVID-19 Remote quarter and the exam period I want to acknowledge the multitude of challenges many of us are facing. I also give my support for how we continue in our educational and research mission ahead.

This has been a challenging and in so many ways unimaginable quarter from just a year ago. We are grappling with immediate needs for teaching and mentoring efforts, the pull to keep research programs afloat, all in a backdrop of horror and sadness of a disease overtaking so many lives.

I want to emphasize and recognize that these challenges are not falling equally on all in our campus community. Many are caregivers with duties that range from full time child caring, home teaching, to eldercare giving. Those who are directly supporting or have family members who are doing the heavy work in clinics and hospitals right now are also undoubtedly under terrible stress, fear, and exhaustion.

As we enter the end of the quarter and exam period I encourage and support taking extra consideration for students struggling with COVID-19 directly and the broader systemic equity differences exacerbated by the pandemic.  Our student-parents may struggle to find child-care so they can attend lectures and study for exams.  Families with losses of income are under pressure both in terms of time - additional jobs might need to be worked - and in terms of mental and emotional toil the uncertainty.

I ask you to continue considering how you can provide flexibility in your classes. Recording lectures and allowing them to be viewed later is seen as a big help for students. The Undergraduate students represented by ASUCR have asked the Faculty Senate that lecture recordings be made available and I support their request for this flexibility. The http://keepteaching.ucr.edu website has information on using Yuja for uploading and storing videos which still gives you password protected access to these materials. Additional clarification to restate the copyright and ownership of the material is also being included on the keep teaching site to reiterate the rights faculty have of the material and prevention of it being used or posted anywhere outside of faculty consent.

These same pressures and challenges impact our campus staff members. Keeping these in mind as we will continue to have to adjust expectations and manage new workloads in the months ahead - as a campus we are still in a deficit of staff to support what is necessary to keep UCR's excellence to teach, learn, innovate, and thrive.

I also urge you to bring this empathy and consideration to teaching in the Winter quarter. This is referring to both how you approach students in classes, but also to give yourselves more flexibility if possible. The challenges students have for quiet spaces to learn, for student parents to have consistent child-care, and for reliable internet for test taking and lecture watching will remain. The higher disease incidence means an even higher likelihood of you and students in your classes being directly or indirectly impacted by COVID-19. These are temporary but emergency times, and I support and encourage ways to not force your instruction to fit into the norms of in-person to support your own mental health.

I thank you for caring about our students, staff, and colleagues. I wish you the best in the weeks ahead.



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