To: OSU Faculty

From: Alix Gitelman, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Senior Vice Provost

January 18, 2024

Dear Colleagues,

We sincerely hope you and your loved ones have remained safe during these several days of icy conditions and power outages in the Corvallis area.

We are writing with guidance about missed learning opportunities resulting from class cancellations. While we cannot ask students to attend “make-up” sessions outside of the remaining scheduled class/lab meetings, it is reasonable to expect students to meet course learning outcomes, one or more of which may be related to the material you would have covered had classes not been cancelled.

Listed below are suggestions for helping students achieve the course learning outcomes. These are just suggestions. It’s likely these suggestions will not be satisfactory in cases of missed labs or other experiential-based components of a course.

  • Share existing video content you may have created during the pandemic or for an Ecampus version of the course.
  • Consider reading guides or critical thinking questions and summaries for material not covered.
  • Explicitly point students to textbook or existing course materials missed due to the cancellations.
  • Add key elements of missed content to upcoming class sessions.
  • Reduce missed content while still achieving learning outcomes (e.g., cut out a chapter or other reading content as possible).

You should also consider more flexibility—which is not to say more leniency—in assessing learning outcomes related to the missed content. The Center for Teaching and Learning has outstanding resources, please access them as needed.

The decision to cancel classes and not pivot to remote teaching was made because not everyone is able to do that, especially on short notice. The additional challenges of K-12 closures and power outages also make remote delivery very challenging for many.

We have conferred with Associate Deans in the colleges about this message. Please reach out to them, your unit head, and colleagues for support. You can also contact the Center for Teaching and Learning for assistance.

As ever, thanks for all that you do,

Alix I. Gitelman, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Senior Vice Provost

Rick Settersten, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs

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