Message to Faculty and Staff from Provost Cecil, March 13, 2020
Good afternoon,
I wanted to follow-up yesterday’s messages from Chancellor Malhotra and President Davenport with a few additional points of interest and reminders.
As President Davenport noted, we have extended Spring Break for students until March 23. Campus remains open and faculty and staff should report to work. The extra week gives faculty an opportunity to plan for online and alternative delivery of all courses for the remainder of the semester beginning March 23.
The goal of this move to online and alternative delivery is to allow students to stay away from campus. We have encouraged students to stay away if they can, though residence halls remain open for those students who have nowhere else to go or who need to be here because they have jobs in the community. We know that with this shift many of our students will choose not return to Mankato this semester.
Thus, with the exception of unique, off-campus instructional situations like clinical experiences, student teaching, and aviation flight training, we expect that faculty will not hold on-campus classes for the remainder of the semester.
We recognize that this creates enormous challenges in areas like laboratory sciences, art studios, and performance classes and we are ready to help faculty address those challenges.
This is a public health crisis and a worldwide pandemic. It is going to require creativity and innovation in order to help our students succeed. The timing is difficult and planning for those alternative experiences needs to happen quickly. Our goal must be to create learning opportunities that, while not ideal by any measure, address our students’ needs and keep them on schedule for graduation.
As a reminder, we have created a Web site to help anyone with questions about moving classes online quickly: http://mankato.mnsu.edu/keepteaching.
We also have a support site for students who are inexperienced with online learning: http://mankato.mnsu.edu/keeplearning.
In addition, the faculty and staff of Memorial Library offer a wide variety of services that can help with the transition. Contact a librarian for more information.
If you have questions about specific kinds of learning experiences, please contact us at the Office of the Provost, provost@mnsu.edu. We will try to answer your questions or connect you with experts who can help.
Many faculty members have come forward offering their online teaching expertise to assist faculty colleagues with this shift to online and alternative delivery. I am grateful to them for their willingness to help. If you have special skills you would like to offer to help colleagues with this transition, please contact Associate Vice President Jennifer Veltsos: Jennifer.veltsos@mnsu.edu.
It has been a turbulent few weeks. I hope everyone has a restful weekend in preparation for what will be a busy time next week preparing for this shift to online and alternative delivery.
Thank you for everything you do to help our students succeed.
Kind regards,
Matt
