Posts tagged as “Coronavirus”

Dear University of Oregon Faculty, As you are probably aware, the coronavirus situation is changing quickly as COVID-19 spreads and there is a lot of concern about how it may potentially disrupt our campus. The UO has fully activated the Incident Management Team (IMT), which is reviewing and updating the…

In 2009. The response of former SVP Russ Tomlin to the 2009 swine flu is below. I don’t know why our Chief Resiliency Officer has not done this yet for the coronavirus. You’d think he’d have buckets of basics like this stashed away, along with crowbars for extricating faculty from…

No panic yet, (although see the change.org petition from students here) and the university has processes in place for an orderly response, at least in terms of classes and grades, and it’s under the control of the faculty and Senate.

The Academic Continuity Policy was passed by the Senate and adopted by the University Administration last year, and is designed to cover situations like this. The gist is that, after the University President declares an Emergency, the Senate’s Academic Council can declare a “Significant Academic Disruption” and authorize an “Academic Continuity Plan” which could authorize emergency grades, etc:

• The Academic Continuity Plan shall include provisions for continuation of academic activities and awarding of grades. Because a Significant Academic Disruption will affect academic activities differently across campus, the academic continuity plan shall provide a range of options which maintain academic integrity, transparency for students, and fairness for students as described above. These might include alternative instructional times and methods, use of online technology for instruction and assignments, modified assignments, extended deadlines, exceptions to prerequisites and grade requirements, etc.
• Department heads, under the direction of their Dean, will coordinate implementation of the academic continuity plan with instructors in their unit.

It’s at https://policies.uoregon.edu/vol-2-academics-instruction-research/ch-1-curriculum-instruction/academic-continuity-and-emergency and the full text is below, followed by a message from the Provost.