In planning for a new semester, consider the possibility of disruption, and how you may build resilience into your syllabus. If a mid-semester disruption should occur, prioritize your safety and well-being; then communication with your students; then accommodation of the disruption in your instruction going forward.
Environmental or public health emergencies or natural disasters can result in instructional disruptions. The Academic Senate’s Committee on Courses of Instruction (COCI) urges instructors to be as prepared as possible for such eventualities ahead of time. Adapting instruction to such an event does not require COCI approval. This document provides guidelines for instructors, intended as suggestions but not as COCI requirements. We recognize that such an event may disrupt instructors’ individual lives as greatly as it does the life of the campus; these guidelines are not intended to imply that you should go to extraordinary lengths to immediately resume teaching in the face of a crisis. We support compassion, grace, and common sense.
Planning ahead
Be sure you have relevant phone numbers saved in your phone or elsewhere. Who in the department will you call if your house burns down or some other disaster renders you unable to teach?
Maintain your gradebook in an online resource that you and your TAs can all access from any location (bCourses, Gradescope, Google Sheet), not in a locally-saved spreadsheet or on paper.
Review the campus’ safety guidelines for emergencies that may unfold while you are in the classroom. (https://teaching.berkeley.edu/teaching-guides-resources/guidance-instruc... and-emergencies)
Build resilience into your syllabi by considering the following:
- include classroom activities that can be easily converted into graded assignments.
- pre-record some lectures.
- include a statement that explains how you plan to proceed in the event of an interruption to instruction.
- Check out the various toolkits and in-person consultations on how to shape your syllabi to be responsive to various sorts of disruption provided by the Center for Teaching and Learning (https://teaching.berkeley.edu/home).
In the wake of an event
- Students and instructional support staff, including TAs, will look to you to be the authority on how the course will proceed. Communicate as soon as you are comfortable doing so, even if the picture going forward is not yet fully clear. Continue to communicate with students and staff as you develop clarity.
- Both the specific nature of the disruption and its timing within the semester will largely determine the extent to which you and your students will be able to teach and learn during the affected period, or to make up for lost instructional time afterwards.
- It may not be possible to cover all planned materials.
- Students may not be able to produce the same quality of work that they would have under normal conditions.
- Instructors will need to revise their instructional plan.
- Obtaining student input on instructional revisions is an ideal that circumstances may limit.
- Be as transparent as possible about expectations once regular instruction resumes.
- If the impact is too great for the semester to resume under normal conditions, we encourage instructors and their departments to work with students as best as possible to meet educational goals, while remaining attentive to students’ general well-being.
The specific guidelines presented in the following sections take campus closures as their point of reference, and suggest different strategies, and different degrees of flexibility, for responding to different lengths of such closures. These guidelines may be of use as well when a disruption affects an individual class but not result in full-scale campus closure. Instructors do not need to consult COCI when adapting their syllabi to unforeseen disruptions during the semester.
SPECIFIC GUIDELINES FOR CAMPUS CLOSURES CLOSURES or other ONE-TIME EVENTS LASTING ONE DAY OR LESS
- Missed material can be covered at an accelerated pace in remaining course sessions.
- Missed material can be canceled from the syllabus.
- Virtual meetings for lectures and seminars may be held. We encourage faculty to post the virtual meeting to bCourses for the benefit of students who may not be able to participate in the virtual session.
- Faculty may record a video covering the missed material for students to view asynchronously.
- If none of the above solutions are feasible–for example, if the missed session was an in-person lab, studio, or performance class using equipment or materials only available on campus– the session may be made up during RRR week. Where a session occurring only once per week is affected, and where no other means of adjusting the course schedule is deemed feasible, the remaining sessions may each be postponed by a week, and the final session rescheduled for the corresponding day of RRR week.
- If there are several lab sections per week (e.g., the same Chemistry lab with groups meeting on M, W, and F), and only one is missed, consider doubling a later lab that week to allow affected students to attend.
- Assignments due on a disrupted day can still be due if submitted electronically (through bCourses or by email to individual instructors) or postponed to the next day or class session. Instructors should however be mindful that, depending on the nature of the campus closure, some or all students may not be able to engage with the course at the same level as they would be able to during regular instruction; and that an event that disrupts internet access will prevent electronic submissions.
- Where feasible, classroom activities or discussion topics may be converted into homework assignments in order to maintain continuity during short-term campus closures.
EVENTS REQUIRING THE CANCELLATION OF MULTIPLE DAYS OF CLASS SESSIONS EQUAL TO OR LESS THAN THE EQUIVALENT OF TWO WEEKS
- COCI expects that a pivot to remote instruction will be the most feasible solution to sustain continuity of instruction during a campus closure extending over multiple days. However, some particular crises–e.g., a power outage affecting the campus and dormitories–may make remote instruction impossible, and force classes simply to be canceled.
- Some condensation or omission of course materials may be inevitable.
- For events requiring the canceling of classes for several sessions, consecutive or nonconsecutive, COCI recommends the campus provide blanket approval for classes to continue in their assigned classrooms during RRR week, where this is deemed necessary in order to compensate for essential lectures, labs, field trips, or discussion sections canceled during the term.
- In the event of complete cancellation of classes for five or fewer days, COCI recommends campus approval for make-up sessions on the corresponding days of RRR Week (e.g., if T, W, and Th were canceled, the make-up sessions should be on T, W, and Th of RRR Week) to avoid disruption of the normal weekly schedules of students and instructors (work, Updated December 2024 family, etc.).
- As noted above, however, at the same time COCI urges instructors to preserve as much of RRR Week for its intended purpose as possible, balancing students’ need for final exam preparation time with the instructional needs of their courses by using the various recommended remedies for one-day closures listed in the preceding section, singularly or in combination.
EVENTS REQUIRING THE CANCELLATION OF CLASSES FOR MORE THAN TWO WEEKS
COCI views two weeks of campus closures as the threshold at which the remedies enumerated in the above sections are likely to be insufficient to allow normal instruction to proceed. At that point, deans and central administration must decide whether to provide emergency remedies that can maintain continuity of instruction, or if the semester must be canceled.
Updated December 2024