Course Planning for Fall 2022

To: Departmental Executive Officers
From: Cornelia Lang, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education
RE: Course Planning for Fall 2022

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CLAS expects that courses for fall 2022 will be scheduled in person and that very few courses will have an online or hybrid modality other than courses that already have an online (EX*) designation with Distance and Online Education.

Below are the guidelines for course planning for fall 2022:

  • Please use the values and strategies circulated by CLAS leadership at the September 27th DEO meeting to help guide your decisions around the fall 2022 curriculum.
  • Courses will be scheduled as in-person offerings in classrooms using full capacity regardless of course enrollment.
  • Courses that have been approved for EX* status (online delivery mode) will be scheduled as online courses with Distance and Online Education.
  • The available delivery modes remain as face to face (in-person instruction), online, and hybrid. Note that hybrid modality is defined as a “flexible course where students have both face to face and virtual instruction.”
  • Instructors with a pedagogical reason for selecting hybrid modality for a course should consult with the appropriate Associate Dean (graduate or undergraduate).
  • The course planner for fall 2022 closes for editing on Monday, November 1, 2021. The course planner is open for changes between Tuesday, January 17, 2022 and Tuesday, January 31, 2022. The published schedule of courses for fall 2022 will be released in MyUI on Tuesday, February 1, 2022.

CLAS is offering an opportunity for instructors of large-enrollment undergraduate courses (with enrollments of 150 students or more) to build on what was learned about effective instruction and student engagement during the pandemic and continue to offer the lecture portion of these courses in a virtual delivery mode.

For these courses, instructors may request to change the delivery mode from face to face to an online modality by making a request to the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Cornelia Lang.

Requests must include a short proposal from the course instructor that demonstrates the following key attributes of the course structure, delivery format, and plans for assessment:

    • DEO endorsement describing how the online or hybrid course delivery format will benefit the overall curriculum.
    • Learning objectives of the course aligned with the delivery format. 
    • Synchronous components integrated into the course to encourage student engagement, such as instructor-led activities before, during, and after a lecture.
    • High quality, up to date lecture recordings available for students to review.
    • A well-designed ICON site, easily navigated by students.
    • Additional student engagement activities scheduled throughout the semester, such as discussions, activities, presentations, polling, and breakout rooms. 
    • Clear communication strategies for staying in touch with students, such as a question/answer board, review sessions, group office hours, or other means that assure students that the instructor is deeply involved in the course.
    • Examples of student feedback from previous semesters in which the course lectures were delivered online. This feedback can come from ACE end of semester surveys or other types of formative or summative assessment carried out during the course.
    • A short plan for assessment of the online delivery mode (including student engagement and learning outcomes) should be included. The Office of Teaching and Learning (Analytics), Distance and Online Education, and the OTLT Center for Teaching are excellent resources for departments to consults with regarding tools and support with assessment if needed.

Requests for continuing with the online delivery mode should be sent to Associate Dean Cornelia Lang (cornelia-lang@uiowa.edu).

Requests should be received no later than Friday, October 22, 2021. Responses to these requests will be returned by Tuesday, October 26, 2021 for course planning. Please feel free to reach out to us with any questions about this process or to discuss strategies and plans for the online modality for any of your large enrollment courses. Please feel free to reach out with questions related to curricular planning for fall 2022 as well.