Introduction
There are many reasons for continuing to ensure a level of flexibility in course policies and practices even as we return to “normal”. Among these are:
- As a public health best practice, people with illnesses should not attend in-person classes.
- There are a number of potential disruptions that can either temporarily prevent in-person instruction or prevent a subset of the class from making it to campus. These include, but are not limited to, fire, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
- Educational research continues to provide evidence that some level of student control/responsibility over various elements of the course (often related to self-efficacy) improves learning and course outcomes. This is especially true for minoritized students.
- Best practices related to inclusion and student mental health point to having core elements of flexibility in course design.
- Well-designed policies reduce faculty time spent on email to “negotiate” with students.
One of the key elements of flexible policies is to remove the need for “proof that an excuse is real.” The goal is to put management of life occurrences in the student’s hands and provide them options for navigating most things that come up during the quarter. It is important to be clear about this up front in the syllabus. Also, even for the most carefully designed policies, it is not possible to account for every situation, so there is always the potential for additional exceptions.
It is worth mentioning the campus’ rationale for building flexibility into the course and highlighting what flexibility is not:
- It is about equity. By having flexibility built in and clearly articulated, students do not need to utilize social capital to negotiate for “flexibility.”
- It is intended to save faculty and students time and stress by significantly reducing administrative overhead and minimizing negotiating with each student on a case-by-case basis.
- It is not a requirement to offer all courses in-person and online
There are many options for building flexibility into a course, and not all options work for every course. Therefore, the following are examples and suggestions that may apply to your course or may provide inspiration for alternative approaches that would be more appropriate.
For ease of implementation, we have prepared example syllabi and syllabi language that can be copied and used here.
Additional considerations for all of these policies may be necessary for sufficiently long-term absences. In these cases, students may have to take advantage of campus-wide policies regarding leaves of absences and other mechanisms.
For variations on these suggestions, the U. of Michigan and U. of North Carolina have good resources.
The following recommendations are organized by category:
Policies related to general deadlines/late work
A valid goal for most courses is to encourage students to learn to manage deadlines. In this regard, it is useful to distinguish between “hard” deadlines and “soft deadlines,” which is what the “real-world” consists of, and to focus on the concept of managing deadlines in the context of multiple courses and other life demands, versus meeting every deadline exactly. Possible policies that achieve these goals are:
- Having “submission windows” for assignments rather than fixed deadlines.
- Allowing a limited “grace period” for assignments that is reasonably aligned with your grading schedule and needs. Often a grace period is connected with either:
- The detail of feedback that you or your TAs intend to provide
- The timeframe in which the work is guaranteed to be graded
- Allowing a limited number of late assignments, with a fixed period in which they can be late.
- This can also be incorporated into a system where students earn “tokens” that are used for either late work or missed assignments by doing alternative assignments.
- Design assignment categories with a level of flexibility that only requires students to complete a subset of the assignments (for example, 70% of homework must be completed for full credit). This allows students to plan their schedule around other commitments and to intentionally skip assignments if needed. This is an alternative version of allowing a set number of assignments to be “dropped,” which can achieve the same goals.
Class Attendance Policies
Having policies to handle disruptions and/or life events that prevent individual students from attending class is critical, particularly if participation is expected.
- It is strongly encouraged to record appropriate portions of class time.
- For most courses, it is recommended to provide all recordings to the students. This serves two goals. First, it provides a resource that students can use to revisit the material throughout the quarter. Second, it simplifies meeting student needs when a class has to be missed, saving both the faculty and the student time.
- For situations in which providing recordings to all students is a challenge, alternatives include releasing recordings only to students that miss class. Feel free to reach out to DTEI to brainstorm other alternatives if needed.
- If attendance is part of the grade, consider allowing students to miss a fixed number of classes.
- This can be supplemented with making the class activities and/or recordings available to students.
- Allow students to replace attendance with an alternate assignment, such as a reflection on the material for that day.
- As with late assignments, missed class can be tracked with “tokens.”
- Not having any of the grade associated with attendance or work done in the class, even for cases with significant in-class activities.
- This may require alternative methods for encouraging attendance and places the burden fully on the student to engage in the class at an appropriate level.
In Class Exams
In class exams, including in-class essays, are their own category because unlike assignments, there are generally fewer in-class exams. For the foreseeable future, policies that address students in isolation for COVID, monkeypox, and other long-term illnesses, but who are still capable of taking an exam remotely will be an essential part of course design.
- Drop the lowest exam score (if there are sufficient exams). On a related note, research shows that multiple smaller exams can create a more equitable course experience compared to courses with only one large midterm and final exam.
- Leverage online exam tools to allow students to take one or more exams online versus in-person at the same time as the scheduled in-person exam.
- Allow students to miss a fixed number of exams (usually one) and provide an essay in place of the exam. For small enough courses, one could allow one exam to be replaced by an oral exam, either in-person or by Zoom.