Dear College of Engineering faculty and staff members,

I’m sure you have seen the messages from President Watkins and SVPs Reed and Good regarding the  U’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find updates here. You may also be interested to see a video explanation of the U’s response and the public health issues that led to these decisions.  

To complement the official message from the administration, I will address some questions that that have come up specific the College of Engineering’s response to COVID-19.

  • Faculty can find help for moving your course on line at http://tlt.utah.edu/covid19.php. If you need to communicate directly with a person, call the TLT help desk at 844-527-032 or go to the Canvas live Chat.
  • All faculty, staff and students who are on international travel for university-affiliated reasons (except those at our Asia Campus) are required to return home immediately.
  • The University will remain open and operational. We expect faculty and staff members to continue to do their work in their university offices through this period, except those who should work from home for legitimate health reasons. If COVID-19 is a high risk to you, please arrange with your supervisor to work from home. Steve Dean will help set up your computing environment to facilitate remote access.  
  • If you feel sick for any reason, stay home.
  • If you are returning after spring break from any location with a high incidence of coronavirus, please contact MedRed and your supervisor, and self-quarantine for two weeks by working from home. 
  • Meetings of more than 100 participants are now prohibited. Think about whether all meetings, regardless of size, require a face-to-face meeting, or whether it is practical to meet through videoconferencing.
  • While classes will all be on-line (recorded, rather than streamed), there are some laboratory experiences that are difficult to replace with an on-line version. To get an exception to the policy and still hold a lab class, please discuss with your department chair and contact me with your justification. We also need to get approval from SVP Reed and Martha Bradley.
  • You may need to schedule student access to labs in shifts so to keep the total number of student down (must be below 100).
  • Because students are being asked to stay home after spring break, we must make every effort to find an alternative to meeting in a physical lab. Students must not be penalized for heading the U’s advice to stay home, so they must somehow be accommodated. Consider, for example, whether substitute labs could be done at home, whether the lab could be videotaped by a TA with measured values given to the students for their lab reports, or whether teams could work together remotely using Skype (a realistic engineering work experience).You may need to check out lab equipment or computers to students.
  • On-line advising appointments should be made available to students. 
  • Please communicate soon and consistently with the students in your classes, so that they know your plan for the remainder of the course.
  • The university computer labs and library will remain open so that students without access at home can continue their courses.
  • Interviews for faculty candidates can continue, but use videoconferencing for any candidate who has recently lived in or traveled to a location having a high incidence of COVID-19. Group sizes should be kept modest for recruiting talks.

If you have other questions, please contact me.

Thanks for all of your extra effort during this challenging time.

Rich