Road Map to Fall 2020: Aug. 6 update

Announced at the end of May, the CU Boulder community is making preparations for a COVID-19-ready campus for the fall semester, with classes beginning on Aug. 24.

Three groups were established to assist in the implementation of the Road Map to Fall 2020:

• COVID-19-Ready Campus Team

• Academic Instruction Team
• Resource Alignment Team

These teams are hard at work building the infrastructure and procedures that will be necessary to mitigate risk and facilitate research and teaching this fall. As part of this iterative process, the teams are committed to sharing regular updates on their progress.

News from the COVID-19-Ready Campus Team

• With plans to reopen the campus at a greater capacity, Medical Services will open a health clinic at the Wardenburg Health Center on Monday, Aug. 10.  The clinic will serve the health and safety needs of students by providing COVID-19 testing; isolation and quarantine support and management; case investigation; and contact tracing for the CU Boulder campus community. Faculty and staff identified through campus contact tracing as needing testing will be contacted by Medical Services to review testing options.     
• The campus continues to focus on plans for the testing of residence hall students at move-in. Students who are moving onto campus on Aug. 8 or later are required to complete a COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, test within five days prior to arriving on campus. This COVID-19 PCR test result should be negative for COVID-19 to support the safety of our students and community. For students who need testing or have not received their test results, CU Boulder will offer rapid and PCR testing. Most students will move in Aug. 17 through Aug. 21, and the testing site during this week will be the CU Events Center. 
• Facilities Management teams are beginning to implement reduced density measures in classrooms by spacing furniture and marking off seats not to be used.  
• The facilities task force cleaning subgroup ordered 250 additional hand sanitizer dispensing units and liquid. 
• Striping for bikeways has begun to help promote physical distancing on campus pathways and provide clearly marked alternative transportation options with the significant reduction in density on buses. 
• The outdoor/transportation demand management subgroup finalized locations of open-air tents to be used as multiuse spaces. Installation will begin on Aug. 10.  
• The access control subgroup established protocols for building access for the fall. In general, most buildings will be locked, and all CU Boulder students, faculty and staff will have Buff OneCard access to all academic buildings (from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday-Friday) where active teaching is scheduled.   
• The Protect Our Herd campaign will begin amplifying Boulder County Public Health campaign stories and ramp up CU Boulder content highlighting student, staff and faculty stories during the pandemic, including, for example, a story about the daily health form requirement published in CU Boulder Today. The campaign will also roll out a toolkit of approved campus images for use by campus communicators.  
• The Student Recreation Center is set to open on Monday, Aug. 10, for students only. Access for faculty and staff will be re-evaluated in September.  
• The CU Children’s Center is set to reopen on Monday, Aug. 10.  
• More than 1,200 first-year students registered for early dropoff of their belongings at residence halls. This new offering will help reduce density during move-in week by allowing students to drop off, but not unpack, belongings in their rooms ahead of their scheduled move-in dates.  
• Student Affairs continues to seek volunteers to register to help with move-in activities Aug. 17 to Aug. 25. This is a particularly critical need this year as volunteer roles are open only to current students, faculty and staff because of campus health and safety guidelines. 

News from the Academic Instruction Team

• This week, the academic instruction team is publishing edition No. 5 of guidance for deans, chairs and directors to share with their faculty and other instructional personnel. This edition of guidance is primarily devoted to helping individual faculty manage their in-person, remote and online classrooms and their on-campus work in the fall 2020 semester. Topics include: the return-to-campus procedure; requesting further class schedule changes; attendance and waitlist procedures; syllabus and assessment planning (syllabus statements, fall calendar, exams, thesis defenses, etc.); and numerous topics having to do with the COVID-19 classroom, including classroom safety, student behavior, faculty or student illness and quarantine and effective teaching while wearing masks and with physical distancing. In addition, this edition includes updates on class scheduling and room assignments, international student class registration and Office of Information Technology, or OIT, services. 
• The fifth edition of academic instruction guidance will be accompanied by two one-page reference sheets requested by numerous faculty and students covering:
  • What to do about student illness and quarantine in the COVID-19 era.
  • Guidance for your in-person classroom: Student behavior related to COVID-19 mitigation.
• As is normally the case, the Office of Undergraduate Education will send required syllabus statements to all instructional faculty about two weeks before the semester begins. The statement on classroom behavior has been revised to specify that campus policy applies to behavior in any teaching modality or type of classroom, whether online, remote or in person.
• New student enrollment windows were open through Friday, July 31. As of Monday, Aug. 3, all new and continuing students are able to enroll and further modify their class schedules. Open enrollment, which includes Continuing Education ACCESS students, begins Monday, Aug. 10. Graduate student enrollment has remained open all summer.
• Data from the Office of the Registrar indicate about half of CU Boulder’s fall 2020 classes are fully or partly in-person in teaching modality. As of July 30, CU Boulder had 6,062 classes scheduled for fall 2020 (not including thesis/dissertation hours, field experiences, internships, independent study, research sections, classes at Colorado Mesa University and Continuing Education and B3–Coursera for-credit–sections. Of these, 1,379 (23%) are completely in-person; 1,498 (25%) are hybrid in-person; and 3,185 (53%) are completely online or remote. (Percentages do not add up to 100% due to rounding.) In other words, 48% of fall 2020 classes include an in-person component and the rest are entirely online/remote. 
• As of July 30, about 90% of undergraduate students already enrolled for fall 2020 were signed up for classes with an in-person component as part of their course load. About 10% were signed up for exclusively remote/online courses.
• The offices of the provost, registrar, space optimization and information technology have been in regular coordination and communication to identify new instructional spaces that meet health and safety standards, have required minimum capacities and are accessible. OIT has increased the number of remote-capable classrooms tenfold from spring 2020, with 406 classrooms scheduled to be remote-capable. A list of all instructional spaces for fall 2020, including their COVID-19-adjusted capacities and hybrid technology availability, is available on the Office of the Registrar and OIT websites. See an up-to-date list of hybrid-capable classrooms.

News from the Resource Alignment Team

• The team confirmed the purchase of 250 additional stand-mounted hand sanitizing stations that can be relocated around campus as needed, and 200 cases of liquid hand sanitizer to refill the stations. These products will arrive the week of Aug. 10. 
• The team approved an initial order of 5,016 clear masks for campus-wide requirements associated with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, compliance purposes.
• Items for ongoing discussion include: facilities services coordination with auxiliary units whose spaces will be used for academic purposes; tech updates in specific campus units; anticipated cleaning and testing supplies for the spring 2021 semester; spring space needs; ergonomic accommodations for at-home work; specific personal protective equipment items for higher-risk activities such as music, theater, dance and studio environments. 

Do you have a question or comment about implementation team work on the Road Map to Fall 2020? Submit a question or comment.