Guidance for course modality change requests

Now that almost everyone has or can offer online and hybrid courses, institutions have been challenged to develop decision-making processes for when courses should be offered in modalities other than face-to-face.

At Drexel, we were making these decisions in a centralized way for the past two years, but having the process emanate from the office of the provost wasn't sustainable. Starting this winter (in our quarter-system school), decisions for modality change requests will happen at department and program levels, with some college-level oversight. The university will only get involved in a big-picture way, making sure, for instance, that departments/units aren't tilting beyond a certain percentage (which happens to be 5%) of online and hybrid course offerings.

Our process manifests itself in our scheduling system, in that schedulers will be able to add an annotation in the system when choosing one of three "instructional methods" in addition to face-to-face:

• Remote synchronous
• Remote asynchronous
• Hybrid

A document guides everyone through the process, and key in that document is what we are calling "Justification Guidance"; the prime directive, if you will, is this: "Modality changes must be driven by the opportunity to improve the student experience." It's all overtly about the students; as the document says, "Faculty convenience is not a compelling rationale to request a modality change."

Justifications for change must address three primary questions:

• Why is this delivery mode better for students?
• What data has been collected or will be collected to support claims that the new modality is superior?
• When offering remote and hybrid courses, are scheduling units ensuring that students have face-to-face choices?

Data, data, data--assembling data about student experience and success is emphasized throughout.

There is flexibility, though. Courses with a long history of running in certain modalities--for example, our first-year writing courses have long been hybrids--can continue to do so. "Prestigious" non-local faculty can teach classes remotely if such opportunities present themselves. And none of this involves human resources; faculty with disability and accessibility issues will bypass this guidance and work with human resources about accommodations.

Again, our scheduling system includes a field in which schedulers will add detailed notations describing the modality change, so the history behind decision-making will be codified.

Nothing's perfect, but this system provides a transparent, equitable, and more locally-grounded way for our programs to make decisions about modality change requests.