Support Center

There are many tools and techniques for teaching in an online environment. Faculty members are free, as always, to experiment. Nonetheless, we recognize that the shift from in-person to remote teaching represents a big change for most Trinity faculty members -- and for most students. We’re trying to keep things simple for everyone involved. If you and your students understand that you are all expected to gather, remotely, at a regularly scheduled class time, that shared understanding will bring some clarity and simplicity to a potentially chaotic situation.

To repeat, faculty members remain free to experiment with tools and methods. Under normal circumstances, instructors might record mini-lectures in a "flipped" classroom environment, break up students into small-group discussions, create online discussion forums, and so forth. Guidance from Academic Affairs is not meant to discourage that normal level of experimentation and variation. Nonetheless, we need to preserve the overall quality of the Trinity experience. Generally speaking, under normal circumstances, we expect an instructor to meet their class at the regularly scheduled time. Generally speaking, in an online environment, that expectation holds.

Zoom is Trinity's preferred web conference tool. Available to faculty and students, you can use Zoom to connect and collaborative online with your students during your regular class times. Check out the Zoom at Trinity cheatsheet for more details.

Moving to a synchronous remote learning environment will obviously be more difficult in some disciplines than in others. We know that our faculty are supremely creative and intelligent, and we are relying on you to develop thoughtful solutions for hands-on courses such as labs, studio art classes, internships, and music ensembles.

We encourage faculty members, as they rethink their courses, to focus on learning outcomes rather than specific activities. Ask yourself what you intend for your students to gain from your course, on a fundamental level, and then look for ways to approximate that learning in a new environment.

We do not recommend that you end a class right now, halfway through the semester, and grade the students on the basis of the work they’ve completed to date. That approach might be reasonable if we had only a week left in the semester, but it’s not convincing to treat seven or eight weeks of academic work as if they were equivalent to fourteen or fifteen.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges recently offered the following guidance, which additionally discourages any attempt to grant full credit for a partial semester:

If you find that you will not be able to complete the current semester/quarter, it is expected that you will make the necessary adjustments to the academic credit granted for work already completed, e.g. “I” grades, completing the semester’s work during summer, etc. All decisions must conform with your institutional policies. Full course credit when the course was not completed would demonstrate non-compliance with Standard 9.2 (Program Length), Standard 10.7 (Credit Hour), and Standard 1.1 (Integrity) of the Principles of Accreditation.

The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching will hold several sessions, in the week of March 16-20, focusing on specific pedagogical challenges in our new environment. We encourage you to attend these sessions, either in person or through Zoom, to learn from and share with others solutions to these challenges.

Under the Academic Honor Code, you are free to give an online exam and to remind students that they are honor-bound to abide by all requirements and limitations that you specify. If you aren’t comfortable with that approach, you should feel free to craft another kind of assignment to replace an originally scheduled exam. It is important, however, to stick to the original schedule of exams and assignments, as much as possible. Try to preserve your original schedule, even if you need to change assignment formats.

FERPA-protected data (including grades, GPA, or personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers) should not be sent via email, as this is not a secure method of transmitting sensitive data.

Zoom online meetings are secure. However, faculty should be certain of the student’s identity before sharing FERPA-protected data, and this data should never be revealed if more than one student is present. Google Drive file sharing provides another secure option for distributing FERPA-protected data.

TLEARN allows you to confidentially and digitally communicate individual grades, category grades, and total grades for students.

You will still be able to use TigerPaws to submit official midterm and final course grades.

No. Doing so would create any number of challenges for your students and would interfere with their timely progress to graduation. That’s one line we’re not going to cross.

Furthermore, we do not recommend that you suspend a course right now and give the students Incomplete grades. Barring something truly catastrophic, you will be teaching a full course load in the Fall 2020 semester, and your students will similarly be taking a full load of courses. Granting Incompletes at this point would create a workload nightmare for everyone in the Fall.

No. The Spring 2020 semester will end as scheduled, with the last day of classes on May 1 and the final exam period running May 6-12. Because this is a challenging transitional period, please do not ask your students to complete any assignments during the week of March 16-20.

Yes. Working with the Registrar, Academic Affairs has agreed to extend the deadline for midterm grades by one week, to March 24. As a consequence, the deadline for students to withdraw from a course will be moved to April 13. Remember that we are now required to submit midterm grades for all students in all undergraduate courses.

We don’t think so. If you can teach your courses in an online environment, you should be able to hold advising sessions in much the same way. The Office of the Registrar is prepared to proceed with preregistration as planned and on schedule.

Trinity has suspended, until further notice, all non-essential University-sponsored travel, foreign and domestic. Travel to a professional conference, for example, is non-essential and will not be approved.

We know that many professional conferences have been canceled, and we expect more to be canceled in the coming days and weeks. If you have already been approved for University-sponsored travel to a conference or other professional activity, and if you have already committed your own money with the expectation of being reimbursed, the University will indeed reimburse your out-of-pocket expenses. We do, however, ask that you first check with conferences, hotels, and airlines to see if they will approve a refund or credit.

All University-sponsored events are canceled or postponed, effective March 16, 2020. This policy extends up to May 13. Spring Family Showcase will not happen. Spring 2020 Commencement has been postponed until Saturday, August 8; however Trinity will virtually confer degrees on Saturday, May 16.

In a message dated March 18, 2020, President Anderson announced that the University is temporarily suspending most on-campus operations and transitioning to conducting business remotely whenever possible. All employees are now encouraged to work remotely when possible, with guidance from their supervisors.

For summer 2020, faculty-led study abroad programs to European locations have been canceled. Programs traveling to Japan and Costa Rica are still under review.

For other summer programming, the only reasonable course of action at this point is to continue planning for summer activities on the assumption that they will happen, but with the understanding that this could all change tomorrow.

Students are free to enter campus as long as it remains open. However, we ask faculty members not to engage in face-to-face interactions with students who are physically on campus, particularly when those interactions have a teaching, advising, or mentoring component. In addition to the public health risks, such interactions would create all kinds of real or potential inequities. Imagine one student who can continue their lab research as originally planned because they happen to live in the area, and then imagine another student from the same lab who finds their research significantly altered because they've had to move away. We've decided that it's best to treat those two students in the same way for the remainder of the semester.

Ending face-to-face interactions will mean that most facilities are now off-limits, even to students who have physical access to campus. Lab spaces, studio spaces, and other facilities will need to be closed down because of the absence of faculty or staff supervision. Please note that the Coates Library is now closed to walk-in visitors and has shifted to a books-on-demand model.

In principle, yes. But we're still working with ITS to make sure this is feasible from a technological standpoint.

Let's start this experiment by thinking positively. Some instructors -- and some students -- may well thrive in the world of remote teaching and learning. Even when things don't go perfectly in a course, there's no reason to assume that teaching evaluations will be particularly negative. We're encouraging faculty members to be flexible and compassionate with their students, and we suspect that most students will be flexible and compassionate in their evaluation of their instructors.

Let's remember, also, that the self-evaluation written by a promotion or tenure candidate is not the place to pretend that every professional choice has been wildly successful. Even if you find yourself occasionally struggling as you adjust to a new teaching environment, you are surely making intelligent decisions and drawing intelligent conclusions from their results. You might well make a convincing case for tenure by describing this semester, in nuanced and thoughtful terms, as a learning experience for you as a teacher.

If, however, you conclude that you have been truly disadvantaged by the changing circumstances this semester, either in your teaching or in your research, there is an option. The Faculty and Contract Staff Handbook (Chapter 3A, Article IV.D) allows tenure-track faculty members to request a one-year extension of the tenure clock if the faculty member "experiences a situation that necessitates a commitment of time and energy that delays adequate development of his or her teaching, librarianship, research, or artistic endeavors during the normal probationary period." Academic Affairs will look favorably on requests to extend the tenure clock on the basis of this semester's disruptions. Please note that requests for an extension of the tenure clock may be submitted at any point before the normal due date for the submission of one's tenure materials. There's no need to make such a request right now.

To protect the health of our users and staff, Coates Library will be closed to all but staff who work in the building, beginning Friday, March 20. Many of our holdings can be accessed online at lib.trinity.edu. You may, however, request physical items for retrieval and pick-up at designated times. Circulation staff will retrieve in-house materials (physical items like books, DVDs, CDs, etc.), check them out to your account, and leave them on a designated table just inside the front doors. Beginning Friday, March 27th, the front door locks will permit your access three times on the following days to pick up your materials:

Tuesday and Thursday

• 10:00-10:30 a.m.

• 12:30-1:00 p.m.

• 3:00-3:30 p.m.

Users may not access other areas of the library. This procedure replaces our normal deliveries to faculty offices.

There are three ways you can request items through this service:

1. Via the catalog: When viewing an item record in the catalog, click on the blue Request button at the top of the right-hand column. You'll be prompted to log in using your Trinity credentials to submit the request. Please note: Requests placed using this method will be retrieved and made available for pick-up the following business morning.

2. Via email: You can submit a retrieval request to libcirc@trinity.edu. We will try to fill these requests on the same day they are placed.

3. Via telephone: Call the circulation desk at (210) 999-8127 to speak with a staff member about your item needs. If there is no answer when you call, please leave a detailed message.

Items can be returned either to the outside book drop (just beside the library's loading dock) or inside on the designated returns table.

Remember that library staff will continue to provide reference and research assistance remotely to faculty and students.

Please call (210) 999-8127 for further information.

We can’t know. With many thousands of students, faculty members, and staff members shifting to remote work across the nation, there’s a good chance that you will experience some issues with internet connectivity and server capacity, no matter what platform or tool you’re using. Every instructor needs to have a Plan B in case their preferred digital method stops working reliably.

The Tiger Learning Commons (Academic Support, Quantitative Reasoning and Skills Center, Writing Center, and Student Accessibility Services) continues to serve students remotely. So does Petra Bowman, our Academic Advising Coordinator. Students doing credit-bearing internships have received guidance from the Office of Experiential Learning, and the Office of Career Services has let students know that their services are still available. The Center for International Engagement worked closely with international students as they returned to their home countries; additionally, CIE instructed all study-abroad students to return home, and the vast majority have now done so.

Please note that all accommodations specified by Student Accessibility Services (SAS) remain in place. With the shift to remote learning, some students may need further accommodations, which will be spelled out officially by SAS. It is more important than ever for instructors to provide accommodations when officially requested to do so.

As authorized by the U.S. Department of Education, students receiving federal work-study funds will be paid the amount that they were expecting to earn for the remainder of the semester. Students receiving institutional work-study support may continue to be paid at their current rate, but only if meaningful remote work can be arranged with their employer.

The University has established an emergency fund to provide limited financial assistance to those students who have been hardest hit by the sudden need to move away from campus. The University has also asked students to identify gaps in their access to digital technologies and will continue to look for ways to reduce those gaps.

A small number of students have been allowed to stay in the residence halls in cases where it would not have been feasible for them to return home at this point in the semester.

The deadline to apply for pass/fail registration was April 3, 2020. Students facing difficult extenuating circumstances can still apply for pass/fail registration; however, any courses switched to pass/fail registration at this point cannot be considered for Pathways or major/minor credit. Submit individual requests to Dr. Michael Soto, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs, at msoto@trinity.edu.

Trinity typically does not accept online courses for transfer credit, but this summer is obviously a special case. If a student requests the use of an online course from an accredited institution for summer 2020, Associate Vice President Michael Soto will encourage the relevant department chair to review the course materials carefully to determine whether the course fulfills the appropriate learning outcomes for Trinity equivalent credit. Upon the chair’s recommendation, transfer credit from an online course for summer 2020 will be approved.

In most cases, we think students living in the contiguous United States should be able to adjust for the difference in time zones while attending their classes remotely, with only minimal disruptions to their normal sleep schedule. Students living overseas are likely to have more problems because of time-zone differences. As we continue to exercise flexibility and generosity, instructors may well need to devise asynchronous ways of interacting with students for whom synchronous class participation is not feasible.

Of course.