A Message to Faculty from the Center for Academic Excellence

The staff in the Center for Academic Excellence welcome and strongly encourage a continued, strong partnership with faculty to help us best serve our undergraduate students during this difficult and unusual semester.

Alerts:

In addition to completing your mid-semester advisory reports (which is a direct communication tool between you and your students), we ask that faculty please use the existing Alert system via Connect in the Portal for any student concern that they wish to bring to our attention (see the attached document for directions on how to submit an Alert). Our success advisors will outreach to students via phone and email regarding your concerns in order to help students successfully complete their spring semester courses.

Here are some examples of helpful information faculty should report:

Students who are not “attending” your synchronous, online, virtual courses

Students who are not participating in your online discussion boards

Students who are not completing assignments in a timely manner

Students who stop communicating with you

Students who you believe should consider the P/D+/D/F grade option for your course

Students who report personal health concerns

Virtural Peer Tutor Support:

The Undergraduate Tutorial Program within the Center for Academic Excellence will provide virtual, peer tutoring support for most of the courses that were supported by our in-person peer tutors. We are in the process of creating these platforms and will slowly be rolling out one-on-one online peer tutoring appointments and peer group-tutoring appointments starting the week of March 23rd. Almost every course that we previously supported through one-on-one and group tutoring will continue with remote, virtual access. However, we may not be able to provide tutoring for courses that were not previously offered by our peer tutors. For additional questions related to tutoring support, please email us at utp@hofstra.edu

Understandably, our tutors are uncertain about what to expect regarding time demands required for their own distance learning classes and we do not want to overwhelm them. We may reach out to faculty with questions that come to us from our peer tutors or your enrolled students and for more information on how students can utilize faculty’s online office hours. We appreciate your help and prompt responses in these circumstances. If you have additional ideas for how the Center for Academic Excellence and faculty can work together to better serve our students, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at Diane.Herbert@hofstra.edu

Success Advising:

The Center for Academic Excellence will continue to serve our students via phone or virtual (video) appointments for the remainder of the semester. Students are highly encouraged to make appointments through Connect on the Portal. We recognize that students are facing diverse and challenging circumstances, and we remain available to help them navigate the completion of their spring 2020 coursework. Students can make an appointment to discuss strategies to help manage their time while completing distance learning assignments, strategies to stay engaged in their distance learning courses, as well as other academic questions or concerns they may have. If you have any difficulty scheduling an appointment, please email us at cae@hofstra.edu