While our faculty were already providing some courses online in the years before the pandemic, all were thrust into these
modalities on short notice in March 2020. The faculty undertook appropriate training as rapidly as possible with the expectation that hybrid and online courses would be the norm for academic year 2020-2021.

The enormous shift in F20/W21 was, of course, driven by the changes the university made to suppress transmission of COVID in classrooms. Making sure all the seats were six feet apart reduced GVSU’s number of ordinary classroom seats from about 10,500 to about 4,500. CLAS responded by converting about 45% of our sections to fully online, switching most of the remainder to hybrid forms that had only half the students in the classroom at a time, and “shuffling” courses among rooms to make sure half the students could be accommodated. Class times were not changed, however, to reduce disruption to students.

Six-foot seat distancing, together with the other elements of the university’s Face Covering Policy, were very effective in preventing disease transmission. GVSU saw almost no transmission in its academic spaces.