The University of Notre Dame’s students are back from the summer. The university is committed to beginning the Fall 2020 semester with in-person classes whenever possible, and in hybrid mode when necessary. In order to orient students, faculty, and staff to the University's new public health requirements, Notre Dame created a site in Sakai that would introduce the campus rules while providing accountability for individuals and compliance reporting for departments.
Notre Dame has used Sakai in teaching and learning for eight years. The University has also increasingly used the LMS for orientation and training. Notre Dame’s new orientation site, created in Sakai’s LESSONS tool, walks users through several aspects of campus life. It contains sections on expectations for sharing responsibility, health and safety practices, the new “normal for campus’, and student life in Fall 2020. At the end of the course, users are asked to accept responsibility for meeting the expectations and keeping their community safe.
The University used automated processes to enroll all 29,000 faculty, staff, and students into a single Sakai “course.” More than 18,000 individual users have accessed and completed the course so far.
The final step in the course asks faculty, staff and students to confirm their acceptance of the orientation and to take responsibility for their role in keeping the campus open and safe. After users agree to the University’s expectations, Sakai sends a point to the GRADEBOOK, which creates a trackable score that the University will be able to access as necessary.
Students began returning to Notre Dame in early August, and classes started on August 10. Following a brief pivot to all-online instruction, in-person classes resumed on September 2.