Academic Continuity
For School Administrators
As the University monitors changes in the federal landscape, we are thinking about future contingencies, including the possibility that one or more current students could be required to leave the United States. Please ask your faculty and staff to inform you if they learn that a student is being required to leave the country. We also ask that you notify the Office of Care and Support Services in Student Affairs. Instructors are encouraged to work with affected students to allow them to complete the term under what are likely to be extremely difficult personal circumstances. To plan for that possibility, the University has developed a resource page to assist instructional faculty in enabling students who are unable to remain in the U.S. to finish the Spring 2025 semester from abroad. Please share this resource page with the affected instructors.
Please also be mindful of the following:
- If an instructor in your school is adapting a course to enable remote participation for students who have been asked to leave the U.S., this activity should be reported to Matt Banfield, associate vice provost for academic affairs. Central coordination may be needed to fulfill the University’s responsibilities to foreign regulators.
- While we anticipate that completing the spring semester remotely will be permissible in most countries, U.S. export control regulations may prohibit UVA from providing distance education to students returning to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, or the Crimean, Donetsk, or Luhansk Regions of Ukraine.
- U.S. student visas are not required to participate in a UVA course remotely while the student is living in another country.
- Students who are not able to continue with a class after leaving the U.S., including through the use of IN (incomplete) grading options, should withdraw from the class. Some affected students may need to withdraw from the semester entirely; they will receive a W in all courses and may receive a tuition and fee refund according to the University’s refund schedule. If the University’s refund deadline has passed, the school may submit a petition on the student’s behalf to the Committee on Withdrawal for Extreme Circumstances. (Accessibility disclaimer: If you need an accessible option for submitting a petition please contact the Office of Vice Provost for Academic Affairs).
- Displaced students working to complete the semester should be provided access to academic advising and academic support services.
Questions relating to a student’s visa status should be directed to the International Studies Office (ISO). Questions relating to the University’s tuition refund schedule should be directed to Student Financial Services (SFS). All other questions should be directed to the Provost’s Office.
Supporting Students Who Are Required to Leave the U.S. During the Spring 2025 Semester
If a student in your class is forced to leave the country, but is eligible to remain enrolled remotely, there are practical ways you can support them in finishing the semester from abroad. This page is intended to serve as a resource for instructors of students who have had to leave the U.S. during the Spring 2025 semester.
A student who is unexpectedly forced to leave the country may be experiencing anxiety and confusion, while having to manage the logistics of their move. Please approach this situation with kindness and empathy.
In cases where a student in your course has to leave the country, instructors could allow the student to join the class remotely, through a live Zoom link or other means (see below), if pedagogically appropriate. Other strategies include allowing affected students to participate in discussions remotely, either via Zoom or through online class message boards, and creating alternative assignments if the student is unable to participate in the usual course activities. Please keep in mind that time zone differences and unreliable internet access may make live participation challenging, so a variety of participation modalities will help ensure accessibility. Furthermore, digital course resources, such as certain Canvas tools or online journal articles and databases, may not be accessible in all countries.
The Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) at UVA has developed a Teaching Continuity website that provides instructors with pedagogical and technological resources to support the shift to a range of remote instructional teaching modalities. Highlights, and guidance from additional resources, include:
- Make a plan and clearly communicate that plan to the affected students. Alternative activities and assignments should be designed to address the course objectives.
- Consider broadcasting or recording your class sessions using Zoom or Panopto. For many courses, an audio recording may do equally well. Recordings can be created through your LMS (using VoiceThread or Canvas’s Rich Content Editor), or via a laptop or cell phone and uploaded to the course LMS site. Creating a repository with all class or office hours recordings can facilitate ease of access for affected students. Some classrooms are equipped to support recording class sessions; support is available from UVA’s Classrooms team. Note: You must inform all students in the course that class sessions are being recorded and share the recording only within the class.
- Zoom’s AI companion can be used to automatically create notes and summaries. The notes are cross linked to the recording, making it easy for students to click directly to the portion of the recording they wish to review.
- Keep in mind the need to provide substantiative interaction with all students (e.g., engaging via discussion boards or providing substantiative feedback on assignments) as required by UVA’s accreditor.
- If a course requires fieldwork, community-based projects, or other similar activities, special consideration would be needed for how those experiences can be replicated with suitable alternatives, as pedagogically appropriate.
- Engage students in a variety of ways to support their classmates. For instance, consider asking for student volunteers to share their notes with you, which you could then share with students in the course, or form “buddy groups” that are responsible for ensuring any member of the group who is unable to attend class will get the information they need. Instructors might also consider uploading their own notes and slides to the course LMS site. Given the variety of note-taking styles, absent students benefit from having at least two sets of notes to review.
- Be mindful of how remote students access office hours and consider hosting some of your office hours online. If appropriate, instructors could record office hours and use the Zoom AI companion to provide notes and summaries.
- Allowing students to submit alternative assignments to demonstrate class participation can support remote learner engagement. For example, instructors could ask remote students to submit an outline of the reading assignment, a well-considered question about a topic, a response to a question about the material, or another brief assignment.
- Students who are managing alternate time zones or unreliable internet access while having to relocate away from Grounds may not be able to complete assignments on time. Being flexible with deadlines could offer meaningful relief.
- In most schools, instructors can assign a grade of IN (incomplete). An IN would allow students additional time to complete course requirements beyond the end of the semester, before the instructor calculates the final grade. Incomplete policies for undergraduate students and graduate students are available on the University Registrar's website.
Additional Resources
The following resources may be useful for instructors in supporting students who have unexpectedly been required to leave the country.
Center for Teaching Excellence
Provides pedagogical support through instructional consultation, events, and programs.
The CTE maintains several companion sites:
Teaching Continuity
Provides information to help instructors pivot their instruction to online modalities. The site also provides school-specific contacts who can help with discipline-specific considerations.
Teaching Hub
Highlights practical pedagogical resources and solutions, grounded in evidence-based research.
Learning Tech
Highlights institutionally- and departmentally-supported teaching and learning technologies.
Learning Design & Technology: Addressing Student Absence
Offers a broad range of strategies for addressing student absences (from A&S, but widely applicable).
Online Learning Consortium - Online Learning Consortium
Offers resources to assist instructors in developing and reviewing asynchronous course materials. You can create an account using your UVA email address.