Academic Continuity

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. 

The CTE maintains several companion sites: