A message to our community regarding COVID-19 and online summer courses

Dear NebraskaMATH and NebraskaSCIENCE communities,

We send you sincere wishes that you and your loved ones remain healthy and safe. As we all navigate these unprecedented times, we want you to know that we are cognizant of how much work you are doing to reinvent your daily workload in a remote environment and how hard it must be to not be able to see your students in person. Thank you for your quick work to build online learning for students and provide a variety of resources for parents.

COVID-19 has impacted so many individuals and organizations, and, of course, NMSSI and teacher professional development are among them. The university has just announced that all summer courses will be held online. We are closely monitoring further logistical decisions by the university and expect to hear more by mid-April. We are working hard to resolve the challenges this has created for our community.

We thank you for bearing with us as we determine our plans, including expanding online offerings and finding new opportunities for connecting with us in the near future. We will be working with instructors to decide which courses will be offered synchronously on Zoom and which will be offered asynchronously over a five-week period (either First 5-Week Session June 8-July 10 or Second 5-Week Session July 13-August 13). We will send more information next week.

If there is a course that we are not currently offering (see list at https://scimath.unl.edu/nmssi/2020/course-catalog) but you would like to take it online now, please let us know by emailing nebraskamath@unl.edu. We encourage you to forward this newsletter to peers who might be interested in taking a course.

Not only are we grateful to be part of a broader community that sees the contributions of teachers and prizes public service, but we are also taking time to reflect on how we can assist you with different resources during this rapidly changing time. Please see other resources in the accompanying stories in this newsletter.

Thank you for your continued support of the Center for Science, Mathematics and Computer Education.

Jim Lewis and the CSMCE faculty and staff