UCA moves to online-only for summer courses

Summer courses will be online-only at the University of Central Arkansas, said Houston Davis, the school’s president, in a campus message Tuesday.

The Conway campus begins summer courses on May 11, according to its academic calendar.

Davis referred to projections about the covid-19 outbreak in Arkansas, specifically remarks made last week by Gov. Asa Hutchinson that it will likely be 8 to 12 weeks before the outbreak peaks in the state.

“In response to this and the continued need to practice social distancing, all of our summer school courses will move to online-only academic instruction,” Davis said.

The university has yet to decide on any fee changes but “is exploring options for adjusting fees for summer 2020 classes,” Davis said.

“We will communicate those fee changes soon, once they are finalized,” Davis said. Fee changes would not apply to students enrolled in fully-online degree programs, Davis said.

UCA has three separate summer sessions, with the last, Summer III, starting classes on July 20.

Amanda Hoelzeman, UCA’s director of media relations, said that “at this time” the shift to online-only classes applies to the Summer III session as well as earlier sessions.

UCA this past fall enrolled the third-most undergraduates in the state, about 8,700, according to the state Division of Higher Education. The university in fall 2019 had a total enrollment of 10,869 students.

Like other universities, UCA has shifted to online-only instruction for its spring courses in response to the covid-19 outbreak.

Davis said the university will continue with letter grades for the spring semester. Some schools, including the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, have announced expanded options for students to choose Credit/No Credit grading.

In his message, Davis said the spring semester was more than three-quarters complete when UCA began on Monday its first full week of online-only instruction.

“Instructors have been asked to modify their syllabi and take into account the new mode of course instruction in assigning final grades to their students. Many students have put months of effort into earning their grades, and all of our faculty have worked diligently to prepare their students for success. For these reasons and others, we will not as a university assign pass/fail grades for the spring semester,” Davis said.