Students and faculty are adjusting to curriculum changes caused by the power outage on campus.
An ice storm recently caused the Oklahoma City University main campus to lose power from Oct. 26-30. The main campus closed at 2:28p.m Oct. 26. and remained closed through Oct. 30, when an email was sent through the emergency Blue Alert system announcing the resumption of classes on Nov. 2.
George Sims, interim provost, said every faculty member needed to make curriculum adjustments. He said the need for faculty members to make adjustments to their schedules or be lenient with students who did not have electricity was not new or surprising given the overall circumstances of the semester.
“It’s one of those things; we remind everybody, ‘please work with students and make reasonable and flexible adjustments for folks who are overcoming the power failure and all like that,’ and everybody says ‘yeah, tell us something else that’s obvious,’ because it is kind of the obvious thing to say,” Sims said.
Enrollment for students with 60 or more credit hours continued as scheduled last week. On Oct. 29, Registrar Charlie Monnot sent an email to the campus community announcing pre-enrollment for students with 30 or more credit hours would be delayed until Nov. 2 and enrollment for all students would open Nov. 3.
Monnot said he consulted with Sims, deans and student success coordinators and heard students could continue with enrollment via their phones and advisors could also assist students by performing enrollment for them. He said advisors recommended registration be paused for the last two days due to difficulties related to the ice storm.
“I would say it was because it was the freshman group too, and it’s the first-time enrollment, and with all the confusion, and there was some backup, and there were some issues with electricity going out for some of the advisors too, and so that’s when they asked me to put a halt on it, and then I proceeded to do so,” Monnot said.
Monnot said the registration process was generally unaffected by the ice storm for several days. Monnot keeps a tracker for pre-enrollment numbers each semester for enrollments performed by students, advisors and the registrar’s office. Pre-enrollment for the spring semester in 2018 (prior to the enrollment dates for those with fewer than 30 credit hours), included 936 students. In pre-enrollment for the 2019 spring semester, 1,045 students had enrolled by that point. This year, 1,003 students had enrolled. There was a roughly 3% increase in enrollments performed by advisors this year.
Monnot said he received a message from housing personnel that students were nervous about enrollment, but he otherwise received no complaints from students. He said if students ever have feedback, they can share it with the registrar’s office by emailing registrar@okcu.edu.
Amy Cataldi, dean of Petree College of Arts and Sciences, said courses within the Arts and Sciences have not been adversely affected by the closure.
“Each faculty person is different in the way that they handle their schedule, and their syllabus and their work assignments. Everybody tried to be as flexible as possible as the week rolled on. Oftentimes faculty will build in a buffer course at the end of the semester for any sort of abnormality, weather or otherwise,” Cataldi said.
Cataldi teaches a statistics course and said she has utilized the time provided by their scheduled buffer day to combine course content in order to cover the majority of the syllabus. She said the ice storm is another in a series of stressors this semester.
“The stress that we’ve all been under from a multitude of fronts is practically unbearable. And I have faculty and amazing staff and beyond amazing students who have tried to go with the flow, who have tried to adjust, who have tried to voice their concerns as needed. So, I think it’s just one more layer of stress that people are enduring,” she said.
Cataldi said she hopes, despite the circumstances of the campus closure, students were able to find some comfort in the break from classes.
Jake Harrell, English/religious education junior, said he lives on campus and woke up Oct. 27 to the power outage in Cokesbury Court Apartments. He said the impact of the ice storm on his college career has been dramatic.
“One of my advisors enrolls me for me, but she even had trouble enrolling me in the classes that I needed, and it looks like I’m not going to graduate in four years because of the mishaps with enrollment,” Harrell said.
Harrell said he focused on preparing for finals, since he expected they would not be canceled or changed significantly. Many of his courses have either cut content from the end of the syllabus or condensed the remaining lecture material, he said.
He said some of his professors have given students days off or previously cut material from their syllabi in order to prevent students from feeling overwhelmed. He said he was thankful for his friends and professors who stepped up to listen to students’ concerns.
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