Dean Anthony Varona sent this message out to the law school community this morning
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
SCHOOL of LAW
A Message from the Dean
Dear Miami Law Students –
We are concluding our preparations for the resumption of spring semester classes, now online, next Monday, March 23rd.
Recent Important Decisions [archived here]
Our migration to online classes will continue for the balance of the spring semester. Many University offices and departments, including those at Miami Law, have transitioned to remote work staffing structures, while continuing to provide services and resources to students and faculty. Many campus facilities have closed. The Richter and Law Libraries have shifted much of their operations online. UM also has announced that several Commencement ceremonies for Spring 2020 graduates are postponed until December 2020. The Miami Law Commencement ceremony now is scheduled for Friday, December 18th. More details on Commencement 2020 will be forthcoming. Many other UM and Miami Law events have been cancelled or postponed.
All of these adjustments, of course, are precautionary. We recognize that the UM and Miami Law community members – students, faculty, and staff – are our most precious resources. We want to do all we can to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and to help keep you all healthy, while continuing our key academic and administrative activities.
Remote Access
The faculty and staff at Miami Law have been working very hard over the last two weeks to welcome all of you back to classes, online, next Monday. Although many of our administrative and program offices are now on work-from-home schedules, they remain open for business and have continued to serve many students and faculty online, by Email, and by telephone. If you need help from any Miami Law administrative office or program, simply call or email us. Someone will be able to help you either immediately or, in most cases, within one workday.
Miami Law Coronavirus FAQs Webpage
If you have questions related to adjustments and disruptions prompted by the Coronavirus, please refer to the new “Miami Law Coronavirus FAQs” webpage, available here. We will update that FAQs webpage as frequently as possible in order to account for new information and to respond to additional questions as we receive them. Please refer to the FAQs webpage before contacting an administrative office or your professors. Your question, and our answer, may already be included in the FAQs, to which you have 24/7 access. For additional information from UM, please visit the University’s COVID-19 site at coronavirus.miami.edu.
Online Classes
For well over a week, our LawIT colleagues and Miami Law faculty have been hard at work migrating virtually all of our courses to new online platforms. LawIT has completed countless individual and small-group training sessions – hundreds of hours of aggregate instruction and assistance – for all of our faculty colleagues. And just over the last two days, many Miami Law professors (at one point close to 80 full-time and adjunct faculty members) participated in a total of approximately 2 ½ hours of a two-part online law teaching best practices pedagogy seminar, led by master online law teachers on our own faculty.
As a faculty we have been sharing, both synchronously and asynchronously, many ideas and resources to ensure that our migration to online teaching next Monday is as smooth and seamless as possible. Many of you already have received updated syllabi and/or plans course-specific plans for online migration from your individual professors. You should be hearing from the rest of your professors very soon.
In addition, recognizing that online learning, like online teaching, requires its own particular set of skills for success, our Director of Academic Achievement Alex Schimel circulated on Wednesday a set of best practices and recommendations for online law students to get the most out of your online learning experience. Please review them carefully.
Patience Should Prevail, Please
Despite all of our best efforts as faculty and administrators, and all of your best efforts as students, there assuredly will be glitches. And hiccups. And freezes. And temporary service interruptions. Online learning platforms like BlueJeans, Zoom, and Blackboard this week have been investing a tremendous amount of resources towards expanding their relative capacities and capabilities. Still, there will be bumps. In addition, many instructors as well as students in our Miami Law community will, for the first time, be engaging in online education next week.
Patience, therefore, will be in order. Let’s continue to be compassionate and patient with one another, as we all – together – venture into online legal education for the last month or so of our semester and academic year.
We are in the midst of a challenging, and interesting, moment of disruption and inconvenience as a law school, as a university, as a nation, and world. A moment full of uncertainty and even some anxiety. But still just a moment. A temporary moment, that will pass, and that we will survive, stronger for our having experienced and weathered it together as a community.
I have seen many silver linings this week. I hope you have too. Our UM and Miami Law community has been extraordinary in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. Extraordinary. Faculty, staff and student community members have risen to the challenge and worked round the clock to protect and prepare our law school. We have shown ourselves as a law school that is full of people who care deeply for one another and for the greater Miami Law family.
I also have seen tremendous excitement and creativity around our migration to online law teaching. Many of my faculty colleagues have identified superb pedagogical techniques that will work better online – and that will provide students with an even more engaging, rigorous, and worthwhile learning experience – than in a traditional exclusively “brick-and-mortar” classroom. I have heard similar excitement from students too. I suspect, in fact, that this experience will result in the incorporation of many more online learning tools into traditional law courses once “social distancing” distances itself into the past.
In sum, we are ready. We are prepared. And we will succeed, together.
¡Adelante!
Tony Varona
Anthony E. Varona
Dean and M. Minnette Massey Professor of Law
