From the Vice President’s Desk: A Year Into Chaos

As we rapidly head to the year anniversary of when our context at LSU (and indeed, all of education) changed, we have reflected on the amazing work of our faculty, and our colleagues from around the institution who were able to pivot on a dime and go online with all university operations in a matter of 2 weeks (in many cases, much less!).

This pandemic has been devastating to so many families, and the repercussions will continue for years to come. We want here, though, to focus on the many positive outcomes that were - however unintentional - byproducts of a time of profound change.

So we wanted to celebrate the work of this amazing community with a little walk down memory lane. Remember the Faculty Contingency Site? We put that up in one day, and then kept updating it based on your suggestions and needs. Y’all participated in so many workshops (hundreds upon hundreds of you), and even more watched our Learn & Geaux on demand videos. 

We lived through a huge Moodle upgrade together (and survived!), and now we have refreshed, centralized support for academic technology and design together, with the inclusion of the Faculty Technology Center. Together we navigated which type of closed captioning works with which type of video platform for what purpose. LSU has more instructional video than ever before! (Don’t forget to delete those old videos!) And our partners at the Learning and Teaching Collaborative worked with us to launch the Faculty Fellows program. We also launched our “Designer-in-Residence” and “FTC-in-Residence” initiatives to provide college-dedicated  support on demand. In response to needs and requests, we rebuilt our website around faculty, so that you don’t need to know our organizational structure to get the help you need. We do want you to know our faces though! So we’re launching team pages, beginning with our Leadership Team page, and check out our Enrollment Concierges!

Student services for academic and other support are now available virtually! This amazing work by Student Affairs, by the Center for Academic Success, by the Library and so many others began out of necessity but will forever reach more students because of the lack of constraints for physical presence.

We look forward to supporting faculty in the coming year - thank you so much for the opportunity to serve you on behalf of our students.

From the team - Sasha