August 4, 2025

Creating a pandemic-proof class schedule

Academic Task Force works to ensure in-person and remote learning

An example of the complicated schedule for one class in fall 2020. An example of the complicated schedule for one class in fall 2020.
An example of the complicated schedule for one class in fall 2020.
6 minute read

Developing the fall 2020 semester class schedule for the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences could easily be likened to the age-old adage of “How do you eat an elephant?”(Answer: One bite at a time.)

The scheduling process actually began in March, with Vice Dean Gail B. Rattinger relying on assistance from the Academic Task Force, which she formed when the COVID-19 pandemic first impacted how students would learn. The task force helped the school move quickly to remote instruction for the remainder of the spring semester, and came back together for scheduling for the fall.

The daunting task was accomplished with some absolutes agreed upon for the fall:

  • In-person delivery was the goal whenever possible.
  • Students had to be socially distanced in the classrooms.
  • Exams were to be in person.

“We made the decision to run hybrid classes [that requires some in-person attendance and some online attendance], and the lab and clinical lab classes had to run in person,” Rattinger said. “Typically, we teach more than one cohort at the same time each in one classroom or in two sections, but now we can’t, so we had to work out what classes could be in person, and when.”

All of the variables were “put in the hopper,” Rattinger said, and then the task force looked at ways to better engage students online through methods such as Zoom office hours and tweaking the kinds of questions asked in exams. “These methods are helping us better engage students — and to know better what students are learning,” she said. “We’re using a larger range of how we prove students know what they know, by gathering information in different ways. For example, we’ve switched from mostly multiple choice questions to adding and using more open-ended ones and we’ve brought cumulative content into assessments so we know that students are remembering what they’ve learned.”

Assessing cumulative content rather than only what has been taught since the last exam helps avoid the, “I learned this for this test and can now get rid of it” syndrome, Rattinger said.

Bringing current events into the classroom also helps. “I co-teach an epidemiology course (PHRM 528 Population Health & Study Design Evaluation) with Utkarsh Dang,” Rattinger said. “When I taught about descriptive epidemiology, I worked in the COVID pandemic because it was topical, and for our students who are doing clinical rotations, the School of Pharmacy faculty really amped up to get them more engaged doing COVID testing and flu clinics.

“We’re working hard to keep students engaged, but it’s harder in a remote environment,” Rattinger said. “When I teach over Zoom, students are looking at me but I don’t know how many are really looking at me. I can open up a chat and get a response from the same students each time. Normally, when I’m teaching I walk around and I’m not a head talking in a box. I can engage students better.

“I call these microchallenges to overcome,” she added. “Think of all the bad things one does in meetings, like texting someone when you shouldn’t be texting. You don’t do that in a classroom, but can’t monitor it in a remote environment now.”

When it came to the actual course scheduling, which Rattinger refers to as Tetris and Jenga combined, she credits task force member Erin Pauling, clinical assistant professor of pharmacy practice, with being a scheduling wizard.

“She should be an international FedEx coordinator because she did an incredible job working on the scheduling,” Rattinger said. “Plus, we’re dealing with what’s really another compressed semester.”

It’s stressful for faculty as well as students, she added, so it’s vital to think about how best to schedule classes and engage with students in a semester with so little wiggle room with no breaks.

“Because our students are in lock step and taking 17-20 credits in a condensed manner, they don’t have a cushion to catch up,” she said. “It’s an intense curriculum so we’ve moved the less-stressful aspects such as some assessments and learning experiences into the virtual week after Thanksgiving.”

Even now, as the fall semester winds down after two pauses for remote-only instruction, Rattinger and the task force are looking at ways to improve schedules for the spring semester. Having more dialogue with the students is driving some changes.

One change is taking travel time between in-person and remote classes into consideration. In the fall, if a student had an in-person class followed by a remote class, it was unlikely there was enough time to travel to an off-campus home before the remote class started, so the student would remain in a classroom and Zoom into the class. “They really hated that and they told us so!” Rattinger said.

“Next semester, we’ve rejiggered so that when students have a remote class, they have time to go remote,” she said. “We’re really trying to take their input where we can to try to make it easy for them to navigate the Zoom and hybrid classes.”

To make up for the extra time required to move from an in-person class to a remote location and open up classroom space for required courses, electives have been switched to remote-only, so students don’t need to travel to the pharmacy building for them.

For hands-on work in the Skills Lab and the Compounding Lab, some is done remotely using small groups in breakout rooms, and there are also small groups working in person, socially distanced in the lab one week, then remote the next, Rattinger said.

Everyone has really stepped up to make the schedule work, Rattinger added — not just the task force, but all students, faculty and staff.

Moving forward for next semester, the School of Pharmacy will start classes (to be held remotely) one week earlier than the rest of the University to accommodate the need for P3 students to begin their fourth year experiential rotations around May 18 or 19. “Preceptors usually want all students from all schools to start at the same time and we have external agreements to meet,” Rattinger said. “I’m meeting with task force subgroups based on what current and future needs are.”

Posted in: Pharmacy