Postponement of Gateway Course Experience Conference and Related Events
Dear Colleagues:
In light of the rapidly changing COVID-19 situation especially Monday’s CDC guidelines, out of concern for the safety of our staff, and in the interest of the well-being of the educators and the institutions we serve, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the delivery of our Virtual Gateway Course Experience Conference and related events (Communities of Practice, Teaching and Learning Academy, Gardner Institute-New American History Workshop and Pre-conference Workshops.)
The reality of our circumstances is that to deliver these events requires all of our staff to be physically present in our confined office space. To do that would violate the latest government recommendations about the necessity for social distancing.
We believe as responsible citizens we must join so many of our fellow citizens of the world in attempting to reduce the probability of spreading the virus. The alternative for us would be to attempt to deliver this remotely from our staff’s home residences. We are not confident at all that we would have the adequate bandwidth to execute the event well.
We are working on plans to deliver the virtual conference – either on different dates or as a series of events over an extended period.
We are committed to providing this content for one simple reason.
Gateway courses remain one of the most challenging and inequitable student success issues. The sudden shift to complete on-line instruction and the removal of many students from campuses across the globe – particularly those from income- and food-insecure homes – will only exacerbate this. To fail to deliver the conference content in modified ways would do nothing to address the issue. Collectively we will not allow this to occur.
Your many inspirational sessions and hopeful messages will be of great value and use to the broader gateway course improvement community, of which you are a part.
To help this come to fruition, we will be in touch no later than Tuesday of next week with updates on our modified approach. When we write, we will also include information on our approach to refunds for the 2020 in-person event and/or credits for future events.
Please know that this decision was not an easy one for any of us. Many of you have contacted members of the Gardner Institute’s team over the past week to let us know that the Virtual Conference was a source of inspiration – an event to look forward to in light of the sudden isolation associated with social distancing and instructional challenges that now confront us.
But we needed to share the news with you as soon as we could – even if it is only partially complete.
We will be in touch with additional information starting next week.
For now, stay healthy. We have much to do together in the name of equitable student success over the months and years ahead. We look forward to the work we will do together.
On behalf of the Gardner Institute Team,
John Drew Angie
John N. Gardner Andrew K. Koch Angela M. Whiteside
Chair and CEO President and COO VP, Finance, H.R. & Events
gardner@jngi.org koch@jngi.org whiteside@jngi.org