Tippie RISE students in the University of Iowa business college will still receive credit for their experiential class, despite community spread of the novel coronavirus cutting on-campus learning short for the spring semester, as all courses moved to an online format in March.

According to the UI Tippie College of Business website, Tippie RISE offers four areas in which students can gain “real-world experience”: research with faculty, internship courses, studying abroad, or experiential courses.

Tippie Associate Dean Ken Brown said that still giving Tippie RISE students credit for their course is a small thing that can be done to help Tippie students.

“While students are happy to get RISE credit, there are just so many issues right now that we want to help them get through,” he said. “It is so painful for people to make plans for so long and then be told to come home next week and cancel all of them. We didn’t want to add to the frustration and disappointment by telling people they had to redo Tippie RISE.”

Brown said there are students with a very wide range of circumstances at home and different levels of technology access. Tippie’s goal is to work with every student and be as flexible as possible, he said.

Despite the distance, many students across undergraduate colleges and programs are continuing their experiential learning from afar. Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates offers a summer fellowship to support undergraduates involved in research with faculty, and more than three-quarters will continue their projects, said the center’s director, Bob Kirby, in an email to The Daily Iowan.

“With the COVID-19 related changes to on-campus research, we expected many students and faculty would not be able to pursue their summer fellow projects,” Kirby said. “We have been extremely surprised that over 80 percent of the faculty/student collaborations are going to move forward as funded projects.”

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Kirby said that many projects and their focus have been adjusted to fit the current research environment of the university.

“We were extremely pleased with this outcome because we know it will be a challenging summer for students to find work and these funded projects will let them continue to gain experience and our faculty to advance their scholarship,” Kirby said.

Kirby added that a wide range of partnerships have been developed in order to help students whose existing plans have been derailed by COVID-19.

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“While these opportunities don’t cover the countless ways our students and faculty have been impacted, we’re excited to see so many of these opportunities moving forward, the very positive collaborations that have taken place, and the chance to help fund students in such a challenging time,” Kirby said.

UI business-college Experiential Learning Assistant Director Nicholas Kavanaugh said Tippie is aligning with the rest of the university in its efforts to return to an in-person learning environment in the fall 2020 semester and revert RISE experiences back to normal.

In regard to the fall semester, Brown said there will hopefully be a return to normalcy with classes. There are groups of faculty and staff that are planning for a range of possibilities in the coming semester, he added.

“Should a student have problems completing an experience in the future we will always try our best to work with the student,” Kavanaugh said. “And I think this semester is a good example of that.”