You can expect all of your residential courses to be hybrid to some extent. This means that although each student will be able to experience some face-to-face classroom engagement and some amount of face-to-face instruction, the amount and type will vary dependent on the courses you are taking. For some courses, the majority of the instruction could be conducted face-to-face. This might be the case for experiential learning courses, labs, or smaller discussion based courses. For other courses, only a limited portion of the course or certain specific components of the course will be delivered face-to-face. For example, the lecture portion of a large lecture course might be delivered online, whereas the labs associated with that large lecture course could be delivered face-to-face. Alternatively, in large lecture courses, your instructor may be giving you the choice to come to a face-to-face lecture on certain established days, while you watch the lecture online on other days and complete associated assessments and activities online. You can expect a lot of variety depending on the type of courses you are taking, the physical classroom space, and the design decisions your instructors will make in collaboration with the teaching and learning team. The courses are also intentionally designed to allow us to quickly move to another delivery option, or move all aspects of the course online, later in the semester if necessary.
No matter what your classroom experience looks like, be assured that the teaching and learning team at Purdue University has approached the design of the classroom and learning environments in the same way it has done over the past several years; with a strong focus toward transformative education and engaged student learning. The Innovative Learning team working on the Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT), a program nationally recognized for its innovation in higher education.
The physical classroom might look different in many ways. The guidelines on physical distancing and de-densification means that in the face-to-face classroom, you will be sitting 6-feet away from other students, that the instructor will be at least 10-feet away from the front row of students, and that no more than 150 students will be allowed in the classroom at one time. This will necessarily change how face-to-face instruction can be conducted (e.g. your ability to do group work), even though you will experience some face-to-face instruction.