BAU to open in Fall with In-person and Online Instruction

Dear BAU Students,

Many of you have heard about ICE’s announcement concerning F1 students’ status in the USA if the university they are attending to offers only online education in the coming Fall semester. I have already received emails from some of you sharing your concerns.

First of all, all our students on a non-immigrant student visa (F-1) should already know that this is not a new practice of SEVIS. All international students need to be on a full-time course load, and they are allowed to take only ONE course online. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, universities had to close and many of them switched to online education in the middle of the Spring semester. SEVIS offered a flexibility for those students during the Spring semester, as this was an extraordinary situation for everyone. Now that universities are planning for their Fall semester, ICE/SEVIS has announced that they will not offer this flexibility anymore and all non-immigrant F1 students need to take their classes on campus. They can still take one course online.

As BAU, if you remember, we shared with you over a month ago that we were planning to open our campus for Fall and do a hybrid education, meaning offering some courses online. We said, we would still need some more time to finalize our decision after seeing the first phases of the reopening.

We have made all our preparations for you to welcome you back in Fall 2020 with a series of precautions taken on the campus to enable the required physical distancing and hygiene. These precautions and our new life at BAU campus will be shared with you by Student Services before you come back.

BAU will start Fall semester offering hybrid mode of delivery, ensuring that only high populated courses to be offered online and the rest of the courses to be offered on campus and ensuring that our international students meet the requirements of SEVIS.

For further information related with your individual cases, please be in touch with Alex Roset, our DSO at [email protected].

We are excited to be seeing you all back to BAU campus.

Until then, please stay safe and healthy.

Best regards,