Each year over winter break, we temporarily close our office and take our online student courses offline to give both staff and students time to rest and be with their loved ones.
Here’s what Michigan Virtual learners need to know about our scheduled downtime over winter break.
Offline Dec 26-29
From Monday, December 26 through Thursday, December 29, students will not be able to log into Brightspace, the platform where they access online courses and submit assignments to instructors. Courses will reopen at 7 a.m. on Friday, December 30.
See FAQs below for information on how students can download lessons and assignments to continue to make progress over the break if desired.
Unavailable Nov 24-25 and Dec 23 – Jan 2
The Michigan Virtual office will be closed, and our staff (including instructors and the Customer Care Team) will be out of the office between Thursday, November 25 — Friday, November 26, and Friday, December 23 — Monday, January 2. If you reach out during this time, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can upon our return to the office.
System will remain online throughout the break
Learners in our Professional Learning Portal will continue to have uninterrupted access to their online courses throughout our winter break. Those enrolled in a facilitated course, however, should expect not to receive feedback from our staff between Friday, December 23 — Monday, January 2.
Processing of SCECHs may take longer than our typical 10-day turnaround due to our office being closed:
We’re sorry to inform you that we have reached capacity for several of our Semester 1 and Trimester 1 courses. You’ll notice when attempting to enroll students in our Student Learning Portal that some courses are unavailable. While we are no longer accepting new enrollments for these courses at this time, many courses continue to remain open for enrollment.
With many students across the state 100% remote, demand for our online courses is greater than ever before. Because every course we offer is taught by a Michigan-certified teacher, this high volume of enrollments has created capacity issues for our teachers who provide each and every student with individual feedback.
While the Michigan Virtual team anticipated and planned for significant increases in student enrollments this Fall, the increased demand we’ve experienced has been unprecedented. As a result, we are taking steps to hire even more part-and full-time teachers to support larger numbers of student enrollments for Semester 2 as well as for Trimester 2 and 3.
For schools that still need online learning options this year, please fill out the form at the bottom of our virtual pathways page to meet with someone to discuss other solutions. While some of our teacher-led courses are full, we may still have the capacity to help you in upcoming terms or can discuss timing to implement a whole-school or collaborative program in which local teachers from your school/district use our online course content to teach students. We also have free course content and resources available for you to use.
We know this is an incredibly stressful time for all, and we’re sorry if the courses you’re looking for are unavailable. We never want to turn away a student who wants to learn from us. Our top concern, however, is student success, and we have a policy to not take on additional enrollments if we cannot guarantee that all students will have a quality online learning experience.
We appreciate your patience and understanding as we navigate the unusually high volume of enrollments we are receiving.
