For professors

Professors don't get subs. They send three messages.

When a professor is out, there is no substitute pool — there is a chair to notify before class, a TA or colleague who might cover, and students who need an announcement on the LMS. A professor's absence is those three messages plus a session that can run without you. SubPacket stores your courses once and, on the morning you're out, assembles a cover packet that leads with exactly those three pieces: the chair note, the TA brief, and the ready-to-post student announcement.

The chair note

University policies are consistent on the first move: let your chair know before the class meets, say whether the session is covered, moved to asynchronous work, or cancelled, and say what students have been told. The cover packet opens with that note, written from your stored details — your name, department, the course and its meeting time, the plan for the session — addressed to the chair you named at setup. No composing from a sickbed.

The TA brief

If your TA or a colleague is covering, what they need is not a syllabus — it's a brief: where the session picks up, what to run, what to skip, where the materials live, and what to do if the room tech fails. The packet's second section is that brief, built around your banked session: slides, a reading, a recorded lecture, or a problem set that runs itself. If nobody is covering, the brief becomes the instructions for the asynchronous version of the session.

The student announcement

Third, the announcement — the text you paste into Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle telling students what's happening: you're out, what the session is today, where the materials are, and what's due as scheduled unless you post otherwise. SubPacket generates it from the same stored facts, ready to post word for word, so the 8am section and the 2pm section get the same true story.

Set up from your syllabus

Setup starts with what you already have: paste a syllabus and Patty extracts your courses, meeting times, TA, chair, and LMS — then shows you what it found, and saves only what you confirm. Bank one ready session per course (the reading and discussion questions that can carry a day) and the cover packet has something real to hand over. Your delivery list is your TA and covering colleagues — up to five addresses on the Pass.

And back to you

Whoever covered can leave a note back from the packet link — what got covered, what questions came up — which lands in your inbox and your packet history. When you're back, you know exactly where each section stopped, instead of reconstructing it from three inboxes.

Quick questions