In the case of unforeseen events, instructors should be prepared to deliver their classes online temporarily on short notice. Instructors may take different approaches to online delivery that best reflects the context of their courses, students, and department/program expectations. The goal is to provide the best educational experience possible given the limitations of the current circumstance.
Working remotely and faculty resources
Be prepared to take your class online
Use the following best practices and tools to help you during this time
Communicate with your students: Even if you don't yet have a plan in place, communicate with your students as soon as possible, informing them that changes are coming. Let them know what your expectations are for checking email or D2L, so you can get them more details when available. Continue to communicate with your students regularly about the course and your expectations.
Check with your department/program: Your department/program may issue more details about the situation and guidelines about their expectations for classes. Administrators may want to have many of the department's classes handled in similar ways, so before doing too much planning, check with departmental leaders to get guidance.
Consider realistic goals for teaching online under the circumstances: As you think about continuing instruction online, consider what you think you can realistically accomplish. Do you think you can maintain your original syllabus and schedule? Do you hope students will keep up with the reading with some assignments to add structure and accountability? How will you keep them engaged with the course content? Consider realistic options for applied learning contexts.
Pick tools and approaches familiar to you and your students: Try to rely on tools and workflows that are familiar to you and your students, introducing new tools only when necessary, given the stress that instructors and students will be under.
Keep things accessible and mobile friendly: In a crisis, many students may have access to a mobile device only and not a laptop or desktop. It’s important to: • Consider that all students may not be able to equitably complete written course work, including written responses to quizzes/exams, and accommodate accordingly. • Ensure you are using mobile-friendly formats including PDFs and D2L pages. For example, consider saving other files in two formats, its original application format and a PDF. PDFs are easier to read on phones and tablets and keep the file size small, and the original file format often has application features that are helpful to students who use accessibility software.
NOTE: PDFs generated through photocopy scanning are NOT an accessible file format; digitally-speaking, they are just images. The text in a scanned PDF will not be accessible to anyone using text-to-speech assistive technology and the files will not easily resize for mobile devices. To create more accessible PDFs, start with simple Word documents and save these in PDF format. For some technical guidance, see PDF Accessibility.
You may want to poll your students confidentially to find out what access to devices and internet they may have in the event of a complete college shut down. This may guide some of your decisions regarding course delivery and/or accommodations for individual students.
Copyright Compliance: As you move materials online, be mindful of copyright. Consider providing links to third party resources rather than embedding them in your D2L course if they do not fall within the Fair Dealing guidelines the Canadian Copyright Act. Contact Camosun’s Copyright Advisor if you have questions: copyright@camosun.ca.
The content on this webpage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Portions of the guidance on this page are adapted, with permission, from the Indiana University keepteaching.iu.edu website. “Keep Teaching” content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License by the Trustees of Indiana University.