Instructional Continuity – General Recommendations
The Educational Technology Team has developed the following recommendations and overview of available online tools if classes need to be taught remotely.
- Communicate with your students right away and set expectations: Even if you don't have a plan in place yet, communicate with your students as soon as possible, informing them that changes are coming and what your expectations are for checking email or Canvas so you can get them more details soon.
- Consider realistic goals for continuing instruction: What do you think you can realistically accomplish during this time period? 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? Do you just want to keep them engaged with the course content somehow?
- Review your course schedule to determine priorities: Identify your priorities during the disruption—providing lectures, structuring new opportunities for discussion or group work, collecting assignments, etc. What activities are better rescheduled, and what can or must be done online? Give yourself a little flexibility in that schedule, just in case the situation takes longer to resolve than you think.
- Review your syllabus for points that must change: What will have to temporarily change in your syllabus (policies, due dates, assignments, etc.)? Since students will also be thrown off by the changes, they will appreciate details whenever you can provide them.
- Identify your new expectations for students: You will have to reconsider some of your expectations for students, including participation, communication, and deadlines. As you think through those changes, keep in mind the impact this situation may have on students' ability to meet those expectations, including illness, lacking power or internet connections, or needing to care for family members. Be ready to handle requests for extensions or accommodations equitably.
- Create a more detailed communications plan: Once you have more details about changes in the class, communicate them to students, along with more information about how they can contact you (email, online office hours, etc.). A useful communication plan also lets students know how soon they can expect a reply. They will have many questions, so try to figure out how you want to manage that.
Adopted from Indiana University https://kb.iu.edu/d/keep
Suggested Tools for Delivering a Virtual Course
Most faculty already use Canvas as the learning platform for their courses. To minimize confusion for both faculty and students, it should be used when courses need to be offered in a virtual environment. Both Echo360 and Zoom are excellent tools for capturing lectures and discussion-based classes and ensuring that the community of learners stays strong.
- Email communication: Use Canvas Announcements which go to both a student’s St. Mike’s email and is added to the Announcements page in your Canvas course.
- Class Discussion:
- Use Canvas Discussions for written discussions on questions that you post and the students respond to. They should then respond to two other students in order to truly “discuss” the question. This is asynchronous so it can be done at any time.
- Use Zoom to have a virtual face-to-face conversation/lecture with your students. This works best for classes that are typically discussion based. You need to create a Zoom session and email them an invitation (very easy to do) for each virtual class meeting. This is synchronous, so students need to be available at the time you choose.
- Lectures: Use Echo360 to record standalone lectures that students can access in their Canvas course.
- Important note regarding use of Zoom and Echo360 together: Due to equipment limitations, Zoom and Echo360 cannot be used at the same time. Detailed instructions will be available to address this issue.
- Assignments: Create Assignments in Canvas. Students will submit papers via Canvas; the plagiarism checker Unicheck can also be used. You can use the embedded feature, Speedgrader, to help grade the papers.
- Quizzes: If you have an online quiz or test you can use the Quiz function in Canvas that allows for multiple choice, true-false, essay questions, etc. Some questions can be automatically graded and you can grade the short answer/essay questions in Canvas.
- Office Hours: You can offer virtual office hours via the phone, email or the use of Zoom.
- Scheduling Software: If you are trying to determine the best time for a synchronous meeting or discussion, a Doodle Poll (which is free) allows you to quickly poll your students to determine the best date and time for the meeting.
Educational Technology Team
- Anne Crowley – Canvas Administrator/Course Designer (acrowley@smcvt.edu)
- Jim Millard – ECHO360 Administrator/Course Designer (jmillard@smcvt.edu)
- Amde Assefa – Zoom Administrator (aassefa2@smcvt.edu)