Academic Continuity
Plan Ahead
As with many things, the best time to plan for an emergency is before it happens. Taking some simple steps at the beginning of every semester can help both you and your students, should you need to be off campus for a period of time.
Share a Syllabus Statement
Crafting and sharing a statement for your syllabus about how you will handle academic continuity will make it clear to all students what your approach will be. A sample statement is included below.
Class Cancellations: In the event that class is cancelled due to inclement weather/illness/unforeseen circumstances, I will send an email to your Clark University email address with further instructions. In all cases of a cancelled class, an attempt will be made to make up for lost class time using online tools so please expect to log in to our Canvas site for information about alternate arrangements including additional materials and assignments.
Use Canvas
Many of the techniques offered here to continue teaching and learning away from the classroom will include Canvas. Publishing your Canvas course, and using it regularly will make your, and your students’ transition after an unexpected closure, much easier. Click here for information on Canvas.
Get Ready
Take some time now and use the ideas and techniques below to make a concrete plan for how you will approach an unexpected campus closure. For example, draft and save a sample email for your students that will explain how you will communicate with them and how you will modify your course.
Additionally, identify an ‘ever-green’ topic for your course. This is a topic that can be used this year, or in the future, and presented to the students at any point of a semester. ‘Ever-green’ topics are often supplemental to your usual course schedule and usually stand alone. Once identified, collect some resources and create an activity that can be presented online to have students engage and learn about the topic. Many semesters you won’t need the ‘ever-green’ topic, but if you need it – everything is ready!
First Steps
In the event of an emergency campus closure, the following steps can help you think about how to keep your students engaged in their learning.
Stay Informed
Monitor your Clark email and other communication streams for official communication about campus closures. Ensure that your ClarkALERTS information is up to date (https://you.clarku.edu). Additionally, talk to your department as they will likely have more details about the situation and expectations for classes. Administrators may want department’s classes handled in similar ways, so check before doing too much planning.
Early Communication
Communicate with your students right away. Even if you don’t have a plan in place yet, inform them that changes are coming and what your expectations for them will be around communication and how you will get them more details soon.
Teaching and Learning Considerations
First, consider goals for continuing instruction, including what you think you and your students can realistically accomplish during this time period.
Review your course schedule to identify your priorities for the period of the closure. What activities are better rescheduled, and what can be done easily online? What will have to change in your syllabus (due dates, assignments, etc.)? Give yourself a little flexibility, just in case the situation takes longer to resolve than you think.
Identify your new expectations for students including participation, communication, and deadlines. Keep in mind the impact this situation may have on students’ ability to meet expectations, including illness, lacking access to technology, or needing to care for family members. Be ready to handle requests for extensions or accommodations equitably.
Technology will undoubtedly play a part in your ability to continue teaching. As much as possible, try to rely on tools and workflows that are familiar to you, your students, and Clark’s ITS. Roll out new tools only when necessary. Introducing a lot of new tools and approaches can lead to frustration, confusion and detract from the learning.
Continue to Communicate
Once you have more details about the changes in the class, communicate them to students. Additionally, set expectations on how soon they can expect responses to their many questions. Finally, communicate regularly with your students to keep the academic momentum of your course.
Strategies
The strategies listed here provide multiple options for keeping your class running – offered in order from those that require the least technical skill to the most involved. In order to help your course run smoothly during this time, focus on the most basic elements you need to put in place to meet your short-term instructional objectives. If the situation continues, you can add more activities and find ways to accomplish them online.
Communication
Early and regular communication with your students is a key strategy in helping your students stay active in their learning away from the classroom.
An easy way to make announcements to your class is to use the Announcements in your Canvas course. Faculty and TAs can create a post in this forum, and all students will receive the message as an email to their Clark University email address.
Resources
You will likely need to provide additional course materials to support your changing plans, from updated schedules to readings that allow you to shift more instruction online. In a pinch, providing some new readings and related assignments or online discussions may be your best bet for keeping the intellectual momentum of the course moving.
Without regular class-time, you may need to think differently on what resources to provide your students. However, don’t overlook the wonderful resources and offered by the Goddard Library to faculty and students on, and off campus. Click here to learn more about the Library’s Academic Continuity resources.
Course Activities
Discussions
Fostering communication online allows you to reproduce any discussions or collaboration you build into your course, and maintains a sense of community that can help keep students motivated to participate and learn.
Canvas discussion boards can offer a rich and interesting way of having students engage with content and each other. Some suggestions include
- Refer to or link to an article, TED Talk, YouTube video, podcast or textbook reading and ask students to share thoughts, questions and further research on the topic through the lens of their learning.
- Offer students a controversial prompt and have them debate, discuss and challenge each other’s opinions
- Ask students to research, locate and share an article, video, interesting site that adds to their classmate’s learning on a specific topic.
There are also techniques that you can use to increase engagement, promote rich discussion, and establish your presence in the course. Click here to read a series of articles about asynchronous discussions from the ITS newsletter.
Assignments
Collecting assignments during a campus closure is fairly straightforward and many instructors already collect work electronically. Here are a few things to keep in mind
It may seem easy to collect assignments via email, but it can quickly swamp your email inbox, and can be difficult for you and your students to keep track of. We strongly suggest using the Assignment activity in Canvas.
Set clear deadlines and expectations for your online assignments but be aware that during campus closures some students will have difficulties meeting deadlines. Be ready to provide more flexibility than you normally would in your class.
Keep in mind that students may not have access to specialty software located on campus computer labs, so try to have submissions created in common applications such as Microsoft Office.
Faculty Videos/Lectures
For some courses, the ability to offer lectures will be important, even during campus closures. It’s relatively quick and easy to record short lectures, either with you talking directly to camera or as a presentation with audio/voice-over. Some considerations for this include
- Multiple short videos (10-15 minutes) are more effective for learning than longer videos. If you have a lot of content that you would like to cover on specific topics, consider ‘chunking’ your lecture into shorter videos.
- Uploading videos directly into Canvas is often problematic. Video files are usually large, and students may have difficulty downloading them. Additionally, downloaded video files may not play correctly on different platforms. Using our video streaming service, Kaltura is much more reliable for recording and viewing.
- Kaltura is Clark University’s video streaming service. It allows you to record audio and video (face to camera, voice-over powerpoint, or a combination) or upload existing videos (recorded on a phone or tablet) and allows your students to easily watch them.
Online Synchronous Class
While Clark’s ITS recommends the use of Zoom for synchronous class sessions, please consider the following points carefully before choosing this option over other offered techniques.
- Schedule your meeting times well in advance and publish the day, time and length. Sessions should be recorded for students who can’t attend to watch afterwards.
- Before you use Zoom to teach, take some time to practice. Because Zoom runs on multiple devices – including mobile phones – one great way to practice is to launch a meeting on your computer and then sign into that meeting on your iPhone, iPad, or Android Device.
- Do not assume that your students know how to use or learn in Zoom. In particular:
- Remind your students to test Zoom on their devices well in advance of the first meeting.
- Give your students a tour of the interface during your first session and teach them how to mute and unmute themselves.
- Determine if you are going to require your students to have their web cameras on during your entire class or if you are going to allow them to turn them off. Consider the bandwidth issues some students may experience if there are many videos being streamed, and that some students may not have access to a camera.
