Emergency Teaching: Short-Term Protocol (1–2 Class Sessions) 

Your goal in navigating a short-term disruption to your course is not to replicate exactly what you initially planned to do. Rather, you should find meaningful, intellectually stimulating and appropriately rigorous ways to have students engage in the most important portions of the planned content.

• Identify the most important information that you were going to present during the disrupted session.
• If that must be presented synchronously, then plan to use Zoom.
• If there are materials associated with that information, use D2L to post them.
• Assign meaningful work: give students intellectual work that is complete-able given the circumstances.
  • Avoid assigning “busy work” or time-consuming tasks that do little to deepen students’ understanding of the core learning outcomes.
  • Rather, have students engage in work aligned with learning outcomes that encourages them to apply key principles, analyze critical ideas, evaluate arguments about the subject matter, or create products tied to the subject.

Plan for a reasonable amount of flexibility where possible. Students’ workflows, access to course content, and communication with both you and their peers may have been interrupted.

You do not need to replicate the entirety of the planned class, but it is still valuable to give students meaningful work to complete. Here are some suggestions:

• Hold a meaningful synchronous online meeting via Zoom
• Post a reading, and assign a notetaking or annotation activity
• Find a YouTube video and suggest students watch it while completing guided notetaking or answering guiding questions
• Ensure that captioning is available for the video
• Post a discussion forum in D2L where students engage with each other about a core course topic
• Post planned slide deck for the day and have students write three questions they have about the content in the slides
• Ask students to find and share in D2L one news story that is pertinent to your course