Sometimes the unexpected happens. When it does, Dartmouth is prepared to keep on teaching and keep on learning. Planned or unplanned events can make instructional locations unavailable for a period of time, however academic continuity can maintain course progression.
The Goal = Academic Continuity
This toolkit was developed to provide faculty with options to keep teaching and for faculty to consider providing options for students to support them as they keep learning. The tips, strategies, tools, and resources below are not intended to be a comprehensive lesson in online course pedagogy. The core purpose is to support faculty with a rapid transition to remote instruction. As outlined below, Dartmouth aims to approach all aspects of academic continuity with flexibility, care, compassion, kindness, creativity, and positivity.
General Principles
Prioritize care, compassion, kindness. Some of your students may need to miss class, find alternate ways to submit assignments depending on their technology/internet access, or request an extension for an assignment/exam. Knowing that you care about them and their success may make all the difference in their motivation, persistence, and ultimate success in your course.
Stay calm. Students look to you for leadership. If students see that you are calm and that you are assuring them everything will work with the course, that will go a long way to keep them positive and engaged.
Keep it simple. Do not expect to launch a fully online course that would typically take months to develop. Choose tools that are already in use by both you and the students. Keep it simple and choose technology tools that will support your particular learning goals and needs. Iterate as you learn over time.
Practice pedagogical flexibility. In times of rapid transition to remote teaching, flexibility goes a long way. Pedagogical flexibility allows us to get creative with assignment design, exam format, options for students such as choosing from a list of projects, interactive discussions, avenues for student submission of their work.
Support our entire student community. Please keep in mind that under-served and marginalized students may experience disproportionate stressors in these extenuating circumstances. This may include an overall lack of resources or need for a more accessible/flexible format.
Seek support from colleagues and teaching and learning staff. We encourage faculty to stay in communication with colleagues both in your own department and also across the college for ideas on how best to transition to remote teaching. There are likely some discipline-specific needs that may be solved with creativity in brainstorming with faculty teaching similar content.
Before You Start
The quick guide below can help you get oriented and start thinking about how you might “teach from anywhere”. Visit the longer Remote Teaching Good Practices for strategies, techniques, and links to tutorials.
- Check with your department or program: Your department or 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 check with departmental leaders before doing too much planning.
- Review your course schedule to determine priorities: Identify your priorities during a disruption to campus—providing lectures, structuring new opportunities for discussion or group work, collecting assignments, etc. Give yourself flexibility in that schedule, since you may be teaching in a new format or the situation takes longer to resolve than initially planned.
- Review your syllabus for points that must change: What will have to temporarily change in your syllabus, including, policies, due dates, assignments, or submission format?
- 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. Student Accessibility Services can assist with arranging for accommodations requests.
Getting Started
- Pick tools and approaches familiar to you and your students: Introduce new tools only when absolutely necessary. If you are introducing a new tool or technology, test it out in advance.
- Distribute Course Materials and Readings: See the Canvas Guide on options to place materials in Canvas. The Dartmouth Library can also provide readings, video, or audio on your Canvas site. See the Use Library Resources for Remote Teaching guide for more information.
- Deliver Lectures: If your class regularly uses a lecture format, there are several options to consider:
- Live delivery: Holding online sessions during your scheduled class time using Zoom. Not everyone may be able to attend due to time zones, family commitments, or other factors. This is a big change for students as well. We recommend you record these sessions and post them in Canvas to the class to view or review later.
- Time delayed delivery: Recording a lecture using screen recording software and posting to Canvas.
- Accessibility: All video in a class must include text transcripts to meet accessibility requirements. Zoom and Panopto include transcription processes in each software. See the Panoptp and Accessible Remote Teaching guide for more information.
- Facilitate discussions: See the following discussion guides for more information on structuring discussions on Zoom or Canvas, summarized here:
- Live discussions (in real-time), including smaller breakout groups can be hosted on Zoom. Discussions should be scheduled during scheduled class time, however an alternate time is encouraged to provide access to students in different time zones.
- Text-based discussions can be hosted using the Canvas discussion tool. Discussions are text based, but can include recorded media and links. These discussions provide time flexibility and accessible discussions.
- Collect assignments, provide feedback, and distribute grades:
- Canvas Assignments allows you to collect assignments, provide students feedback, and post student grades. See the Canvas Assignments guide for more information about setting up assignments.
- Feedback and grading can be provided in Speedgrader .
- Canvas provides individual assignment grades, category grades (i.e. quizzes), and course grade to each student through the Canvas Gradebook. See the Canvas Gradebook Guide for more details and the Grading and Feedback guide from DCAL.
- Foster social presence and collaboration among students. Shifting your course online can feel isolating to you and your students, but there are a few strategies to bring social presence to your course, including:
- Photo: Ask students to upload a photo or avatar to their Canvas profile.
- Set up Groups in your course: Canvas has features to allow for Group communication, discussion, and file sharing, or Dartmouth also offers Google’s G Suite for collaboration and file sharing.
- Announcements: Use Announcements in Canvas to communicate with the class. You can allow comments to the announcement, which provides a place for students to respond.
- For groups needing to meet virtually we recommend using Zoom. See the Zoom Guide for more information.
- Consider using Slack for your course. Dartmouth subscribes to an educational version for Slack.
- Assessing students and exams/quizzes: Canvas Quizzes allow instructors to create multiple choice, open-response, matching, and fill-in-the-blank question types. See the Quizzes, Tests, and Exams in Canvas guide for more details.
- Communicating with students: We recommend using the Canvas Announcements feature to communicate with your class. Announcements also allow you to send a message to an individual section within a multi-section course. Canvas Announcements will email the students and include a copy of the announcement on your course site, and keep the communication easy to access for all members of the course.