Emergency Remote Teaching

A variety of circumstances might require you to temporarily deliver your class online with minimal notice, such as a viral or infectious disease outbreak, a family emergency requiring your presence elsewhere, or a natural disaster. This guide provides you suggested actions to take quickly when making the shift from teaching in a land-based classroom to teaching anywhere.

A good starting point for planning a shift to remote teaching is to understand the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning .

Shared Guidance from Collaborative Units

Prepare Online Class Sessions in Five Steps

Make a Plan

Consider using the Rule of 2's strategy to create a straightforward remote teaching plan. This planning process includes focusing on two guiding principles, two tools to support teaching, and so on. Modify your course expectations allowing flexibility for less than ideal conditions for access to technology, child or dependent care, and health considerations.

Stay Connected with Students

Determine how you will stay connected to students. Will you schedule office hours by phone call? Will you hold virtual office hours synchronously on Zoom? Will you simply contact students using the Announcement feature in Canvas? Define your communication plan, and keep it simple.

Create or Identify Content to Distribute

Get the content prepared. Consider preparing a combination of brief lecture videos, existing open content, and readings based on your course plan. Assistance in adding and organizing this content in Canvas is available from the Center for Innovative Design and Instruction and can be requested by completing the Online Conversion Help Request form .

Create Assignments and Assessments

Based on your plan determine how students can best demonstrate that they have met your expectations for the course. Again, be cognizant that students will have varying levels of access to technology are other important resources, so be flexible in your requirements. We want to remove barriers, not rigor. Also, consider student accessibility issues as you transition to remote teaching in a new format.

Teach Remotely

Time to get started. This will be a different teaching experience for you, and a different learning experience for your students. Teaching is difficult anyway, and teaching through a crisis presents several additional challenges. We are all human and trying to process what's happening in the world around us. Be flexible in your expectations. Be understanding with your students. Be human.

Additional Resources and Tips

1. Make a Plan

With limited time and resources to redesign courses for online or remote teaching, we need to keep things simple and straightforward. Priority should certainly be placed on providing students with the support they need during this time. That starts with understanding that we must be flexible with expectations. We want to remove barriers to students' learning without removing rigor.

Consider using the following tips and resources:

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Use the Rule of 2's strategy

The Rule of 2's strategy was created for shifting to remote teaching during a crisis to establish or maintain guiding principles for your course, and keep things simple by focusing on two tools, chunking content, and focusing on flexible ways to engage students. Remember that as you go through this process you can work with a colleague, instructional designer, librarian, or student to help.