Communicate regularly. Let students know about changes and when they can expect more specific information. They will be grateful for anything you can share.
Set expectations. Create a consistent communication plan that answers the following: How and where will you communicate information with students? How often should students check their email? How quickly they can expect a response. Share this plan with your students.
Manage your (and your students) communications load. You will receive lots of individual requests for information that could be useful to all your students. To save your time and to avoid swamping your students, consider letting your students know that you will send out a regular group email answering questions.
Share academic integrity expectations. Let students know that they must still uphold the Academic Honor Code. If students are now able to collaborate or use certain materials for assessments, let them know about these changes.
Use TLEARN to communicate grades. FERPA-protected data (such as grades, GPAs, or personally identifiable information like Social Security numbers) should never be sent via email (even university email). TLEARN is a secure way to communicate individual assignment grades. TigerPaws is the University’s secure method of submitting official midterm and final course grades.
💡Tips for Success
Use TLEARN: Get in the habit, if possible, of sending emails through TLEARN Announcements so there is a shared repository of all official course communications.
Communicate early and often: Frequent communication can ease student anxiety and save you from too many individual questions.
Create a FAQ Page: Create and maintain a FAQ page or Discussion Forum in TLEARN where you and students can answer questions. You can then encourage students to check there first before emailing you.
Build communication channels. Regular communication is important for reproducing the collaboration you have already built into your course. It also allows you to maintain a sense of community that can help keep students motivated to participate and learn.
Link to clear goals and outcomes. As with in-class learning, be sure to have explicit and transparent purposes and outcomes for all student-to-student interactions. Consider how online activities help students to meet course outcomes and prepare for assignments.
Build in simple accountability. Find ways to ensure that students are accountable for the work they do in any online discussions, synchronous learning experiences, and collaborations. Assigning points for online discussion posts or comments made during Zoom sessions can be tedious, so some instructors ask for reflective statements where students detail their contributions and reflect on what they learned from the conversation.
💡Tips for Success
Use synchronous and asynchronous tools. Students will participate in synchronous learning experiences through Zoom. This will be a powerful method of fostering student communication and community. With that said, keep in mind that--just as in the classroom--not all students will actively participate in online synchronous experiences. Consider using TLEARN forums and other online collaborative tools to allow students to interact with you and their fellow students.
Replace physical resources with digital resources whenever possible. Remember students will not be on campus with access to physical materials (or perhaps even their course textbooks). There are a number of free and easy-to-use apps that will allow you to take quick scans of print texts with your phone and convert them to PDFs.
Announce when and where new material is posted. Let students know when new material is available and where they can find it. Be consistent in where you post course materials.
Keep things mobile device/phone friendly. In a crisis, students may only have a phone or other mobile device available, so make sure you are using mobile-friendly formats, such as PDFs. Videos can take lots of bandwidth, so only require them if you are confident that students will have access to them while learning off-campus.
Consider saving files (such as PowerPoint presentations) to PDFs. PDFs are easier to read on phones and tablets, can easily be reduced to smaller file sizes, and can help ensure that your file’s formatting and structure remains consistent. Remember that PDFs cannot be easily modified, so do not use them for files needing collaborative editing. Most programs can convert to/save as PDFs: Microsoft files to PDF, using Google Suite to download a files as a PDF, saving a document as a PDF on Mac.
💡Tips for Success
Enable sharing options. Be sure to enable sharing options when using collaborative resources; it can be easy to forget to share Google files.
Enable notification preferences. Have students change their notification preferences on TLEARN to be alerted whenever anything new is posted, uploaded, announced, or assigned.
Make adjustments. Be ready to change assignment expectations to meet the realities of the situation. Consider whether you should allow individual rather than group projects and adjust, as necessary, the resources needed for completion.
Offer some consistency. Put everything in the same place. Make work due through the same channels and at the same time (and, if possible, the same day of the week). Directions and rubrics can be included when you create an assignment in TLEARN.
Remember students are off-campus. Many of us already collect work electronically, but remember that students only have access to the technologies, softwares, and resources they can access off-campus. While many resources, including softwares and library materials, can be accessed (sometimes with limitations) off-campus, not all students have the exact same opportunities and technological resources off-campus.
Think twice before collecting work through email. There are many issues associated with this method: inability to access attachments, submissions getting lost, an overload of emails in your inbox, students forgetting to hit send. TLEARN and Dropbox both ensure that the students have a record of submission (and so do you!).
State expectations, but be ready to allow extensions. You can still expect high levels of academic rigor and performance, but remember that some students will be facing new difficulties and challenges. Make expectations (both existing and new) clear, but provide more flexibility than you normally would in your in-person classes.
Adopt and share your revised submission policies. Tell students that it is their responsibility to ensure that assignment files can be properly accessed. Be sure to have policies in place for how students can document technical issues and how you will accommodate for late submissions due to these issues.
💡Tips for Success
Survey your students. Consider surveying your students to see what they will have access to off-campus and, as much as possible, use common, accessible, and free software and tools.
Require specific file names. It may sound trivial, but anyone who collects papers electronically knows the pain of getting 20 files named Essay1.docx. Give your students a simple file naming convention, for example, LastnameFirstname-Essay1.docx.
Post your policies. Have clear policies that you can share with your students about online submissions and technical issues. Consult our suggested policy wordings.
Keep things simple--for you and your students. It is fairly easy to give smaller quizzes online; this can be a useful way to check in on students and help them keep on track during class disruptions. Providing high-stakes tests online can be more challenging: they place extra stress on you and students; test integrity can be difficult to ensure; it takes considerable time to build online tests, and there will inevitably be technical issues.
Consider alternative assessment options. Delivering a secure exam online can be difficult without a good deal of preparation and support, and even with these resources there will be unexpected problems and technical issues. Exams that focus more on application rather than recitation can be harder to grade, but you have fewer worries about test security and technology failures. Ask students to apply knowledge to scenarios or to explain their justification for choosing one of multiple correct answers. Or have them engage in another method that still allows them to demonstrate student learning outcomes, such as: , such as: personal reflection on learning, infographic, summary video, advertisement, brochure, research proposal, video essay, annotated bibliography or article review, analysis of data.
Prepare for technical issues. The more guidance and instruction you provide prior to the test, the fewer issues you will encounter. Adopt and share a policy for how students can document technical issues and how you will accommodate for these issues.
Keep accessibility in mind. Official learning and testing accommodations issued by Student Accessibilities Services are still in effect; however, students will not be able to take tests through the Accommodated Testing Center. It will be your responsibility to ensure that students are still provided, as needed, with longer testing times. For tests administered synchronously during regular class time, remember that students who need extended testing times cannot be expected to keep working past the end of your class as they may have another class to attend. It will therefore be necessary to make appropriate arrangements. Consult the Accessibilities and Accommodations page for more information.
Give students time. Students will be In classes most of the day. For “take-home” tests or anything to be completed outside of the normal class time, give students as much time as possible (a minimum of 24-hours, 48-72 hours is ideal) to complete the work.
Think about the realities of the situation. If you feel a closed-book, proctored, timed exam is critical for your course, consult the Collaborative for some best practices. It is possible to do this in Zoom by having students show their work area on their webcam as they download a test, write answers by hand, and upload pictures of their work. But there are many potential problems with this method: students must have working webcams, additional time must be built into the exam time for the uploading process, students will still have their devices open, and you must proctor additional exam times for students with accommodations.
💡Tips for Success
Be bold. Substantial changes, including dates and the nature/format of the assessment, are understandable in the current, unprecedented environment so long as such changes are clearly communicated to students and changes are made with the best interests of both the instructor and student needs.
See what's out there. Check for publishers’ test banks and online quizzing tools that can be used for assessments or just to quizzing tools that can help students to better engage with the material.
Post your policies. Have clear policies that you can share with your students about online submissions and technical issues. Consult our suggested policy wordings.
Enable the multiple attempts feature in TLEARN. You can still restrict how long they have to complete the test and how long the test will be available; students do not gain additional time for attempts past the first one. Multiple attempts simply ensures that if a student encounters unexpected Internet or TLEARN issues and is “kicked out” of the test, they will be able to log back into the test and keep working. Allowing for multiple attempts will help reduce the need for special contingency plans.
Communicate early and regularly. Take the time (before classes resume if possible) to hold a brief conversation with your tutor: they will want to be helpful but this will be a challenging time for them as well. Ask for their suggestions in transitioning your class online. Go over any changed expectations for the rest of the term, particularly in terms of ‘office hours’, peer review, and the like. Feel free to use the template for initial email to your peer tutors.
Remember they have other responsibilities. It can be easy to rely more heavily on peer tutors (particularly tech-savvy ones) during this time. Remember though they should still only work the originally scheduled number of hours because they do have other commitments.
Let your peer tutors help. If your peer tutor is up to the challenge, consider asking them to provide technical support during Zoom class instructions so that students know this is their go-to person for troubleshooting tips.
Hold virtual office hours regularly and consistently. You can hold office hours both in real time during announced periods of time or asynchronously during announced days and hours. Maintaining times when students can come to you for individual assistance is especially important during a disruption, when students may be uncertain about changed deadlines or requirements.
Make sure students know "where" to find you. Put a link to the Zoom meeting you’re using for office hours in a central place on TLEARN and consider sending a reminder email each time you are in office hours. It is important that students know how to find “your office” and when you are “in” just as you would tell them directions to your on-campus office and post a notice on the door about times. (Google Hangouts is another software option as well.)
Use office hours wisely. Focus as much as possible on helping students with course content (clarifying theories or references, explaining solutions to problems, etc.) rather than administrative matters such as grading policies or assignment descriptions.
Consider alternative communication methods. If you or your students do not have strong enough network connections for reliable videoconferencing or if you are encountering technical issues; consider using TLEARN Chat or any other instant messaging tool; this still provides immediate and real-time connection with your students.