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Campus closure – ideas for your course

Weather, natural disaster, and other stuff.

Be safe

Be aware that the conditions can impact faculty, staff, and students in different ways depending on where they live and commitments they have.

Policy -

Ideas

  • Host a synchronous class meeting in Zoom and record it for anyone who misses the session.
  • Flip your class and create a video lecture at home with Panopto and post it for students to watch
  • Create a classroom assignment that can be completed remotely
    • Online Quiz
    • Online Discussion
    • FlipGrid
    • Students create their own videos

Here’s our guide to setting up zoom: https://wiki.spu.edu/display/ETMH/Zoom and CIS’s help page https://wiki.spu.edu/display/HKB/Zoom

It covers registering, requesting pro accounts (if needed), and – optionally - how to add zoom into Canvas .

Pro accounts are needed to host or record meetings longer than 40 minutes. Although, even with a basic account you could run a sequence of zoom sessions.

I’m a huge ZOOM user and proponent.  YES you can share your screen (or students can share their screens) while still keeping your camera on.  Participating members can play around with their ZOOM controls so that they can see both the static or streaming screens of the members on the ZOOM call. 

The trick I’ve had to relearn (again and again) is that the controls disappear when you aren’t using them.  If you wiggle your mouse, you’ll see the controls appear at the bottom of the screen and “Share Screen” is one of them.


When I set up large classrooms, I generally ask that the participants

  • Use earbuds if they have them (prevents reverb)
  • Stay muted unless they are going to speak (background noise can be killer)
    1. An alternate to conversation/participation is to use the text-messaging tool built into zoom
  • NOT TYPE on the laptop while they are unmuted if they are using the laptop as their ZOOM tool…it drowns out other voices.  They can easily log into zoom with a tablet or phone and then use their laptop to take notes.  Or stay muted.
  • Keep video off…saves bandwidth and let’s participants listen comfortably without having to worry about their appearance.


We’re happy to talk about good practices for the mechanics using Zoom and to discuss how it works in different class settings. A fully online session will run differently than a mixed mode on campus and online session. I’d add a few suggested tips to Lynette’s list:

1) Connectivity problems happen – let students know that that’s ok and they should just rejoin as they can.

2) If you’re running a mixed mode session, designate someone in the room with you to be actively monitoring and engaging with the online students in the chat – that’s a good way to make sure the online students have a voice without you trying to do everything at once

3) For synchronous online sessions – be aware that you’re often being invited into a student’s home and be understanding. Although we’d suggest that you recommend finding a quiet space and setting aside the time, they (and you) may not always be able to control interruptions by roommates, spouses, children, and pets. Especially with snow days, I’d suggest recording sessions, in case students need to pause to leave the session for a while to deal with events and come back to the session later (rather than have an extended interruption play out in front of the class)..

4) If you have access to a microphone or headset use it – it’ll nearly always be better audio than your computer’s built in options.

I’m indebted to colleagues in the School of Education who have helped develop our approach to 2 & 3.

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