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.
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.