You’ve read recommendations about planning ahead to use Mediasite and HuskyCT to offer virtual classes during cancellations, but what can you do if you haven’t planned ahead?
Even if there’s no time to practice, try one of these options at the last minute. Although you may not be real familiar with using these tools, your students have likely practiced with them in other courses.
- Select a space—a discussion thread, blog space, or other HuskyCT area—in which students can assemble.
- Post a discussion thread for working through a current issue or ask a student (or a few) to post a piece of a current project for discussion.
- Have students think through their first drafts in a “Course Blog” (everyone in class can see that); assign responses to the blogs that engage with the students’ project.
- Create and share visual/textual supports for the conversations you’ve been having in class.
- Use Google Docs to set up a document (or passage from something you’ve read) all students can annotate (or let them assemble a “slab” of quotations and visuals).
These recommendations come from Scott Campbell in the English Department, but they are easily adaptable to other disciplines. He suggests that, whatever you choose to do, you communicate with your students about your expectations for the work they should be doing. Although some schedule adjustments are inevitable, it’s getting a bit late to change due dates for major projects. The semester must proceed, and it isn’t helpful to make March and April even busier, nor to leave students without any grades so far into the semester.
Visit Weather Interruptions/Emergency Cancellations for more details.
For more information, contact: The Institute for Teaching and Learning at itl@uconn.edu