Preparation for Teaching and Learning in Uncertain Times: Home

Moving to online delivery reveals just how much we rely on the familiar rhythms of campus life to structure our work and student learning. As you transition into an online context, your courses benefit from the intentional establishment of consistency and structures that are lost when meeting face-to-face is not possible.

A shift to online learning necessitates clearly articulating expectations for students, much as we might at the start of a semester. These are highly unusual circumstances: everyone is experiencing an additional burden of stress. In addition, students will be anxious about what a shift to remote learning will mean for them. They will be concerned about grades and their ability to access the internet. By the same token, this is a new experience for most faculty. This shared common ground, especially when discussed openly, can ease student concern and set the terms for going forward with this new mode of course delivery. Simply stating that we are all learning as we go along will go a long way towards creating a shared community.

A collection of recources gathered by Vanderbilt

A professor creates a syllabus to guide herself and other faculty members in preparing for more remote teaching this fall, amid Covid-19

By Sarah Rose Cavanagh JUNE 09, 2020

Sometimes educators adopt new technology to address specific needs — capturing lectures to flip the classroom and make more time for interaction, or adding audio assignments to support students on the go with mobile devices. Sometimes we’re attracted to shiny new tools: extraordinary experiences in virtual reality or adaptive learning automatically tailored to each student’s needs. Enter the pandemic and we’ve all suddenly got “emergency” reasons to explore and adopt new practices and tools to support remote and socially distanced teaching and learning. We don’t necessarily have the luxury of conducting drawn-out comparisons between different solutions — in the current climate, piloting edtech is no longer a question of “if,” but “how.”