Supporting Instructor Absences

Suggestions for instructors to plan into courses

Here are some sug­ges­tions to help instruc­tors keep teach­ing dur­ing any absences to dig­i­tal or in-per­son teach­ing. If  there are no sub­sti­tute teach­ers or oth­er instruc­tors who can take your class, here are some sug­ges­tions to con­sid­er:

An ide­al solu­tion is to have a ‘in your back pock­et’ class that can be launched fair­ly effort­less­ly in an emer­gency when you can’t teach — but is already to go!

  • build one class that can be launched with lit­tle effort with pre-built instructions/videos to out­line stu­dent activ­i­ty
  • it might be a class that isn’t in sequence that can hap­pen at any time with a high degree of stu­dent-focused learn­ing
  • con­sid­er inde­pen­dent activ­i­ties for stu­dents or have them take more own­er­ship and build some­thing togeth­er in small groups

Flipped learn­ing is all about putting the stu­dents in the dri­ver’s seat to engage with con­tent (lis­ten­ing, read­ing, learn­ing) on their own first out­side of the class­room — and then you use class time for applied learn­ing, assign­ments, activ­i­ties. It is an excel­lent mod­el to flip­ping one class to being all about stu­dents doing the con­tent engage­ment, find­ing con­tent, going through con­tent you would have pre­sent­ed — on their own.

  • take con­tent that is more teacher-led and ask stu­dents to take on more of the prepa­ra­tion, plan­ning and engage­ment

Make a plan to start enhanc­ing your Bright­space cours­es with more dig­i­tal mate­ri­als to assist with build­ing a more flex­i­ble course.

  • take record­ings and resources you cre­at­ed in pre­vi­ous years and add to your course (note: you can­not reuse Kaltura record­ings as they con­tain pri­vate images of stu­dents and aren’t allow­able to be shared with anoth­er class)
  • find new dig­i­tal con­tent and enhance your cours­es so you have more of a com­plete ‘web pres­ence’ for all class­es
  • share con­tent with oth­er instruc­tors who might ben­e­fit from your resources

Put more of your live class con­tent into short record­ings either screen­cast­ing your pre­sen­ta­tions and hand­outs and/or nar­rat­ing Pow­er­Point slide decks etc. Make audio or video record­ings to ehance your exist­ing con­tent so more of it can be accessed in dig­i­tal for­mats even if teach­ing it syn­chro­nous­ly.

  • cap­ture instruc­tions for assign­ments, projects and oth­er stu­dent eval­u­a­tions into short videos
  • use Kaltura Cap­ture with direct upload­ing to My Media for Kaltura and embed­ding in cours­es
  • there is no bet­ter time than think­ing about design­ing all of your cours­es to be more nim­ble and flex­i­ble for what­ev­er the sit­u­a­tion — now or in the future
  • think about cre­at­ing ONE course that can be both syn­chro­nous dig­i­tal OR in-per­son and then pos­si­bly some or all parts asyn­chro­nous
  • In a nut­shell — a true HyFlex course that could be taught with some stu­dents join­ing online to the in-per­son class and some doing the course on their own
  • Resource: Flex­i­ble Learn­ing Resource by Ryer­son Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Chap­ter: Teach­ing a Hybrid-Flex­i­ble Course: The Fac­ul­ty Expe­ri­ence in HyFlex by Bri­an J. Beat­ty

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