Guiding Principles

Learner-centered Design courses that offer students flexible options to participate fully in the course. Select content and activities based on what students should learn and encourage them to bring their past knowledge, experiences, and ideas to the material in a manner that makes them an active member of the class as opposed to passively taking in information.
Scaffolding Clarity about learning objectives, expectations, and course mechanics is even more important in a flexible teaching environment.
Engagement Create learning experiences that engage students, including peer-to-peer activities and opportunities to participate in both live and/or asynchronous discussions. Online and hybrid modes of instruction place an even greater premium on faculty/TA interaction and feedback. Course elements such as discussion forums will matter to students insofar as faculty/TAs meaningfully engage with them.
Equity and inclusion Some students may become unable to join regular class meetings for legitimate reasons, especially health-related reasons. All reasonable efforts will be made to ensure that course work is accessible to students, whether they are able to attend in-person classes or will need to participate remotely.
Planning Keep workloads for faculty and students appropriate. There is no need to put in huge amounts of time into course elements that won’t be effective. More intensive faculty engagement over shorter time-frames with smaller groups of students will likely have greater pay-off than less intensive synchronous interaction with large numbers of students.
Transformation instead of translation Puts less focus on what technological options are available to guide your pedagogy and more on what you want students to learn. Think less about “translating” your face-to-face course to digital and more about “transforming” your course to take advantage of the options, tools, and flexibility that digital learning offers.
Read how this differs from emergency remote teaching