There are a number of circumstances which may require you to temporarily move your face-to-face class to a blended or fully online modality expeditiously. The resources on this page offer approaches you can use to keep your course running during these unplanned situations. If you are looking for guides or more information, search the IT Knowledge Base. We recommend that you adopt strategies that you are comfortable with and will allow you to meet your necessary short-term instructional objectives.
- Acts of Nature
- Campus/Building Closure
- Family Emergency
- Increased Absenteeism during Cold/Flu Season
Tools
Communication with your students should begin as soon as possible to inform them that a transition may be taking place. Set clear expectations with your students about the preferred communication tool for the course and use it consistently.
- Announcements: The Canvas Announcements tool is another effective way to keep your students updated on course activities. Announcements are typically a one-way push of information from instructor to students.
- Canvas Inbox: Alternatively you could use the Canvas Inbox email system. This system allows you to easily send messages to the entire course, or target specific students or student groups.
- Email Lists: The university provides the ability to create course Email Lists. The lists automatically update throughout the semester to reflect the current student roster.
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Faculty with expertise in this area:
- Shelly Galliah (sagallia@mtu.edu)
- Canvas Discussion Tool: The Canvas Discussion Tool is a common way to encourage your students to discuss course content at a time that is convenient for them. Discussions can be threaded to allow conversations to expand on demand.
- Piazza: If a question and answer format is more appropriate for your course needs you can enable Piazza in your Canvas course. Piazza allows students to pose questions while others can provide solutions. Meanwhile the instructor can moderate activity to ensure students are staying productive and to endorse correct solutions offered by students.
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Faculty with expertise in this area:
- Nancy Barr (nbbarr@mtu.edu)
- Brigitte Morin (bemorin@mtu.edu)
- Providing course content via Canvas Content Pages is a great way to allow students to access information from a variety of devices including laptops, tablets and phones. Content pages are responsive to the screen dimensions on which the student is viewing. They support text-based content, images, tables, video content, and links to documents, presentations or external websites.
- If you would prefer to create short recordings of your lecture content, you can utilize the university-supported Panopto-Huskycast Video Platform which provides a robust system for delivering video content to your students. The system allows for uploading and streaming the content to all registered students in a Canvas course.
- If you would like to record your lectures in a campus classroom, please contact the CTL (906-487-3000).
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Faculty with expertise in this area:
- Nancy Barr (nbbarr@mtu.edu)
- Brett Hamlin (bhhamlin@mtu.edu)
- Amlan Mukherjee (amlan@mtu.edu)
- Shane Oberloier (swoberlo@mtu.edu)
- Assignments in Canvas can be used to assess students’ understanding and competency of course materials by using a variety of media. Assignments include Quizzes, Graded Discussions and online submissions.
- Assignments can be assigned to everyone in the course or differentiated by section and user.
- Assignments involving the submission of a student paper can be integrated with Turnitin to check for similarity.
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Faculty with expertise in this area:
- Libby Meyer (ecmeyer@mtu.edu)
- If you require synchronous interactions with your students, such as a live class session or virtual office hours, the university-supported Zoom Conferencing Software is your best option. All Michigan Tech faculty, staff and students have Zoom user accounts available.
- You can Schedule a Zoom Meeting and invite your class to join the meeting. At the scheduled meeting time simply Launch the Zoom Session.
- Zoom also offers the ability to record synchronous meetings to make them available for viewing for those unable to attend the live event. This Tips & Tricks article published by Zoom is a great resource on how to successfully teach a virtual lesson.
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Faculty with expertise in this area:
- Brett Hamlin (bhhamlin@mtu.edu)
- Ruth Archer (raarcher@mtu.edu)
- When teaching remotely it may be difficult to imagine an effective simulation of these normally face to face interactions.
- This curated list of POD Online Simulations Google Doc may be of interest if you would like to try and incorporate a lab simulation that has already been created and is available.
- Alternatively, Michigan Tech’s IT has the ability to set up a camera to record your lab exercises or experiments to post to your course in Canvas. You can contact ctl@mtu.edu to discuss your needs.
- The Michigan Association of State Universities has compiled this list of Lab and Simulation Resources, sorted by discipline.
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Faculty with expertise in this area:
- Ed Laitila (ealaitil@mtu.edu)