1. Identify what is MOST important for students to learn to successfully complete your course and which assessments are key measures of that learning. At first, it is recommended to only make minimal adjustments. If the disruption lasts longer, more extensive interventions may be required and further campus guidance will be provided.
2. Clear communication at all levels is critical during a disruption. You may even want to communicate your plans before the disruption occurs (if possible). Expect to inform your students of the plan for the course moving forward as well as to communicate with your teaching team to troubleshoot any further issues that may arise.

Let students know, in every format possible (e.g. in person, through email, via Canvas Announcement) and as soon as possible, how they’ll be updated, in what ways they can expect to be impacted, and how class meetings will occur (e.g. via Zoom, viewing asynchronous materials, etc.) in the case of a campus disruption.

• Create Announcements to reach all of the students in your course at once.
• Use the Canvas Inbox to communicate with a course, or portions of it.
• Enable the Chat feature in your courses for especially quick communication.

Note: During a period of disruption, it will be especially important for you to be aware of how Canvas notifications work. If you have not already done this, encourage your students to have their notifications on, especially for Announcements and Conversations as the situation develops. You might also consider curating your own notifications. 

Further Strategies:

• If TAs are not available, let students know how to communicate with you and remind them that you will be the primary point of communication.
• Use familiar tools to facilitate communication to students and for student to student collaboration.
• Plan ahead so that you can organize communication (especially emails) efficiently. For example, ask students to use standardized subject lines such as: 
  • COURSE NAME/NUMBER - QUESTION ABOUT <TOPIC, SOMETHING HAPPENING IN CLASS, ADMINISTRATIVE ISSUE>. If you do this, provide students with categories for the subject lines.

Depending on the type of disruption, it may be helpful for you to temporarily pivot your instruction to emergency remote learning.

• UCR instructors still have enhanced licensing for Zoom. If you haven’t yet used Zoom or need a refresher, visit their Getting Started Guide.
•  If you taught this course already between 2020-2022 as an emergency remote course, check a previous version of this course to determine if there is a video or lesson plan you can re-use during this latest disruption.

Encourage students to ask you questions in an online discussion forum or help each other with homework in a Canvas chat (You may need to redirect students who email with questions to the forum or chat). 

• To improve efficiency, consider creating forums or chat threads for different categories of questions (e.g. administrative, concepts from the week, grading questions).
• Canvas Discussion Forums
• Consider Zoom-based group office hours so that multiple students can attend without worrying about space. 
• If you host multiple office hours, consider creating themes for some of the hours (e.g. how to organize a paper, solve difficult problems for exams, review a complex topic). 
• If you expect large groups, consider recording the office hour session and sharing it with all students.

• Foster predictability: communicate your plans for the course each week and try to stick to them. 
• If part of students’ grades depends on meetings that you don’t lead, decide how any remaining portion of the grade tied to those meetings will be earned and communicate that to students.
• Post lecture notes/recordings so that students can review content independently or use them  to complete assignments.
• If grading will be delayed, encourage your students to keep copies of their submitted work (where possible), and post sample solutions or annotated examples of exemplary work, along with a short video of “common successes and pitfalls” that you can glean from quickly scanning students’ assignments.
• Further resources for keeping courses accessible: 
  • Zoom Accessibility
  • Canvas Accessibility Standards

• Provide remote activities where possible.
• If needed, seed an experiment for your students to continue in future lab periods or provide artificial data, or data from prior in-person activities, for them to analyze in place of performing the work on their own.
• For courses with small numbers of sections, consider asking your colleagues whether they would be willing to share the responsibility of facilitating them with you.

Many virtual labs - ChemCollective (Chemistry), MERLOT (Science), PhET (simulation), and LabXchange (molecular biology), to name a few - are available that can substitute for the physical performance of an experiment (here is a list of additional online labs, simulations, and resources). Online museum collections (Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Harvard Digital Collections) can be examined in lieu of interaction with physical artifacts. How well these virtual experiences model professional practice will vary, depending on your discipline and course, but you may find an option that works well for you.

• Create a structured online discussion (by section groups, if appropriate). Consider creating an online space for students to interact asynchronously. 
• Create worksheets or collaborative activities for your students to work through, either synchronously or asynchronously.
• Encourage students to help each other with homework, complete group projects, and ask administrative questions. 
• Annotate a reading together, asynchronously, by asking (section groups of) students to comment on it in Google Docs (check sharing permissions) or by using an online annotation tool.
• Create a self-grading online quiz with multiple attempts for student mastery, and provide information about where students can find relevant information
  • Creating a New Quiz
  • Creating a Classic Quiz

Explore more options for engaging students with low and high stakes assessments.

• Consider different formats for hosting “review sessions” that provide all students with access: create an FAQ, video response, live review session on Zoom and record/share.
• Create a way for students to submit questions about exams and organize questions/responses thematically using tools that are familiar to you and/or your students. 
  • Discussion Forum in Canvas (encourage upvoting)
  • Collaborative Google Doc
  • Surveys in Canvas (ungraded quizzes), Poll Everywhere or a Google Form. 
  • Encourage students to use or choose from common categories of questions (“big ideas” that are necessary for successfully completing the course) so that you can sort questions into groups as you put together responses.
• Avoid hosting review sessions that will not be accessible to all students (e.g. review sessions during any time other than the scheduled class times, unless recorded and shared).

• Identify what is essential for assessments and what formats of assessments will be reasonable to grade (multiple-choice or short-answer exams, etc.).
• If you are changing the format of an exam from short answer to multiple choice, let students know and provide them with sample questions.
• If you use something like a final paper in a course, consider adapting the assignment so that the grading workload is more manageable, such as having students write the outline of the final. paper, indicating what evidence or data from the course they will use and how it is connected to the paper’s thesis or argument. If you choose to do so, provide students with a strong example of this approach, and with the rubric you will use to grade their work.
• Give students feedback about their work, whether the feedback is automated in an online quiz, light-touch feedback to groups of students, or to the whole class in a short video that highlights common successes and challenges of student work.
•  Use Rubrics and ask students to self-evaluate their submitted work using the rubrics.
• Consider having students complete work in teams instead of individually.

Video on Creating Groups in Canvas

Provide students with opportunities for self and peer-assessment.

To aid grading, utilize online quizzes in Canvas that can auto-grade or leverage tools such as Gradescope.

Yuja Proctoring for Canvas Quizzes

Provide these instructions for starting a proctoring session to your students.

 How to use SpeedGrader and Using the Canvas Gradebook

Sharing Canvas Content with Another Instructor

• Modules
• Assignments
• Classic Quizzes
• New Quizzes

Copying Content between Your Courses

• Course Import
• Announcements
• Modules
• Assignments
• Classic Quizzes
• New Quizzes

Canvas Calendar features

• Quick Edit Assignment or Event
• Create Appointment Groups

These Canvas Video Guides will walk you through Course Management and Gradebook tasks in Canvas. 

In the grid below, each link opens up a step-by-step video demonstration given by an XCITE team member.  

You may pause the videos or rewind them to learn at your preferred pace.

You can access your courses in Canvas at http://elearn.ucr.edu