UF Resources Available to Ensure Teaching Continuity
Resources are available here at UF to ensure course continuity for faculty, teaching assistants and students. Are you prepared to continue teaching your course in the event face-to-face classes are not viable? What about if the H1N1 flu pandemic or a major weather event were to affect UF? Under these conditions you may have large numbers of student absences occurring over a period of months. Instructors and teaching assistants may also be absent for several days.
Instructors must be adequately prepared in advance. The three key components to ensure that the education process continues are planning, communication with students, and using available tools and services for course delivery.
Planning is Key
- Ensure you have proper equipment for online teaching.
- Have a communication strategy.
- Plan how you will stay in touch with your TAs and other instructional staff.
- Make sure your course syllabus and other course information is available online.
- Consider ways to help students continue through your curriculum.
Communication with Students
If online communication is not properly managed, it can easily overwhelm the instructor. To avoid this:
- Use email only for personal communications such as questions about grades, health issues and other personal information.
- Avoid multiple responses to the same issue. Direct students to post questions to a discussion board.
- Manage students’ expectations regarding response times.
More information on communicating with students
Available Tools and Services
UF has resources available to facilitate online teaching and communication. E-Learning course accounts with simplified templates have been created for all fall 2009 courses that did not already have an account before September 14, 2009. Instructors will be able to use the course management system to place content online, and student rosters will be pre-loaded into the system for all courses and sections.
- Use E-Learning.
- Large lecture halls are equipped with MediaSite for lecture capture.
- Elluminate licenses are available to faculty whose courses require synchronous communication to attain educational goals.
- Online tutorials are available to familiarize faculty with the use of available tools.
More information on course delivery
More information on available online tutorials
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Tags: Teaching Online
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Posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009.