Tips for Transitioning to Remote Delivery

  1. Be kind to yourself and your students. Everyone is stressed, even if they’re playing cool. Remember to take the time to check in with yourself and your students about how things are going.
  2. You will not recreate your classroom, and you cannot hold yourself to that standard. Moving a class to a remote delivery model will ask you to prioritize by focusing on the learning outcomes and the essential skills students must learn. Be patient with yourself and your students during this time.
  3. Be transparent with students. Talk to them about WHY you’re prioritizing certain things or asking them to read or do certain things. This will improve student buy-in because they know content and delivery are purposeful, even if there are a few hiccups at first.
  4. Be particularly kind to your graduating students. This is an extraordinarily stressful time for them. If you teach a class where they need to have completed something for certification, a job, to apply to grad school, etc., figure out plan B in concert with them and your department/program.
  5. If you’re making videos, student viewership drops off precipitously at 5 minutes. Consider multiple short videos. Do not assume your audio is good enough or that students can understand without transcription. Students who do need this may not feel comfortable asking or when they do ask, your focus may already be elsewhere. Consider uploading videos to YouTube or creating them with TCU’s Panopto license so that they will automatically be transcribed, and you can then edit the captions as needed – this is a place where being proactive can save you some work down the road.
  6. Consider accessibility in materials you upload or link to – are there closed captions, are items formatted correctly, do images have text describing the content of the image, etc.?
  7. Offer low-stakes or practice activities if you’re using a new platform. Get students used to just using the platform. Then you can do something with a larger potential impact on the course grade.
  8. Ask for help from colleagues, your department/program/college Instructional Continuity Facilitator, or the Koehler Center if needed.

List adapted from work by Amy Young, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Communication, Chair of the Department of Communication, Pacific Lutheran University.

Additional Resources

Online Pedagogy