Once you understand your students’ circumstances, consider how flexible you need to be in your approaches to instruction to accommodate student circumstances. For example, are deadlines flexible? Are lectures/zoom sessions recorded for viewing by students that can’t make it? Can you provide options/alternatives for students?
Suggestions:
- Start your course with an ice breaking activity.
- Keep the number of modules in your course between five and nine.
- Avoid dates and term-specific references within the course content, use the course schedule for that, so that the next time you teach the course it will be less work to update.
- Use rubrics to facilitate feedback/grading.
- Consider areas of your course for class community activities (where students can meet each other and talk about non-course-related issues.)
- Consider how you will handle private communication with students.
- Consider mechanisms to create and archive class/course announcements, responses to frequent student questions, and reusable student feedback.
- Create a “culminating activity” for your course that brings closure to the course and elicits feedback from students that may be used for future revisions.