The Coronavirus Conundrum: Move classes online, yes or no?

Forced upon them by the Coronavirus pandemic, university educators and administrators alike are now confronting a new choice: Should they move classes online?  Moreover, if they think they should, how to accomplish what could certainly be a daunting task?

If you are seeking answers to these questions, my literal baptism by fire experience last December may be helpful.  In December 2019, my university was forced to evacuate our Chalon Campus in the hills above L.A. due to the Getty Fire.  As it turned out, this campus needed to remain closed for a couple of months after the fire while clean up and repairs were made.

As the Director of the Online Bachelor's Program, I championed and supported moving on ground classes online via the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) already in place.

As students had their lives disrupted significantly, including moving students from dorms to hotels, and some students relocating back home to areas in and out of L.A., the convenience of being able to quickly scale up our courses into an online environment was considered a resounding success by our senior administration.

So now I am quite the expert at this kind of rapid transition to online content. That being said, here’s some tips if the Coronavirus pandemic is causing you, your school, or others you know to contemplate moving on ground classes online:

Tip #1: Identify SME’s.  These are the Subject Matter Experts with hopefully both online curriculum development and online teaching experience.  You will lean on them for their knowledge.  Typically, these are faculty who already are teaching online.

Tip #2: Determine if your school’s LMS can be rapidly scaled to meet your needs.  If your school does not currently have a LMS, that could be a huge roadblock.  It’s not insurmountable, but this surely can be an impediment to rapid deployment of a solution. 

Tip #3: Prepare to provide extra support to your students.  For example, when we moved Accounting classes online after the Getty Fire, the professor offered live sessions via the Zoom video conferencing application so that students who were struggling with that week’s concepts could ask real-time questions and benefit from something that resembled the on-ground class environment.  Professors who are not used to being more accessible via chat, email, text, video, etc. may need to adjust accordingly to provide greater support to their students.

Tip #4: Consider transitioning to the many excellent, completely online text resources available today, often for free or nearly free.  This enables quick deployment of classes, saves students a tremendous amount of money on books, and even saves the environment.  I started moving classes to free online resources last year with the encouragement and support of my university, and the results have been great. 

As always, feel free to reach out to me if I can be of any assistance with questions about moving classes online, or anything else where I might be an SME-Ira