A lot of teachers I know and love (including one I live with) are scrambling right now to rapidly transition their in progress face to face classes to online instruction. I don’t teach college classes anymore, but I’ve spent more than a decade helping college teachers improve the learning experience for their students and currently spend most of my work time thinking about how to help reduce barriers to education and make learning accessible to more people around the world. Here’s my advice:<\/p>\n
Choose the simplest possible tools and simplest possible processes, wherever possible.<\/strong> For example, if you have content you want to make sure that learners engage with, begin by asking: can this content be shared as simple text? If it can, use simple text: find written content by others, make written content for learners, ask learners to respond in writing. There are lots of low-tech ways to share text with learners, many of which don’t require constant internet access. Use your LMS, use simple publishing tools like Pressbooks, WordPress, Google Docs, or Etherpad<\/a> to make web versions of content you want to share (and where ever possible, export formats that can be read offline, like EPUB or PDF — this is where Pressbooks excels<\/a>). Ask your students to use asynchronous social annotation tools — like the comments function in Google Docs or Hypothesis<\/a> (a free, open source annotation tool) for anything else on the web. More ideas about using Hypothesis as part of an instructional continuity plan here<\/a>. Erik Simpson is right, I think:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n