Curriculum Development

As the COVID-19 outbreak expands, student access to patient care is being restricted with unprecedented scope. Aquifer’s virtual patient cases about core clinical conditions, developed by your colleagues to meet your national educational objectives, are—by design—available to fill the gaps you are experiencing in your student’s clinical training. We want you to be able to take full advantage of your Aquifer cases during this outbreak to help supplement clinical experiences that your students may be lacking due to access restrictions.

Here we (DaVinci Education) address 9 of the most common problems and offer some solutions that you might consider as you deliver or transition to delivering an online education.

As universities declare class cancelations and mandate a shift to online teaching, instructors have the opportunity to design online course materials to be as accessible as possible from the beginning. This will also ensure that your course materials are accessible moving forward.

This hands-on guide will teach you how to make common word processing documents accessible for screen readers, and how to make presentations accessible for a wide range of users.

This document is short, but contains links to more detailed explorations of particular issues and to illustrative material. Some of the ancillary documents contain step-by-step instructions or video demonstrations showing how you might implement particular pedagogic strategies using Zoom, the platform on which we will be most dependent in the coming weeks. But much more comprehensive information concerning the nuts and bolts of Zoom can be found on Harvard’s “Teach Remotely” website.

The Center for Academic Technology at Butler University has created a website to help, calling it Keep Calm and Teach On. Other universities have done something similar. Our university president has been messaging students regularly via email, and Butler University has created a web page specifically for coronavirus updates. There are new Facebook groups being created, such as one called “Pandemic Pedagogy.”

From VCU - This toolkit was developed to provide faculty with options to keep teaching and for faculty to consider providing options for students to support them as they keep learning. The tips, strategies, tools, and resources below are not intended to be a comprehensive lesson in online course pedagogy. The core purpose is to support faculty with a rapid transition to remote instruction that will promote course completion. As outlined below, VCU aims to approach all aspects of academic continuity with flexibility, care, compassion, kindness, creativity, and positivity.

In response to COVID-19, we’ve seen instructors and universities from around the world come together. We know this is not an easy time. But we also know the collaboration in terms of resources and community has been absolutely outstanding. You are not alone in this.

RTOL is a free emergency roadmap for making a rapid transition to remote learning during forced school closures. This quick-start guide will walk you through a simple step-by-step process to maintain your continuity of teaching and learning in a crisis. This program is based on a simple question, If a teacher had just one hour to prepare to teach remotely, what are the most essential things she would need to know and do?

From Standford - This document offers suggestions for instructors in Stanford University’s PWR and Thinking Matters looking to continue offering a student-centered learning experience in a remote or online learning environment.

To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now so that the steps you take are always in the right direction

” The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) initiative that came to the aid of the 2005 hurricane-affected higher education students — called the “Sloan Semester” — is an excellent case in point to understand how higher education can possibly react to disaster in the future. By taking a close look at what actually happened during the Sloan Semester, and at the lessons learned, the higher education distance learning community can gain insight into the necessary steps to take in order to keep students actively engaged in their educational pursuits when and if the next disaster hits.

The course provides clear instructions on how to get started in the course, locating key course components like the syllabus and course schedule. You can find course homepage templates in Canvas Studio.

The following examples show how to adapt several popular CATs for use in synchronous and asynchronous online courses.

I’ve argued that relatively low-tech solutions like podcasting are a good way to convert traditional or hybrid lecture courses online because most of our students have the means of downloading a podcast and listening to it. In a pinch a podcast can be delivered over email and requires only the most basic technologies to create.

Slides from a talk by Alisa Nagler, JD, MA, EdD, Assistant Professor, Medical Education and Educator, Graduate Medical Education at Duke University Hospital

Practical guide for good practices to keep students engaged

Use these quick reads to get essential information on emerging technologies and practices, including potential implications and opportuntities. These resources are great to share with teams or faculty considering a new technology.

Med Educ. 2007 Mar;41(3):250-7.

Acad Med. 2007 Oct;82(10 Suppl):S53-6.