As any faculty member can tell you, proper course planning can take a long time. There are a multitude of factors to consider when initially setting up a course, including text selection, developing the syllabus and course objectives, selecting and developing assessments that properly align with module-level objectives, creating communication channels, and many more. In an ideal situation, we would have months to think about and plan for a truly impactful course.

But life doesn’t always let us take our time. What if your Chair asked you to pick up another course in a month? In a week? What if you were asked to take over a course this afternoon? All of these are scenarios that do happen from time to time, and even though they are always frightening, you can reduce your anxiety significantly by having an emergency plan.

Having a course dropped in your lap at the last minute can be a lot like having your plane crash in the wilderness; all of a sudden, you are taken out of your comfort zone and forced to start over. How will you survive? How will you find food, water, shelter, and clothing? Your students will be looking to you, their fearless leader, for directions on what to do next. And whether you have an actual plan or just a skeleton of one, it should be clear from the first minute you are in contact with them.  Our Instructional Designers spend a lot of time helping faculty over hurdles just like this, and so I have assembled our best practices into an easy-to-follow guide that should lead you not just to survive, but to thrive, no matter what you are up against.

Survivalists try to expect the unexpected by stocking up on supplies, and maintaining what they call a “bug-out bag.” Just in case, they know they have some basic survival gear stashed away, in a highly portable form, with a plan for what to do with it. Your students will need to have their basic needs met too, including shelter (communication and course structure – the “community” aspects of a class), food and water (informational content), and clothing (assessments and feedback). Depending on the time frame, your plan may vary, but knowing you have your bug-out bag at the ready will help you feel confident at the most crucial time. So without further ado, here are your bug-out bags for rapid course deployment, courtesy of CTL’s Instructional Design team.

If you have minutes:

“Hey, I need you to fill a class later today.”

This is an immediate survival situation; you are presently looking around the wreckage of your plane, trying to figure out what comes next – and it’s almost dark. As in any survival situation, seek shelter first! If you aren’t protected and safe from the outdoors, you definitely can’t survive. 

• Start building some quick shelter for students by reaching out to them via email, a course announcement, or both, and letting them know who you are. If you’re seeing them on campus, you can do it in person. 
• No matter how you introduce yourself, it’s your job to let them know it’s safe. You can be honest with them that things are in flux, and that everything isn’t quite ready yet, but you have to let them know you have a plan. Students can smell fear. They won’t eat you, but they will respect you less if they get the impression you are winging it (even though you likely are!). 
• If you have access to course materials from the previous instructor, this will help you begin working on your syllabus and course structure. 
• Finally, reach out to the CTL at ctl.depaul.edu and let us know you’re coming in hot! We will immediately work with you to help develop a triage plan to sort out your course and restore your confidence. It might not hurt to do a quick scan of our Learning Activities page either.

If you have a few days:

“Hey, I need you to take over this class starting next week.”

Maybe you crashed onto an island with easy living conditions and found safety and shelter quickly. This gives you a little bit of breathing room, and so you can be a little more thoughtful about how you engage with the class. You should immediately reach out to the students, providing your contact and bio info, etc. like you always do, and let them know a course syllabus is forthcoming. Then make a plan to improve your shelter, and structure your course. 

• The first priority is creating an outline of what you will cover, week to week, day to day. It can definitely be rough for now, but lay out as much as you can for students, ideally the whole course, so you can give them an idea of what comes next. 
• Second, work on a syllabus. Notice that the course outline came first; this is necessary to keep you out of the weeds of syllabus-writing minutiae. For now, you just need a clear path through the woods. 
• If you have reading materials in mind, now is the time to source them. A particularly good stop for your information is DePaul’s Library, as they can get online editions of most articles, and even many books, and this will get reading material into your students’ hands when there’s no time for a Bookstore order.

Since your shelter has come together nicely, you can start to figure out what to eat. With the time you have, do your best to begin providing some informational content to students. 

• Give them introductory materials for the class, maybe even an introductory video if you have time. Either in text or video, introduce them to the purpose and structure of the course. 
• Reinforce this information by providing them a content structure for the first few weeks of the course, explaining what you will cover, any required materials, and required readings or video for information. It doesn’t have to be finalized by any means, but give them a rough trail to follow as much as you can.
• It’s also a good idea to reach out to the CTL with your survival plan, and we can help you work through any remaining details you haven’t sorted out yet. Let us know what’s happened, and we can send a rescue team!

If you have a week:

“Can you take over this class? It starts a week from tomorrow.”

You’re in luck! In addition to your basic needs being close by and accessible, you’ve been able to salvage a radio from the plane. Help is on the way, but they are going to take a while. You’re still in a survival situation, but you can plan slightly more long-term so you don’t have to redo or undo your work later on. Don’t work hard, work smart! It can be helpful to plan a different part of your course to work on each day, so that you don’t feel overwhelmed by the volume of work you will actually be doing.

• With a little more time to work on your shelter, you should strongly consider making your welcome message a video no matter the modality of your course, as it can provide you with an opportunity to inject a little extra personality into your initial contact. Some faculty use photos from their work, or travel or personal lives, to help create a sense of connection with students.
• Be sure to add or create an introductory exercise to get students interacting with each other and with you. You might use a discussion board or video tool if you’re online, or do a good old-fashioned icebreaker if you’re on campus. There is no real requirement as to what to do, but you should make sure that it’s more than just “Ok, let’s go around and say your name and major…”  CTL has a number of icebreaker activities that you can try, or ask your Instructional Designer!
• Since there is a readily available supply of food and water, you can afford to stockpile a little to get ahead. If you can, shoot to have at least 3-4 weeks of the course content mapped out for students before the class. It doesn’t have to be completely finished, but give students as much detail as you can so they are able to anticipate the upcoming workload. Consistently staying a few weeks ahead will give you breathing room, so you aren’t frantically scrambling to stay just ahead of them.
• For online teaching, shoot as much video content as possible, and even in face-to-face classes, consider creating short videos for unchanging concepts to save time. The IDDBlog has covered some of the best practices for video use in instructional design, the free open-source software you need for the process, and a guide to better lecture videos.
• With enough time to develop a good course structure and syllabus, you should provide a basic assessment structure for the entire course. 
  • What regularly occurring, low stakes assignments are there? These should build into a smaller number of major assessments such as a paper, project, or presentation. 
  • Will students do group work? Figure out those assignments too, as students like having plenty of warning and time to get groups together and on task. 
  • Build out the assignments that will go with the first few weeks’ content. Publisher-created materials, such as those from Pearson, McGraw-Hill, or similar, can help offset some of your development time by leveraging them for readings, quizzes and/or discussions.

As always, it’s a good idea to reach out to us in the CTL and let us know you’ve got a rapid development cycle on your hands. We can help with your planning and content building so you get more time to think about the task at hand, and our Instructional Designers can help find any gaps and fill them in.

If you have a few weeks:

“We need another section of this course…can you jump in?”

Having a few weeks’ notice to create a course is still a rapid development cycle, make no mistake, but the pressure is off considerably. This is more like camping, where you drop yourself into the wilderness on purpose, with proper equipment and maps and a radio. Heck, you might already have a campsite picked out! This is still a survival situation, although the planning you will do here is more like the way you planned before your trip. In this case, you can spend more time thinking through each component of your survival (shelter, food/water, clothing) and executing them individually. When the course starts you will already have been through your checklist, and there are few details left unaddressed.

• Shelter should be no problem in this scenario; you’ll have ample time to complete a syllabus for the course, to provide an introductory video and welcome message to students, and a course overview (video, if you can). If you will be on campus, an introductory video is less necessary, although it can help bridge the gap between them first seeing your course materials and seeing you in person. 
• Although some of it may need to be placeholders for now, you should have sufficient time to build out the entire course content structure. There should be time to add in readings, video, and other informational content. Obviously, the first few weeks should be prioritized according to the 3-4 week rule of thumb, but try to get as much accomplished as you can.
• The greatest difference between this category and the others is that you have a lot more time to consider your needs before the trip. You can handle the major parts of packing quickly, but this should also give you time to plan out exactly how many of everything you need. Not only can you build out the major course assessments, but you can start filling in the milestone assessments along the way for the big project, and fill in other low-stakes assessments (starting at the beginning, of course). If you’re using publisher content, now’s the time to fill it in. 
• You may have time to create rubrics to use in grading your major assessments, and if possible you are strongly encouraged to do so, as they will save you valuable time later. Remember, don’t work hard, work smart!

Even though you have enough time to stay several weeks ahead of the students, you may want to consider reaching out to the CTL to give your course a once-over and offer feedback while there is still time to make changes.

Surviving vs. Thriving

When quality of life becomes important again.

So far, this hasn’t been a lot of fun, has it? You’ve been keeping your head down, working through the changes, striving to have something ready for the first day, and to feel prepared for class. Just surviving.

Well, the good news is that surviving is what you do at first. Once your basic needs have been met in a sustainable way, you will need to develop long-term strategies to thrive in your new environment. A few weeks into the term, your focus can turn to making life in class more enjoyable. When you will be living somewhere for the foreseeable future, you dig in and think about comfort and sustainability. People who are settlers might raise livestock and crops, make cheese and bread, build furniture, or other constructs that will enhance the quality of life as they move toward a sustainable future.

• The first place you can enhance your comfort is in your shelter. You know what your basic structure is like, but given some more time, you can make the administration and grading of your course easier in the long run. You can greatly speed up the grading process for written work such as discussions or writing assignments by creating rubrics for them. Rubrics also come in handy when grading assignments such as presentations or group work. They will also enhance the quality of the student work you receive, if you can show them to the students before or as they are completing the assignments.
• Take some time to revisit your long-term projects and see if there are ways you can enhance your milestones, providing more thorough instructions for students. Instructions that may have been adequate when you were desperately throwing course components together start to look shoddy now, and might need a little shoring up to continue providing support. 
• This is also a good time to check on your course and module-level objectives, to make sure they are:
  • Measurable (it is possible to directly quantify the amount to which a student satisfies the objective),
  • Actionable (students are provided with means to satisfy the objectives),
  • Student-centered (the objectives are written from the student’s perspective), and 
  • Learning or comprehension focused rather than task focused (meaning the objective is about concept mastery that results from performing an operation rather than performing the operation itself)
• Look over your information and instruction pages, and begin thinking in terms of their design and organization. You might have just dumped information into pages initially, but now you will need to get organized or be overwhelmed by clutter later. 
  • Get your content organized with headers, lists, callouts, and other creative formatting tools to separate and categorize information for easy reading. 
  • Pay attention to the typography you’re using! Be sure your font and heading choices speak to the basic readability of your information (how students will scan and process your headers and organization), and the legibility of text on the page (how clear the text itself is for students to read). 
• It sure makes life easier to have a readily available and long-term food supply of crops and livestock to sustain yourself with. In the same way, you can create a long-term supply of informational materials by leveraging University and external resources to produce your informational content. Creating high-quality and reusable materials will save you the trouble of having to recreate them each time you teach a course. 
• If you have informational content that won’t change often, consider making those into video resources, even if you are in a face to face class. This way, you can avoid needing to spend class time discussing easily demonstrated concepts. CTL’s Academic Media Production (AMP) and DIGI (DePaul Instructional Game and Innovation) Lab can help with developing custom graphics, animation, and video content. Make as much of an effort as you can to source this video material either through Panopto or by embedding content directly into HTML pages in D2L; this gives students a consistent approach to video content. 
• With more time available, focus on selecting your reading material and providing students with a wide range of informative sources. Bonus points if you can find these materials online through the Library, as this will both make it easier for students to find and read them as well as save them some money. You may also want to consider bringing in outside experts to lend more real-world relevance to your materials. If an expert cannot come to class, consider recording a conversation with them, to add to your course’s video library.

The final step in securing your shelter and food supply is to get in touch with your Instructional Designer to have a look at your course and suggest enhancements or improvements to make your life easier. They may have great ideas you have overlooked when you were struggling to survive, that could be implemented now that you have a little room to breathe.

Finishing out the term

“I survived…now what?”

If you’ve made it this far, your chances of surviving, and even of thriving, are excellent. By now you’ve found your way through the wilderness, met your basic needs, and probably even investigated some luxuries to make life in class more pleasant. Just remember, as you are tending to your flock, harvesting your crops, and enjoying the fruits of your labor, that the reason you have such favorable outcomes rests entirely upon the planning you did. Good survival instincts and planning lead to favorable outcomes, and the key to student survival in a course development emergency is to provide them with a lifeline throughout the process and focus on what is most important NOW.

This survival metaphor is a great one to use, even when you are thriving, and even when you may not have had a rushed development cycle, because it keeps the focus squarely on students.  It can be easy to get wrapped up in the luxuries when survival isn’t a struggle, and neglect students’ basic needs. No matter how much plan time you may have, or how many new tools and techniques you may want to employ, failing to ensure students’ survival in your course may result in some bleak outcomes. To keep everyone alive, it always pays to go back to basics:

• Shelter (A cohesive course structure, documentation, and instructor outreach; Do students always know what is coming up next and what to do?)
• Food and water (Informational content; Are the students regularly nourished with new and relevant information?)
• Clothing (Do students regularly receive feedback from the instructor and their peers with regular, low-stakes assessments?

Keep students’ needs in mind, and you’ll find your way out of the wilderness every time. Download the full infographic here.