Combining the usual mode of in-person teaching with hybrid or fully remote teaching may require incorporating some unfamiliar resources used in remote teaching with familiar resources used in teaching face to face. Strategies offers ideas for designing and organizing courses that use hybrid approaches for teaching and learning. Strategies does not offer a set of unitary best practices, because the characteristics of courses that combine in-person and hybrid or fully remote modes will differ greatly among the offerings of our 300+ different faculty whose decisions about course design will best fit the goals of their own specific courses. Instead, Strategies offers different approaches to consider that have been previously used successfully to design and organize one type of course or another. 

Strategies offers Try This if-you-like-it ideas, some of which come from faculty and student experiences with remote teaching in the spring and fall 2020 semesters. Below each Try This section you’ll find a list of Resources that link to specific exercises or tools, useful information, and further reading regarding the effectiveness of various strategies (including some “best practices”) for course design and organization. The different components of Strategies address important issues of course design, ranging from building a sense of community, to ensuring equity in accessibility, to assessment techniques, to designing performance or laboratory assignments, and more. 

There are several exceptional challenges that faculty will confront when designing a course that is expected to transition or combine fully in person or hybrid (in person plus remote) to fully remote (or the reverse): Campus events from global pandemics to adverse weather, etc. may require an unanticipated transition from one mode to another.  If that transition occurs rather suddenly, faculty may have very little time (days, not weeks) to inform students of the changes to course format and expectations. That predicament requires that the initial course design and organization anticipate a specific plan for a transition that may or may not occur.  Faculty should expect to provide a revised course syllabus that includes detailed and clear expectations for the remote learning mode of the course moving forward. As you design your courses, keep in mind that disruption is inevitable. Plan for it. Having some Strategies up your sleeve can help.