The likelihood that many of our campuses will have to pivot, at least temporarily, to online learning for part of the spring semester is increasing. Here are the challenges I’m thinking about as I figure out ways to do this.

1. Synchronous or not? Do you expect all your students to “tune in” at the usual class time to attend an online lecture or discussion? Is it reasonable to expect that 100 percent of your students will be able to do this at the same time as your class usually meets? Does your university network have the bandwidth to accommodate every class on campus doing this? Do your students have fast home internet, or unlimited cell phone data plans, so that they can watch a high-quality stream for 1-2 hours multiple days per week? And, if any of these is a “no,” are you putting some of your students at a disadvantage? How will you accommodate them?
2. Content. So many issues about content. First: what content do you have, and how is it “performed?”
   1. They can just read it. (easy to put online)
   2. They can just observe it. (e.g., watch a video of a process or an action; easy to put online)
   3. You need to demonstrate it. (maybe easy, maybe not, depending on what you’re doing: solving an equation, doing a lab demo, …)
   4. They need to do it / practice it / demonstrate it. (really hard)
3. Content. What content cannot be delivered efficiently online? What do you do with that? Force it in anyway (“Here are some photographs of this fun activity you won’t get to do…”)? Jettison it? Something else?
4. Content. If you are recording videos, you absolutely must plan out every part of the lecture in advance. There is almost zero opportunity for the classroom spontaneity most of us love.
5. Activities. Do your normal class meetings have frequent group or team activities, where students discuss their ideas, compare their work, or work on problems together? How do you expect this to work in a setting where face-to-face communication is almost zero? (I’m thinking primarily of my own activities here, which are 2-, 3-, or 4-person, usually.
6. Grading. Are you ready to grade 100 email attachments?
7. Communication. How will students get to ask you questions about course content? Online lecture delivery, even if live, is normally quite passive, so there aren’t many opportunities for unprompted questions. If asynchronous, there are no chances like that at all, so all the questions have to be left on message boards or answered via email — so they could linger unanswered for hours.
8. Communication. Do you already have problems with students not following the instructions on your assignments? Or do you rely heavily on talking through assignments in class? Facial expressions, hand gestures, and inflection go a long way toward setting student expectations, and you won’t have that. How will you resolve this?
9. Communication. Do your students know your LMS as well as you do? Are they equipped with the knowledge they need to swiftly move from one page to the next, one assignment to the next, have multiple tabs open, etc.? (Don’t just assume that everyone aged 18-22 has the same skills as you.)
10. Delivery. Our attention spans (ages 18-80) are already short. For the love of all things holy, chunk your content into smaller pieces.
11. Delivery. This the media era. We are all trained on well-produced commercials, highly choreographed videos, and the like. A movie of slides projecting onto your kitchen wall, with muffled audio, will fail. Students will not watch, and they will go somewhere else to learn the content they need.
12. Delivery. Distractions are different when learning online compared to in the classroom. Some better, some worse. How does your lesson design consider this?

There are probably more, but these are the first few things I thought of while at dinner tonight. I’ll add more if I remember to.