We’ll need to be extra sure that we’re prepared for the return of our students in our new hybrid teaching model. To that end, here are a couple of things to keep in mind.
The most important of these is that you should have your Quercus page and class live-stream links up and running for students by this Friday, September 4th.
Online Courses
1. You should now or very soon—and, again, no later than Friday—have a link for students to use to access the online meeting of your course. Bobby and Dan have offered to provide assistance to anyone who needs it in setting that up. You can reach them at helpdesk.law@utoronto.ca. That link should be posted on your course Quercus page, which should be open and public by Friday. You should also send the zoom link for your course to records.law@utoronto.ca, so that they also have the link in the event that a student asks them for it.
2. For those of you teaching first year courses, you can use your course Quercus page to communicate to your class, and you can also ask the records office for a class list at records.law@utoronto.ca.
3. For those of you teaching upper year courses, things are a bit trickier, since students are of course still adding and dropping courses. The easiest thing to do is to post a link to the live-stream of your course somewhere on your course Quercus page, which you should make public, so that students who are on the waitlist can attend remotely during add-drop. Again, you can reach out to Bobby and Dan for assistance with this if you need to do so.
In Person Courses
1. Remember that almost all in-person courses have remote students that will be participating via zoom (or whatever). That means that even for those of you teaching an in-person class, you need to have your zoom link available and distributed to your students and/or posted on Quercus by Friday. That is, even if you are teaching remotely you’ll want to follow the instructions about for online courses to make sure that you are prepared for the live-stream of your course on the first day of class, and to make sure that the remote students registered in the class are able to access it. Again, you should send the zoom link for your course to records.law@utoronto.ca.
2. We’ll be sending out some communication to students reminding them about social distancing guidelines, and preparing laminated instructions that will be physically located at the lecterns etc in each classroom that you can use in class to remind your students about ingress and egress procedures, keeping their chairs in the spots indicated by the decals on tables, wearing masks, etc.
3. You should also post information about where you’re meeting on your Quercus page. If your class has its first meeting with all in-person students attending together, you can start in person. Students on the waitlist and/or shopping around during add-drop must not attend in person: they can participate remotely. If your first meeting is online, then you should proceed along the lines of a remote course as just described. If your first meeting is ‘hybrid,’ recall from earlier communication on that point that all ‘hybrid’ meetings should be remote until the end of add-drop.
