Pre-Disaster Preparation
Listen to the story
You are teaching a f2f class: students meet regularly in the classroom to listen to lectures, participate in discussions, take quizzes, etc. Blackboard is used outside of class in order for students to access readings, submit papers, and complete other activities.
Before the first class, the city faces a hurricane warning. The warning forecasts a potentially serious threat to the greater metropolitan area. The university plans to close campus for a period of time. In order to respond to the emergency, you will need to:
- Assess the effects of the hurricane in order to adjust students’ workload, test schedules, and other activities then update the syllabus accordingly.
- Figure out a communication method that can reach as many students as possible (if not all) during the emergency period. Keep in mind that you or your students may lose Internet or power if the weather is severe.
- Search for alternative storage space for the core content that you have in Blackboard, just in case Blackboard becomes unavailable but students need to access them during or after a disaster.
- Make announcements to students as early as possible regarding your emergency plan.
Are you prepared?
You can check your readiness level with the following 7 steps:
- Update your contact information in the Emergency notification system in order to receive text message and email alerts.
- Instructions on how to update your emergency contact information.
- Other channels of communication
Design a communication strategy based on availability.
- When Internet is available, you can use Blackboard communication tools such as announcement, or email to reach students.
- Tutorial for creating email listserv. Please encourage students to check the email that they registered in Peoplesoft, because that is the email that appears in the instructor's roster.
- If your cell phone has a data plan, you can also use Blackboard mobile app. Instructor Download | Student Download
- Depending on the assigment you can select the following BlackBoard Tools: assignment dropbox, test, discussion, email.
- Build a communication channel such as a discussion forum to make students aware of your instructional continuity plans and address their questions.
- When an emergency is forecasted, release your continuity plan to students, including upcoming assignments change, due dates updates, and course revisions.
- Secure the necessary names, numbers and email addresses to keep your department up to date during an emergency.
- Consider saving lecture recordings on a cloud based server and then sharing the link in Blackboard or through email. Office 365, a UH supported product, provides OneDrive for hosting files in the “cloud”. You can find tutorials at Instruction@UH. You can also select a third party products such as YouTube or Vimeo based on personal preference. Please be careful to protect your recordings if you select a commercial tool.
- Think about adding your voice to your PowerPoint presentations.
- Contact your Instructional Designer for customized assistance.