A new guide for faculty, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to help professors plan their online courses for fall as the coronavirus pandemic continues.
The faculty playbook, called “Delivering High-Quality Instruction Online in Response to COVID-19,” came out of a collaboration between Every Learner Everywhere, a network of non-profits focused on student outcomes, and two of its member organizations, the Online Learning Consortium and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU). Their aim is to offer equity-minded online education strategies, especially for faculty who made their first foray into online education this year. 
“What we had in the spring was kind of emergency remote teaching,” said Dr. Jessica Rowland Williams, director of Every Learner Everywhere. “And I’m hopeful that faculty over the summer will have the opportunity to reflect on their experience in the spring and redesign their courses in a way that provides a high-quality digital experience for their students.”
The playbook is meant to be their summer guide. While resources for online learning have proliferated since the coronavirus crisis began, the information is scattered across websites and institutions, noted Dr. Karen Vignare, executive director of APLU’s Personalized Learning Consortium.
She sees the guide as a “concise” way to bring best practices together and to offer tools for “optimized online instruction,” she said.
Every topic covered in the playbook – from course design, to assessments, to student-instructor communication – is broken up into different levels: “design,” “enhance” and “optimize.” The levels offer three distinct layers of resources and advice at each step. “Design” sections address more basic steps for getting an online course up and running, while “enhance” and “optimize” paragraphs offer more details on how to improve students’ experiences and boost their success.
The goal is to help faculty come up with a number of different instructional strategies to potentially use for the fall, in case they’re operating fully or partially online, Vignare said. And given uncertainty about what the fall semester will look like, the strategies in the playbook are intended to be adaptable.
