Adapting Activities and Assignments

As at any other time, assignments or activities during disruptions help students practice the skills they need to succeed on higher-stakes assessments, in future courses, or in their lives or future professions. Graded assignments offer a means of monitoring student learning and providing ongoing feedback that students and instructors can use to improve learning and teaching, respectively.

The first step to adapting activities and assignments during a disruption is reviewing your learning objectives to determine which are most critical, given the instructional and learning challenges likely associated with the disruption.

Depending on the modality you choose for course continuity, there may be unique affordances of technology you can leverage, or additional challenges to student engagement that you may want to consider. The pages in this section of the site, listed at the left, explore considerations relevant to class discussions, student writing assignments, lab & studio activities, and so on.

Additional general questions to explore include the following:

  • Once you have revisited and refined your learning objectives to focus on the most critical ones during the disruption, how should assignments or activities be refined or revised to better align with those objectives?
  • How can assignments or activities serve double-duty by also encouraging a strong and supportive course community?
  • How can technology help reduce students’ stress by allowing you to offer a broader array of choices?
    • For example, might offering ideas out loud during a class session, posting questions or comments in a Zoom chat box, and posting reflections or questions (in text, audio file, or video) on a discussion forum all count equally for any participation credit?
    • Might students be able to record and post videos of themselves presenting, rather than needing to present live, to allow them to focus on the content of a presentation?
  • If students must perform work that requires using special symbols or formats (such as solving math problems or writing music scores), can they submit photos of handwritten work or access special software programs for that purpose?
  • When and how might it be most productive to remind students of the Elon Honor Code and how that applies to the expectations in your course?

Additional Resources