Welcome to Teaching and Learning Matters, and thank you for listening. I am Dr. Garvey Pyke, and our topic this time is Continuity Planning (Or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Swine Flu”). Did I just lose everyone under 30?

As you may know, the H1N1 influenza has been a topic of much conversation over the past several months. However, pandemic planning is nothing new. We planned for SARS and Bird Flu before this one, and something else will inevitably come along sooner or later after H1N1 disappears.

The question is, are you ready for a disruption of instruction? I don’t mean, “Do you have a nuclear bunker with wifi and all your textbooks?” but I do mean, “Have you thought through how your instruction could be impacted if the university closed down suddenly, and have you prepared your students for this possibility?”

I would like to run down a series of questions, a checklist, that is appropriate for helping you do some preliminary planning. This checklist also appears in the UNC Charlotte Continuity Planning for Disruption of Instruction, which can be found on our website at teaching.uncc.edu/continuity.

O.K. Question 1: Have you communicated to your students how the class would continue in the case of a pandemic, major disaster, or other emergency? Not only do you need to let them know that, yes, you will continue to function as a class during a possible shutdown, you also need to let them know what methods you will use to still hold class. Moodle? Wimba? Email? Wikis? Blogs? Phone calls? A combination?

Question 2: Have you asked your students to supply you with alternate email addresses and contact information? Put this information together now, for safekeeping. It is easier to collect this information now, while we are still open for business as usual, rather than trying to wrangle it out of them once we are all dispersed.

Question 3: Have you added pandemic information to your syllabus by creating an appendix? I realize that your course syllabus was likely distributed weeks ago with little or no mention of a pandemic. No time like the present to amend it. Give students as much information as you can.

Question 4: Have you considered an attendance policy for your course that allows for “self-isolation of residential students with flu-like illness.” Under normal circumstances, attendance policies are a good thing. We want students to come and be active participants in class. However, we do not want students who have H1N1 to come to class and risk infecting others, just for the attendance points.

Question 5: Have you considered the ways that your usual course activities would be disrupted by a pandemic and begun planning how you could continue instruction via online methods? For example, do you value classroom discussions as a regular part of your course? Perhaps lectures or even student presentations play a big role? How could you adapt these for online? What tools fit these strategies? And what changes would you need to make? Once you have done this kind of brainstorming and planning, do you know how to use the appropriate online tools to accomplish these course goals?

Question 6: Have you taken the time to review the UNC Charlotte Continuity Plan for the Disruption of Instruction? Go to http://teaching.uncc.edu/continuity. It is far more in-depth than this podcast, needless to say. Please review it as soon as possible.

Question 7: Did you conduct any or all of the “practice drills” listed in the Continuity Plan, which will help you prepare to access all vital university systems from home? You can get to your university email and your electronic files from home, plus other applications. Caveats and best practices are listed in the Continuity Plan.

Question 8: Did you prepare a draft of the letter you plan to send to your students when university closure is imminent? If we do close, you will have your hands full. Drafting a quick letter now will save you time later and will be reusable for the future.

And finally, Question 9: Have you encouraged your students that class will continue and they are expected to keep up with the course work? This will be a trying time for everyone. Students need some motivational encouragement from you, their course instructor. It will be appreciated, and it should increase student success.

OK, that may sound like quite a lot to do, but it really should not take long at all to work through that checklist. Much of it will be reusable from course section to section, too, which will help save some time. It will certainly pay off in the long run.

And even if we do not have to close school, these exercises can be considered an excellent professional development exercise: it is truly an opportunity to engage in some reflective practice and examine your teaching, and your students needs’, through a different lens.

That’s it for now. Thanks for listening, and please tune in next time. Until then, so long, and remember: teaching and learning matters.