Academic Affairs/Faculty Information

The following are teaching, research, and service objectives for the ILC during any public emergency:

• Establish a base of operations for ILC and USAonline personnel to provide assistance/support to faculty, staff and students using the Learning Management System (USAonline). This involves initial assessment of access and functionality of the current location of ILC/USAonline. If unavailable, an alternate campus site would be needed. If campus is closed, an alternate off-site facility would be needed. In the event of a pandemic, personnel would operate from disparate locations (personal homes, etc).
• Ensure all primary systems such as LMS (Canvas) essential third-party tools (Zoom, Panopto) SAML SSO, Banner, University web services, etc. are operational.
• In the event of an extended campus closure, all courses (web-enhanced, web-blended, and web-online) would convert to fully online. All available ILC and USAonline staff, as well as the Canvas 24/7 helpdesk, would be utilized to accommodate the additional demand for support. Resources will be made available to faculty to quickly onboard them, and best practices will be offered to guide them in transitioning the course from face-to-face delivery to fully online. Resources include a self-paced Canvas primer course, videos, and PDF how-to guides.

For questions and assistance regarding these objectives, please contact S. Raj Chaudhury or Jason Smith.

The University will continually monitor the health of the campus population and the public health of our region. The campus will be poised to move back to remote work, if conditions warrant, to protect the health of students and employees. In this event, faculty should be prepared to quickly move all courses to the online environment.

The Innovation in Learning Center (ILC) provides substantial training and offers assistance in helping faculty develop high-quality online course materials. The ILC also develops and maintains webpages with resources for instructors identifying best practice design strategies and examples for the web-blended environment that allow for social distancing while facilitating the achievement of student learning outcomes.