Alt-Instruction

Abstract

This chapter highlights a strategic faculty development effort to address equity issues when a university campus pivoted to emergency remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors describe the development of an online faculty development summer program, ‘Alt-Instruction', targeted to help all campus faculty make the rapid pivot to remote learning, while keeping student equity issues front and center. This COVID-19 program was not designed haphazardly but rather based on years of designing and offering educational development that 1) assumed the necessity for collocating instructional technology support with teaching resources, 2) considered teaching from a student-centered perspective, and 3) anticipated the need to carefully model best practices for faculty. The 2020 Alt-Instruction program, which close to 1,000 faculty participated in, used a highly structured approach to educational development, including the employment of online resources and modeling templates. These contributed to a relatively fast, if unprecedented, campus migration to remote learning.