This page presents resources and recommendations for faculty and graduate student instructors to prepare for future events like power outages, air quality events, earthquakes, public health emergencies, and other disruptions.
Center for Teaching and Learning
The Center for Teaching and Learning provides a list of proactive steps you can take to ensure you can continue teaching in case a short- or long-term disruption emerges. The center also describes best practices for delivering remote instruction.
Digital Tools for Remote Teaching
Digital Learning Services offers a variety of guides on important tools you would need to continue your course during a disruption. Zoom is an essential tool that you can use to hold class sessions online and/or record your lectures. Kaltura is another important platform that allows you to upload, edit, and share your Zoom recordings directly in bCourses.
Remote Exminations
As with any good exam, exams delivered remotely should challenge learners to combine the skills, abilities, and knowledge gained through the course to perform a specific task. Students should be assessed on the quality of their answers and the process they used to arrive at their answer. This approach is aligned with the Council on Education for Public Health’s model for competency-based assessments.
Campus policy currently does not allow for external vendors (ProctorU, Examity, Honorlock, etc.) to be contracted for proctoring online exams, but instructional teams do have the option of proctoring students using Zoom.
The Center of Teaching and Learning offers these strategies for Zoom proctoring
The Berkeley Academic Senate has very helpful tips for remote non-proctored exams.
Designing Remote Examinations
In the absence of remote proctoring options, concerns about cheating and exam validity can be reduced through the design of the exam. Some strategies to mitigate the absence of proctoring are suggested below:
- Include an integrity pledge that students must digitally sign with their names and student ID numbers.
- Offer more frequent lower-stakes assessments instead of infrequent high-stakes exams.
- Connect exam questions to course activities and other assessments (student paper, class project, previous discussion, lab) that the student has completed.
bCourses
You can leverage the features in bCourses to create exams that your students can complete remotely from anywhere with an internet connection. Any work students submit online can be reviewed, commented on, and graded by an instructor or GSI. You can watch this video to learn how to create an exam that your students can access remotely within bCourses, or you can review the Canvas guide