Distance Education in the Time of Coronavirus: Quick and Easy Strategies for Professors

Abstract

A worldwide pandemic is forcing schools to close their doors. Yet the need to teach students remains. How can faculty – especially those who are not trained in technology-mediated teaching – maintain educational continuity? This Essay provides some suggestions and relatively quick and easy strategies for distance education in this time of coronavirus. While it is written from the perspective of teaching law school, it can be applied to teaching other humanities such as philosophy, literature, religion, political theory, and other subjects that do not easily lend themselves to charts, graphs, figures, and diagrams. This Essay includes an introductory technology section for those techno-phobic faculty who are now being required to teach online, and it concludes with five straightforward steps to start teaching online quickly.

Keywords: teaching, pedagogy, distance education, online learning, online instruction, technology-mediated education, technology-mediated instruction, synchronous, asynchronous, instructional video, virtual classroom, COVID-19, coronavirus

JEL Classification: A00