Many of my faculty enrolled in the workshops for online instruction this summer and are better prepared to offer online instruction.

Create flexible office hours.

I think having multiple plans, flexibility, patience, and compassion will enable us to prepare for the Fall 2020s UNKNOWNS.

Emphasis on patience and flexibilty

The unknowns come more from administrative levels and so my frustration has been the addition of bureaucratic layers that have substantially slowed down important processes (ie., getting faculty appointed). It feels as if there is less trust in chairs to do their jobs and more administrative mandates.

Make sure that the expectations for learning and assessments are stated clearly from the beginning, and use the university's resources for online education to help make the student's experience as robust as possible.

Doing what I suggested back in May, which is to flip the script and assume that we will be remote in the fall and move on-ground as permitted. By starting from that premise, then faculty spend the summer preparing their classes to be online and students are taught how to perform well online. This isn't wasted effort. There are many online tools in the D2L platform that work quite effectively for on-ground courses. Also, it provides assurances that students who need to be remote no matter the on-ground situation will be able to learn effectively. If a student gets ill they will have the means to catch up. And if an instructor/faculty becomes ill, it will be much easier to have someone take over the course (or potentially have the ill instructor--depending on severity of symptoms--continue. Personally, my class will be ready to go fully online.

By planning for mostly online classes, so that should we be forced into fully remote learning, we won't have to simply rely on Zoom.

Many faculty in my department have taken the summer institute to learn more about remote and online teaching. Most faculty are prepared to move from on-ground to remote or online fairly easily, but we will see what challenges we face. Undoubtedly, there are as many unknown unknowns and there are known unknowns.

Our faculty are willing and capable of responding to the unknowns. I need to find and make use of any available resources and work with our faculty to handle the unknowns. Our students need more help from our faculty and advisors in this time of uncertainty.

Advanced notice and ample time to be prepared of the changes.

It is good that we are working toward having a lot of materials online so that a possible switch to full remote instruction would be easy to carry out. Under the current scenario most of our classes will have to be hybrid - so there is already a lot of online content in place. I think I am personally better positioned having learned some coping strategies to deal with my own workload and the needs of my colleagues.

Need to be in constant communication with ALL instructional faculty to make sure everyone is ready for whatever scenario we encounter.