Resources for teaching from a distance

Without the proper equipment, labs can be difficult to reproduce in a distance setting. Below are a few recommendations for making this work during a campus closure.

• Take part of the lab online: Many lab activities require students to become familiar with certain procedures, and only physical practice of those processes will do. In such cases, consider if there are other parts of the lab experience you could take online (for example, video demonstrations of techniques, online simulations, analysis of data, other pre- or post-lab work), and save the physical practice parts of the labs until access is restored. The quarter might get disjointed by splitting up lab experiences, but it might get you through a short campus closure.
• Investigate virtual labs: Online resources and virtual tools might help replicate the experience of some labs (for example, virtual dissection, night sky apps, video demonstrations of labs, simulations). Those vary widely by discipline, but check with your textbook publisher for materials that might help replace parts of your lab during an emergency. Explore online options like Chem Collective.
• Provide raw data for analysis: In cases where the lab includes both collection of data and its analysis, consider showing how the data can be collected, and then provide some raw sets of data for students to analyze. This approach is not as comprehensive as having students collect and analyze their own data, but it might keep them engaged with parts of the lab experience during the closure. See the Open Science Framework for research projects around the world and access to open data sets.

• Use the Quiz tool in Canvas to create an exam or quiz.
• Add questions to your exam or quiz.
• Activate Respondus Lockdown Browser for your quiz

See this resource for a video introduction to the Canvas gradebook.

Password Resets – through IT

Opening a ticket with IT

IT phone number – 303-871-4700

Telecommuting Resources at DU – this is an IT curated list of resources and links for everything from accessing email and voicemail to document collaboration

Community Engagement and Remote Teaching: Reflections and Resources – Faculty across campus and the country are working to adapt courses for remote learning – including many of us teaching community-engaged courses. At this time of transition, our colleagues at the Center for Community Engagement to Advance Scholarship and Learning (CCESL) offer some reflections and resources to support remote community-engaged teaching.

COVID-19 Wellness & Community Resources

OTL Canvas page – this is a good overview of the basics of getting started

Learning Canvas course – this is a LinkedIn Learning overview of Canvas. It is broken up into chapters so faculty can skip to the information they need at the moment. They will have to log-in to LinkedIn Learning with their DU credentials.

Canvas Instructor Guides – these are step-by-step guides created by Canvas. They include screenshots, and are also broken up into chapters so that they can jump to what they need. You can also access a pdf version.

Textbooks through DU Bookstore
Textbooks available through the DU bookstore can be delivered by mail to students not staying on campus. The DU Libraries are not able to procure textbooks for students.

Electronic Resources
The Libraries has a vast collection of online journal articles and ebooks, and we urge you to use our licensed electronic resources whenever possible, even if this means substituting one resource for another. Many of the Libraries’ articles, videos, and e-books are available online. Search Compass from the main library page or view our complete list of databases. The majority of online library articles and ebooks have a stable URL which can be included in your Canvas course. For more information on how to find stable URLs for articles and ebooks, please see our Off Campus Research guide. For directions on adding links in Canvas, please see the guides provided by the Office of Teaching and Learning.

We can help you determine whether your assigned readings are available electronically and/or explore alternatives. Please contact your subject librarian for help with this. Also, please know that the Libraries will continue to build robust collections in print, and formats you’ve deemed best for your discipline, once this emergency is past us.

Many publishers are making additional electronic content available for free. A national list is being compiled, and we are working to collate these resources and provide them to you in a more useful way. 

Reserves through the Libraries
The Electronic Reserves service provides online access to course materials such as articles, book chapters, and other electronic documents. Enrolled students and faculty may access course materials online at any time of day. Electronic reserves are posted in Canvas via a link to the library’s e-reserve system, Leganto.

Since not all materials are available online, the Fair Use exception to US Copyright law allows us to digitize some materials for educational purposes. Please see the Libraries guidelines on Fair Use for more information. Under normal circumstances, we are restricted in the amount of material that we may digitize for courses. However, we have consulted a copyright attorney, and believe that in this particular moment, because we are in an emergency situation that has forced all of us to radically change the way we provide instruction, we can adopt a far more liberal interpretation of fair use. The fair use factors are always weighed based upon the circumstances, and under these current and very unique circumstances, we can be more aggressive in asserting that the scales weigh in favor of fair use. And with respect to the fair use factor regarding the “amount and substantiality of the work used,” the current unique circumstances give rise to a credible argument that we can assert fair use exists for a greater amount of the work being used than is typically acceptable. This will allow us to, as a last resort, digitize more of a work than we would typically.

If you are unable to find online alternative materials for your course, please submit a course reserves request as soon as possible to reserve@du.edu. Please provide us with a list of the resources needed for your Spring Quarter course. We will work with you to determine how much printed material we are able to scan, if an online resource is not available.

We will prioritize requests by following these guidelines.

1. We will only process course material requests for essential, core readings, not supplemental materials for Spring Quarter.
2. We will only provide course materials for items which we already own in print or electronic format or items that may be purchased quickly in an online format.
3. Any digitized materials that fall outside our usual Fair Use Guidelines will only be available during Spring Quarter while courses are temporarily online and cannot be reused in other quarters.
4. We are not able to digitize DVDs in this process but can provide consultation for finding existing streaming media and work-arounds for your course. Please see this page for more information about our streaming collections. Lamont School of Music Faculty: Please copy musiclibrary@du.edu on any Reserves requests.

Please be aware that digitization takes a large amount of time and requires physical access to both materials and digitization equipment. We are constrained by limited staffing and restrictions that inhibit our ability to work on campus. Our goal is to balance the educational needs of faculty and students along with the need to protect the health and safety of our staff.

The Libraries already have an existing and robust virtual service delivery model with a host of online services and resources. We have been working continuously to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak and we invite you to visit our DU Libraries and COVID-19 webpage for continuing updates on library services, operations, and collections.