Losing the connection doesn't mean losing the plot.

I’ve been on quite a few online courses in Zoom order to learn how to use Zoom to run online courses. In every course I’ve been on people ask various questions, such as “How do you create breakout rooms?”, “How do you make use of the poll feature?”. But the one fear and question at least one person voices is: “What if the internet connection goes down?"

Here’s something to bear in mind I think: if you run or attend lots of courses online, sooner or later the internet connection is going to go down, you will be booted out of the room, or the tutor will freeze. It’s a question of when, not if. So you just need to have a couple of things up your sleeve.

I’ll be teaching a blogging course online in November 2020 (see below), and I have a three-point contingency plan to address the scenarios suggested above. I intend to share this with the class before the start of the first session, and to draw their attention to it at the start of each session.

My internet connection is lost

I don’t want the class to be sitting their twiddling their thumbs while I try to get back online. Once or twice my connection has been lost because a telephone engineer was doing something in the street and didn’t reconnect the cables. Sorting that out took a few hours.

What I intend to do, to help ensure the students’ value for money and my peace of mind, is create and post (on Google Classrooms) and email a list of online articles and videos they should read or watch until I return to the session. As I don’t know what I’ll be covering at the time, and I don’t really want to create several of these lists, I shall make it generic but still useful.

You get booted out of the session

It happens. Just this afternoon I managed to boot myself out of a meeting I was co-hosting. Sometimes, if the connection is not very good, it can help to leave the session and come back in.

So, I will be telling the class that if they have to leave or are forced to leave, all they need to do is use the same link to get back in.

The tutor freezes

On some occasions the tutor has been merrily bestowing their accumulated wisdom on the class — or not, because their face has become frozen into an unfortunate grimace and there is no sound emanating from their unmoving lips.

In case this happens to me, I will be introducing the Chat feature, and telling the class that one way they can use it, if it is required, is to tell me when I (or another student) has frozen. This is necessary because the frozen person doesn’t realise that they have seized up. Most annoying.

Conclusion

You cannot plan ahead for every contingency, and there is also the issue of cost-effectiveness: who wants to spend 20 hours preparing contingency plans for a 5 hour course. Nevertheless, simple ideas like the ones outlined here should not take an inordinate amount of time, and could end up saving the day — and saving face!