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The EECS Undergrad Office sent a survey on Tue Mar 10 to EECS undergrads asking those who expected to have challenges working from home what those challenges might be. Here are some key challenges that came up from the ~100 responses.
Timezone. Some students will be in European or Asian timezones which will make it very difficult to regularly attend a livestreamed class at the originally-scheduled Eastern time, so think about offering recordings as well. This may also affect virtual online help that you offer -- think about making it available at times that work for as many students as possible.
Low bandwidth. Prerecorded videos are option for many but not all; some don't have enough bandwidth to download a high-resolution video. Consider producing videos with the smallest file size you can, using the lowest resolution possible or using audio + slides (like Voice over Powerpoint). Consider providing PDFs of lecture slides as a fallback.
Infrastructure reliability. Three responses reported unreliable electricity and internet at home, and 9 responses reported having limited access to a computer at home.
Some websites are blocked from China. Wikipedia has a list of blocked sites which includes YouTube, Google Docs, and Wikipedia. Your Chinese students may not be able to get to these resources. Students may be able to get on the MIT network using MIT's VPN, but that may not be reliable from China either, and may face bandwidth constraints.
What you can do:
Avoid these problems as much as possible, e.g. by planning for timezone independence and scalable bandwidth.
For problems that are hard to avoid, send a survey to your class to ask about their new remote situation (e.g. what timezone are they in if you need synchronous meetings; can they access website X, Y, Z; can they view an example video you have posted).
- Be aware that it's possible that your surveying tool (e.g. Google Forms) may be a blocked site for some of your students. Make sure to ask them to email you back if they can't access the survey form.