It’s a good idea to have a backup plan in place should a Zoom outage interrupt your scheduled synchronous class time. The best way to avoid Zoom outage vulnerabilities is to design your class using Canvas tools for sharing content and engaging students in a variety of synchronous and asynchronous learning activities. That will give you and the students the most flexibility.

If you prefer synchronous lecture/discussion classes via Zoom, a good response to a Zoom outage is to send an announcement via Canvas to the class with instructions, and to use asynchronous activities like discussion boards or assignments in Canvas, or assign collaborative/group work with Google docs or slides, where students can also use the Google chat function to communicate with each other. Good ideas for asynchronous engagement can be found here. If you need more guidance, there is a self-paced course based on CNDLS’ summer Course Design Institutes for faculty available on the University’s Instructional Continuity Fall 2020 Planning web pages.

You might also consider sending out an announcement to your students during the first week of classes to let them know what to do “just in case”. Below is a sample announcement.