Why Focus on Academic Continuity?

Academic continuity is vitally important because it focuses on maintaining the core function of education: providing students with the opportunity to learn.  The main purpose of this web site is to increase awareness of the importance of academic continuity and help institutions improve their capacities to maintain continuity of learning in crisis situations. Academic continuity is an important domain area in its own right, and this web site focuses on developing and disseminating knowledge related specifically to this domain. The experience of the Sloan Semester illustrated both the importance of academic continuity and the extent to which academic continuity is generally neglected or subsumed by other concerns [1]. By contrast, business continuity planning is a well-established field with certification programs supporting professional career tracks [2]. Disasters are often framed from the emergency management perspective in which academic continuity becomes a minor concern. Campus safety and security come to the forefront of the public’s mind every time there is a new, tragic incident. Nonetheless, academic continuity is an important function for a variety of reasons, for instance:

• As a way of maintaining and/or restoring at least some normalcy to students’ lives.
• As a strategy for minimizing enrollment loss, which one study has cited as “the most important responsibility for the [college/university] president” [3]
• As a way of maintaining a vital part of the nation’s economic and knowledge infrastructure.

There are many key elements of preserving academic continuity, for example:

• Working technology connectionsàemail, online classes, text messages
• Course templates, learning management system—which has been tested
• Faculty trained to teach online, in emergency; ability to convert quickly
• Student instructions for accessing online course
• Remotely mirrored IT system
• Trained and available IT staff to deal with problems
• Leadership by senior management—> quick communications; a plan which has been practiced(disaster drills)
• Immediate action—1st 24hrs—plan and key actors
• Communication to the academic community: multiple streams(telephone texts, email, tv, radio, palm pilots, walkie-talkie, etc)
• Communication with local communityàsame radio frequencies, palm pilots, satellite phones, etc.
• Determine emergency assistance needs of local community, especially if campus is to be an emergency care or helicopter landing site
• Back-up system for storing IT records, such as student enrollments, tuition payments, payroll
• Identify varied ‘help’ resources
• Early warning alarm systems
• Copy infrastructure drawings--electricity, gas, technology, other power, etc--and put in several secure locations

However, academic continuity is also inextricably integrated with the larger goal of institutional resilience.