Rapid Instructional Design for Emergency Remote Teaching In Higher Education

The global COVID-19 pandemic plunged higher education, and particularly its teaching modalities, into unprecedented turmoil compelling unintended recourse to remote instructional modalities which have become widely known as Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). To ensure continuity of learning, institutions of higher education resorted to just-in-time instructional design strategies that spawned significantly divergent nuances in a confounding spectrum. Stress levels among faculty and students soared as a result. This research study was conducted to identify the dominant themes among reported interventions in numerous research studies on ERT in Higher Education. These themes were compared with the tenets of an existing just-in-time Instructional Design framework, the Rapid Instructional Design. Differences and similarities were identified in order to streamline prospective interventions for ERT. This study provides a set of implications that may serve as a guidepost for all stakeholders of education in higher institutes of learning, and especially for instructional designers (IDs), faculty, administrators, and policy makers.