By Jim Phillips

If you have ever attended a faculty meeting with a splotch of slightly used baby food on your shirt or taught a class while unwittingly sporting a miniature-sized stuffed cow Velcroed to your pants, then you can probably remember that joyous moment when your professional life was temporarily interrupted and your personal life changed forever: childbirth.

In preparing for that professional interruption, I've learned that you don't have to go it alone. Let me tell you how a colleague and I -- both expectant parents -- used technology to cope with the challenges of having a new baby.

After what must have been a busy and romantic spring, the fall semester of 2001 brought several new babies to my small liberal-arts college in Ohio. Early in the summer before they arrived, my colleague Susan Siena, a political-science professor and a future mom, approached me to ask my assistance in preparing for a late-semester hiatus from her teaching responsibilities. As a soon-to-be dad, I also had to figure out how to meet my teaching duties while I helped out at home. We both needed to create three to four weeks of online projects to replace the face-to-face class time that we expected to miss because of family leave.

So often, educators go to great lengths to have children during the summer or while they are on sabbatical, but biology doesn't always cooperate. Neither do other family events, such as death or long-term illness of a loved one. In all of these cases, if educators don't find a way to muddle through it all, they risk disrupting student learning by handing off the teaching duties to a colleague kind enough to step in at the last minute.

Bad Timing

While my wife and I had timed our first child perfectly (born in June), we were unable to reproduce a second summer delivery. In retrospect, I think we were shooting for the winter break with this baby, but in practice, such minute family planning can become cumbersome and at times seems unbefitting such an undertaking. Even entering into a discussion of timing can seem a tad overconfident. "You should be thankful to have children at all," I heard my dearly departed grandmother whisper in my ear when we learned of the blessed event. In fact, we are thankful, but nevertheless, my first piece of advice is don't shoot for the winter break, because that's a target too hard to hit.

With our new babies due in late fall, Professor Siena and I sat down before the start of the semester to figure out how to allow learning to continue once they arrived. Late fall is usually a time when things are winding down and students are turning their thoughts to end-of-semester projects, finals, and the holidays. We were somewhat fortunate because there were only two weeks of class after Thanksgiving. The final two weeks of my class would be consumed by student Web-site presentations.

My colleague was in a slightly different situation: She had arranged for her working responsibilities to end on November 1. Although her students would not meet as a group after that date, they needed to stay on track and turn in a final Web-site project.

Our college has no formal policy regarding distance education and does not consider (pure) distance education to be a part of our mission. Several professors supplement their traditional courses with technology, but many do not, preferring instead to preserve the sanctity of the traditional, face-to-face educational experience. So the biggest challenge we faced was cultural: Students here are only just beginning to explore distributed-learning formats.

On the plus side, we were both teaching subjects that were fairly conducive to online learning. I was teaching a course entitled "Contemporary France," and my colleague was teaching an introductory course on international politics. Several of our students were proficient, if not savvy, when it came to navigating the Web. While our college does not have a course-management system, it does have a network and makes a number of software applications available to the students. A final plus: An overwhelming majority of our students live on the campus, so access and compatibility issues would not complicate our "hybrid" distance-learning solution.

Susan and I discussed some of the key components of a course Web site, talked about the advantages and disadvantages of computer-mediated communication, and plotted our strategy. Our approach was to include the electronic distribution of course materials, asynchronous online discussions, and student-designed Web projects.

The Big Day

Class had just started one Thursday evening when a librarian appeared at my door with an urgent message. The next 25 hours are a blur and happily resulted in my wife giving birth to a healthy daughter. All was well at home, but because of some minor medical complications, we averaged only three hours of sleep each night for the next few weeks.

Thanks to an uneventful birth, an incredibly strong wife, and my online materials, I was able to complete the semester (albeit in a zombie-like state) without missing any other class sessions. Having a contingency plan in place that made use of technology helped to keep me better organized. My supervisor had recently become a first-time grandfather and was exceptionally understanding of my situation. This supportive relationship was complemented by an equally caring attitude among co-workers, a characteristic not uncommon in rural Midwestern towns. Work became a place where I could openly share the invigorating joy and unremitting challenges of parenting.

As a corporate approach to management and businesslike accountability makes its presence felt in institutions of higher learning across the nation, the nurturing work environment that I experienced seems more and more rare. Today, Professor Siena also has a beautiful, healthy daughter, although her birth experience was a bit more challenging. After originally planning a return to work after a brief (paid) hiatus, she has since decided to leave academe to be a stay-at-home mom. Her students' Web sites turned out well, and she was satisfied with how technology helped her finish a semester that would have otherwise been cut short.

After the birth of our children, Susan and I convened again to come up with some tips to help you use technology to prepare for a (possible) leave of absence. Here's our top 10:

• Prepare content in advance. Susan's experience in preparing her course content was easier because she wasn't designing a new course. Transforming an existing class into an online class is time-consuming enough.

• Get help!Find a technical-support person who can help. This might be a colleague in your department, a librarian, a mentor, or a person designated by your institution for instructional support. You can probably find a lot of help on your campus if you ask, such as using student workers to plow through the more mundane aspects of a given project (like scanning or data entry); securing financial support for the purchase of specialized software and hardware; getting stipends or grants to help offset some of the development costs; and finding in-class technology training for your students.

• Develop a plan. Identify a few topics within your course syllabus that are conducive to computer-based learning. Focus on developing reusable instructional modules. Create a list of tasks to be completed and set some realistic deadlines.

• Define an appropriate use of technology. Determine how best to transform these learning modules into a format that can be delivered electronically. Would a simulation be a good way to enhance learning? Perhaps a short video or animation might better communicate a given point?

• Start slowly. Develop a prototype of the course and determine whether it is acceptable pedagogically. For example, have you forgotten an assessment component? Once you are satisfied with the prototype, build a few more as time permits.

• Organize the online-learning modules together. As you develop your online activities, try to clump three or four related modules together so that, if needed in an emergency, you will have isolated some time when you can be off the campus.

• Try out your prototype on students and professors. No need to wait for a real emergency: conduct a formal evaluation of the activity in a traditional class setting. You will get to see how your online-learning modules work in action and students will get some practice, too. Hand out surveys to assess user satisfaction.

• Take some time. Be prepared to sacrifice some in-class time for training, questions, and organization. How much time to allot depends on your own comfort level.

• Revise and ramp up technology as needed. If you are like most people, the second time you use these modules you will want to make some major revisions. As you revise, you will be better able to envision more-advanced applications of technology.

• If it isn't fresh, we're out of business. Continue to update your online modules periodically so that your material does not get dated.

If you are still on the fence about this, let our experience help you to decide in favor of it. With a little determination, forethought, and some fairly basic technology, we were able to stay on track with our teaching responsibilities during a very demanding time in life.