The potential sources of disruption to teaching and learning are expanding, as are the consequences, increasing the importance of being able to maintain high-quality academic activity during interruptions.
Scenario
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Riverton College formed a task force to create a comprehensive instructional continuity plan. This plan was extensive and included detailed information about roles and responsibilities of units across the college to ensure that the mission of teaching and learning could, as seamlessly as possible, continue in future states of disruption. To support readiness, Riverton requires all faculty and staff to refresh on the plan every year. In addition, the plan is communicated to all students at the beginning of each semester so that all campus constituents are prepared in case of any disruption.
When a wildfire damaged power and network infrastructure across the Central Riverlands region just days before midterms, the college's leadership activated the IC plan within a few hours. Rather than relying on a single office, a cross-functional team, including information technology, the center for teaching and learning, and academic leadership coordinated a unified response. Faculty received a single source of guidance with practical recommendations for communicating with students, adapting assignments, and sustaining progress to learning outcomes while systems recovered. Students received consistent updates, alternative ways to access course materials, and connections to academic and personal support services. Librarians expanded access to digital resources, instructional designers helped faculty modify learning activities, and advisors proactively reached out to students whose circumstances might complicate participation.
Midterms were delayed due to the college's commitment to ensuring that all students had a meaningful and equitable opportunity to demonstrate their learning, regardless of how the disruption affected their ability to participate. Riverton provided faculty with flexibility to make decisions appropriate to their courses, students, and learning outcomes. Some faculty chose to eliminate the midterm altogether and use evidence that had been collected during the term to measure student learning, while others extended deadlines, modified assessments, or provided alternative ways for students to demonstrate progress. The goal was to preserve meaningful learning while giving faculty and students the ability needed to navigate the disruption.
Although the disruption exposed areas for improvement, it also reinforced the value of preparation, shared responsibility, and strong campus partnerships. After normal operations resumed, Riverton incorporated lessons learned into faculty development, course-design standards, communication protocols, and regular continuity planning. What began as a response to a temporary disruption became a lasting investment in more resilient, student-centered teaching and learning.
1. What Is It?
Instructional continuity (IC) is an institution's ability and commitment to sustain high-quality teaching and learning during and after a disruption, adapting as necessary to preserve the integrity of the educational experience across modalities and circumstances. IC extends beyond emergency response; grounded in partnership, it is a proactive, institution-wide approach to building resilient teaching and learning practices. Rather than focusing solely on keeping classes running, effective continuity planning seeks to preserve meaningful learning experiences, support progress toward course and program learning outcomes, protect academic records, and ensure that all students, regardless of their circumstances, receive equitable access to instruction and support services.
Instructional disruptions vary significantly in scope, duration, and tone. A global health event, a regional weather event, a campus network outage, local political issues, or even the repercussions of a sports championship, when the crush of people in attendance disrupts various forms of infrastructure, can all interrupt teaching and learning. Some disruptions will affect an entire institution, while others impact a single campus, course, technology service, or student population. With potential disruptions arising from an increasingly complex social, political, environmental, technological, and economic landscape, institutions must prepare for when, not if, the next disruption occurs.
2. How Does It Work?
As with any business continuity approach, the goal of IC is to identify potential risks, clarify institutional roles and responsibilities, and establish procedures for maintaining services when normal operations are interrupted. IC succeeds when institutional systems and human support work together. Success is measured not only by restored operations but by whether meaningful learning experiences were preserved.
Implementation centers on an institution's ability to leverage partnerships and pivot without losing sight of student learning and academic success. This requires shared responsibility and coordination across many roles and functions across an institution, including academic leadership, centers for teaching and learning, information technology, student services, libraries, communications, instructional designers, faculty, and students. Together, these partners identify critical teaching and learning services, determine disruption thresholds, establish communication protocols, define contingency plans, and regularly review and update those plans as technologies, policies, and institutional priorities evolve.
Faculty play a central role because they make the day-to-day decisions that shape the student experience during disruption. Institutions support that work by providing professional development, instructional-design partnerships, accessible course design practices, and flexible approaches to assessment, communication, and engagement. The goal is not to expect faculty to become emergency managers but to ensure they have the tools, resources, and relationships needed to adapt while maintaining course learning outcomes.
Ultimately, the goal of IC is not merely to restore operations but to sustain the relationships and learning environments necessary for academic progress. It is an ongoing cycle of preparation, partnership, adaptable execution, reflection, and learning that ensures learners, faculty, and staff have the support they need.
3. Who's Doing It?
The leaders of instructional continuity vary considerably depending on institutional type, governance structure, available resources, and local context. At some institutions, planning is coordinated through the Office of the Provost or Academic Affairs, often in partnership with centers for teaching and learning. At other institutions, information technology, emergency management, or another central office provides leadership. Increasingly, however, institutions are recognizing that IC is a shared institutional responsibility that depends on collaboration across organizational boundaries. The Keep Teaching movement, initiated by Indiana University, provides a powerful model for scalability. During COVID-19, this framework was adapted by dozens of institutions globally, transforming a simple website into a shared, cross-departmental commitment. Similarly, Southern Methodist University's Keep Learning, Keep Teaching, Keep Working initiative highlights the necessity of addressing the distinct needs of students, faculty, and staff. The University at Buffalo has an instructional continuity plan that includes community building as a part of the core needs of an instructional continuity plan. Institutions including Cornell University, Middle Tennessee State University, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Boise State University, and UNC Charlotte exemplify this collaborative spirit, using tailored resources to guide their academic communities.
4. Why Is It Significant?
Cyberattacks, technology outages, severe weather, public-health emergencies, political unrest, and infrastructure failures can cause disruptions that can interrupt instruction with little warning. Recent experience has demonstrated that some of the most consequential challenges to teaching and learning are impossible to anticipate—for example, the COVID-19 pandemic and rapid adoption of AI were unlike any disruptions experienced before. At its core, IC is more than preparing for known risks but instead requires building flexibility, adaptability, and capacity into systems, practices, and structures that support learning.
IC has become a strategic priority because disruptions are no longer extraordinary but are expected. Despite this reality, when large-scale disruption occurs, many institutions scramble to fully support faculty and learners. As institutions become more dependent on cloud services, AI-enabled technologies, and interconnected digital ecosystems, they also become more vulnerable to disruptions within those environments, making the ability to sustain learning essential to fulfilling the academic mission. However, the importance of IC extends beyond institutional resilience. Regulatory and accrediting bodies increasingly require colleges and universities to demonstrate their ability to continue educational services and protect student interests during catastrophic events. For example, institutions participating in the National Council for State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (NC-SARA) must maintain plans that address continuity of instruction, preservation of academic and financial records, and options for students if educational operations are disrupted.
IC is fundamentally about people, yet historically many continuity plans focused on restoring access to technology and data. An institution could restore technology and preserve records while still leaving students disconnected from meaningful learning or faculty without the support needed to adapt their teaching. Additionally, disruption does not affect everyone in the same way—its impact can vary based on learners' circumstances, the modality of the instruction, and the supports available to faculty and students. Institutions that invest in IC before disruption occurs are better positioned to respond with confidence, consistency, and compassion. By fostering collaboration across academic and administrative units, continuity planning strengthens institutional resilience while reinforcing trust among students, faculty, and staff.
5. What Are the Downsides?
One of the greatest challenges of IC is sustaining institutional commitment before a crisis occurs. Because disruptions are unpredictable, planning often competes with other priorities and may be viewed as a compliance exercise rather than a strategic investment. As a result, even continuity plans that exist and satisfy policy requirements can become outdated, incomplete, or insufficiently tested until a major disruption exposes their weaknesses.
Another challenge is ensuring that continuity plans address the needs of all learners and the varied contexts in which learning occurs. In times of disruption, attention is often focused on students enrolled in degree-granting programs, yet continuing education, professional, and workforce learners also depend on access to instruction and support. Continuity also looks different across learning environments. Programs that rely on clinical, laboratory, field-based, or other hands-on experiences cannot simply transition to a virtual environment. Meanwhile, fully online programs depend on continued access to digital infrastructure, platforms, instructional resources, and support services. This underscores a common misconception that IC can be achieved through technology alone, but restoring access to an LMS, video platform, or other technologies does not necessarily restore the conditions necessary for learning.
Disruptions also place significant demands on faculty, instructional designers, librarians, educational technologists, and other academic support professionals, who often work behind the scenes to help teaching continue. Without recognition and long-term support, these teams can experience burnout and compassion fatigue, reducing institutional capacity for future disruptions.
Institutions also risk post-crisis regression. Once normal operations resume, successful practices, strengthened partnerships, and valuable lessons learned may fade as attention shifts elsewhere. Sometimes the greatest downside is not the disruption itself but losing the institutional knowledge gained through responding to it and failing to carry forward the new approaches, practices, and possibilities it revealed.
6. Where Is It Going?
Instructional continuity is slowly evolving from an emergency response strategy into a core institutional competence. Rather than creating plans that sit on a shelf until the next crisis, colleges and universities are beginning to embed resilience into everyday teaching, learning, and academic operations. Flexible course design, accessible learning environments, cross-functional partnerships, and regular planning exercises are becoming more common. Unsurprisingly, the expansion of AI in higher education is accelerating change across teaching and learning, creating new sources of disruption and serving as a powerful opportunity to strengthen institutional capacity for instructional resilience. Faculty, instructional designers, centers for teaching and learning, and institutional leaders are being asked to innovate quickly, adapt practices, and develop policies in real time. In this environment, institutions must proactively reimagine how education is designed and prepare for technology failures and evolving risks.
The future of IC will depend on technology and the strength of academic communities. Faculty, instructional designers, librarians, educational technologists, accessibility specialists, teaching and learning centers, and academic leaders will increasingly work together to create learning environments and student support systems that are flexible, inclusive, and resilient by design. At the same time, institutional leaders will need to continually reflect on disruptions, preserve lessons learned, and adapt their practices rather than return to pre-crisis status quo. Ultimately, the institutions best prepared for the future will those that develop the capacity to adapt to whatever comes next.
7. What Are the Implications for Higher Education?
Recent EDUCAUSE QuickPoll data suggest that, for many institutions, IC remains an emerging capability. Only a small percentage of respondents reported having one or more IC plans, while many indicated that their institution either had no plan or that they were unsure whether one existed. This uncertainty highlights an important opportunity for institutional leaders to establish clear governance, shared ownership, and campus-wide awareness before disruption occurs.
The implications extend well beyond emergency preparedness. IC should be recognized as an institutional commitment to student success that spans the entire academic enterprise. It requires sustained investment in faculty development, instructional design, accessibility, libraries, educational technology, student support services, and cross-functional collaboration. Higher education leaders should also view IC as an ongoing process of continuous improvement rather than a one-time planning exercise. Regular reviews, tabletop exercises, after-action assessments, and updates informed by emerging technologies and changing institutional priorities help ensure that continuity plans remain relevant and actionable.
IC is more than responding to crises. It's a hallmark of a resilient, student-centered commitment to educational excellence. Institutions that prepare collaboratively, communicate clearly, and place learning at the center of their response will be better positioned to navigate uncertainty while preserving the educational experience for every learner they serve.
Contributors
Jennifer Culver is Senior Director of College Accessibility at Dallas College.
Ebony English is Robert Richard Smith Endowed Professor for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Social Work at the Community College of Allegheny.
Rae Mancilla is Executive Director of Digital Learning and Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh.
Nhora Lucía Serrano is Director of Academic Technology, Teaching, & Research at Hamilton College.
Sten Swenson is Associate Dean for Technology Strategy and Solutions at Duke University Trinity College of Arts & Sciences.
Kim Arnold is Director of the Teaching and Learning Program at EDUCAUSE.
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