Teaching in a pandemic: quickly adapting to the unexpected

Motivated by the sudden wide-scale shift to distance learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020, this chapter addresses strategies for adapting to unexpected events, maintaining student engagement, and avoiding unintended consequences. We include some of the adaptive experiences of contributors to this volume who had to make these rapid changes in the health economics courses they taught during the pandemic. Our contributors reported using a range of learning technology platforms. These platforms were successfully used to incorporate synchronous (`real-time’) sessions, which emerged as a common theme for simulating a live classroom experience. We also describe challenges faced by faculty and students that had to be addressed during the sudden shift in educational delivery. Although faculty reported achieving experiences similar to in-person settings, they observed a loss of social connectedness. We further note the need for research that evaluates the impacts of exclusively distanced teaching on learning outcomes.