Five strategies for a successful start for your students (Teaching Tip)

January brings with it the comfortable familiarity of a completed fall semester and the newness and opportunities of a spring semester waiting to begin. Before the first day of the semester, consider these strategies to promote student success.
  • Welcome students. Send a welcoming email or Canvas announcement to your class (see the communication strategies page). Let students know where and when the first class session occurs: in person or online, how to access the Canvas course page, include a copy of the syllabus, and share your student office hours. This welcome sets the stage for prepared students on the first day of class.
  • Do a readiness assessment. On the first day of class, include a short, no-stakes quiz with a mixture of prerequisite knowledge questions and topics students will encounter in the course. This readiness assessment can provide you with diagnostic information about the new class. Further, providing the correct answer to the questions can be an early resource for content review. Get started by using the Quizzes and Exams strategies page.
  • Ask students about their goals. No matter the class size, ask students why they signed up for the class and how it will help them achieve their goals. Students can complete this information in word or sentence format using Qualtrics. Display the Qualtrics word cloud results in real-time or share them during the next class session.
  • Give a syllabus quiz. Instead of a detailed syllabus reading, give a short quiz in the first week of the term (see CELT’s Sample syllabus quiz questions page). This method is an easy first assignment win for students and can lessen potential anxiety about course expectations and grading.
  • Make Connections. Prepare a small follow-up assignment in which students actively engage and make a connection with the course material and their lives. Perhaps this is finding a news article or social media post related to your course content. Maybe it is asking students to identify something within their lives impacted by the course topic. At the next class session, create triads of students to share the information. This strategy is beneficial if you use permanent triads for discussion and project teams throughout the semester and further connections with content and between classmates. Find additional ideas for engagement on the Ideas to create a welcoming, engaging, and inclusive classroom page along with the Engaging Students Online page.
Continue to read the CELT Teaching Tip for the Start of the Semester Checklist, Instructional Tools & Updates, the CELT Teaching Spotlight, and CELT Upcoming Programs. The CELT staff eagerly awaits meeting and working with you in spring 2021!
 
With a joy for teaching,
 
Sara Marcketti, Director

Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching


Full Teaching Tip

View the published CELT Teaching Tip: Five strategies for a successful start for your students (January 14, 2021 – Constant Contact) page.

Prefer a Print version?

To view the Teaching Tip as a printable document with web addresses, download the CELT Teaching Tip for January 14.

Good Course Design Makes All The Difference

Start with the end in mind. It seems like pretty straightforward advice for a lot of things in life. And, although it isn’t always considered Faculty member speaking with three strudentswhen creating a new course, or modifying an existing one, it can create a very useful framework for course design.

Often this approach to course design is called “backward design”. The process starts with identifying the course learning goals. Next, you determine the best ways to assess and evaluate if students are achieving these goals. Then after the goals and evaluation strategies are established the course content is considered. Designing and teaching courses this way puts learning first and content coverage second. It can help students achieve higher levels of cognitive development (i.e. higher order learning as described in the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy) than classes that have content coverage as a primary focus.

The CELT website has a set of resources available to help with your course design:

Additionally, CELT is offering a 5-part workshop series- Best Practices in Online Course Design starting January 31st (registration is now closed for the spring series – CELT will be offering this series again in the near future – if you are interested email CELT). The workshop series is based on the research-based Quality Matters (QM) framework. You may learn more about this framework through CELT’s Quality Matters Tracks for Faculty Development website.

(On a personal note, last fall semester I worked with a graduate student in my program to develop a non-credit online course using the Quality Matters framework. It was a big undertaking, but the QM framework provided a fantastic guide and ensured we implemented a number of best practices for online learning. We’ve had great response from many of the participants as well.)

Ann Marie VanDerZanden, Director
Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching

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