Write a personal welcome letter to students to introduce yourself as the faculty for this course and set the tone. Include a little personal information, background, and previous experiences teaching this course to help form a connection. Adding a picture or short video helps to put a face with the course prior to the start date or if this is a hybrid/online course.
Consider how you will build that personal contact and communication with your students. The tone and examples you put into your course is how they will engage with the faculty and the rest of the class.
Dr. Louisa Hernandez - Education Adjunct Faculty
Office: 970-555-1234 email: lahernandez@coloradomtn.edu
I want to welcome you to this course and hope that you will gain knowledge in educational pedagogy, curriculum selection, and teaching practices that will make your lessons pop! We will be exploring and creating lessons that are appropriate for a variety of elementary grade levels to meet students' different learning abilities and assist in challenging them to reach set goals to stay on track, go beyond, or reach their personal best. Students are encouraged to bring their own unique perspectives, experiences, and ideas to the course.
In this course, students will also be exploring educational technologies and resources that are commonly used in the classroom and the region. Students will be expected to gain knowledge and skills in using these technologies according to the grade level and subjects being taught. This course will require a consistent and stable internet connection and it is recommended to have a computer or tablet for this class rather than a small mobile device or smartphone due to the activities that students will be participating in.
I personally have been teaching in the Education program for the last 3 years, working with future elementary teachers across the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond. I was an elementary teacher in Colorado for 12 years, teaching 3rd and 5th grades, and then was an assistant principal for five years before joining CMC. I currently work for the school district full-time and teach 2 courses for CMC each semester.
In my spare time, I enjoy biking, working in my garden, and rafting with my family and 2 dogs.
Faculty establishes culture through communication, feedback, and performance standards in their course. These guide students to ways to ask questions, communicate with each other, and gain feedback from the instructor. Providing 2-3 methods of communication that are consistently used throughout the semester is the best practice, no matter the modality or software used.
Examples:
When engaging and interacting with students in the course, faculty don't need to respond immediately. Rather let students know up front what your plans are with scheduled times and dates for communication and feedback to help students establish a consistent interaction with you and each other.
Examples:
For Student: Twice a week post to the discussion board, Tuesdays and Thursdays, due at 5 pm mountain time (reoccurring deadlines and times for student interaction)
For Faculty: General response time to student questions is within 24 hrs during the school week, but weekends may be more flexible if stated to students in the syllabus or course information.
Grading: Grading with feedback is generally completed within 2-7 days of submission to the course via SpeedGrader in "Grades" or "Assignments". This may vary depending on the type of assessment that is offered but is a good practice for weekly assignments and participation.
First Week Checklist for Students
Remote Real-Time allows students and faculty to be online live from anywhere. However, a significant challenge is attention. Studies indicate that many students struggle with paying attention to content for more than 10 minutes in an online forum, such as Zoom or WebEx. One key strategy is to involve the students throughout the live class sessions with experiential learning.
An experiential learning approach* to live class sessions engages students in active learning with key characteristics:
The experiential learning approach includes structured content, active experimentation, reflection, and pragmatic application within the live class session.
This approach segments content and activities in such a way that students are learning and engaging throughout the session. For example, one class session agenda might look like this:
To plan your class session, use this Synchronous Class Session Planning Template
*This experiential learning framework and template are based on adult learning theory resources:
A team of Instructional Designers has been created to provide educational support, enhancing andragogy in the classroom and delivering consistent course design across programs.
A blueprint course is a special type of course in Canvas that serves as a template for other courses/sections. The content and settings in the blueprint course can then be pushed out to courses that are associated with the blueprint at any time to establish a level of consistency. Blueprint courses are commonly used for courses at CMC that have multiple sections each semester where outcomes and essential content should be consistent in every Canvas course.
Any existing course can become a Blueprint course, but it must be enabled as a Blueprint by a Canvas administrator for the functionality to be available. This allows faculty the ability to work on the design prior to it becoming a Blueprint or after it has been enabled.
Blueprint Options:
Plan, Plan, Plan
Blueprint courses are well-named, because--like a house or anything designed with a blueprint--planning is critical, as is communication. Blueprint courses wield a bit of extra power in their ability to "push" content and information out to other associated courses/sections. To reduce issues with many courses proper planning or communication is essential with the development team, whether it be a faculty and their ADI/dean or a group of peers working together to develop a course for their program. Therefore, everyone involved in the process should be involved, give timely updates, consider what is essential for the course, consider the needs of future faculty, design for flexibility, and most of all the students.
This is a great addition to Canvas, as it ensures course, program and CMC outcomes get embedded in all associated courses so that the individual faculty do not have to worry about adding them in on their own. Future faculty have a well-designed course with all the key information already in place and students will have a cohesive and consistent environment to learn. With all this design work, the planning and organization of the course is perhaps the most important part of the Blueprint design process.
Items to Consider:
Locking Content for Consistency
When the team has the course design and content completed the next step is to decide what is to be locked and what can be editable by other faculty when their course is associated with the Blueprint. Some objects, such as the syllabus, faculty information, and announcements should be unlocked to allow for personal or timely information to be added, while key content, outcomes, and common assessments may be locked, so the experience is the same for every student.
Locked Objects:
Locking an object in a course enforces the attributes defined in Course Settings. Any change to an attribute retroactively applies to all locked objects in the associated course. If an attribute is enabled for locked objects in the blueprint course, any locked attributes in the associated course that vary from locked attributes in the blueprint course will trigger unsynced changes in the blueprint course and override the associated course objects.
Unlocked Objects
Objects that are unlocked can be managed by a course instructor like any other Canvas object. If the blueprint course is synced and the instructor has modified unlocked objects in the associated course, unlocked objects are not overwritten with the synced changes.
Unlocked blueprint objects can be locked at any time. If you lock an unpublished object, and that object was previously removed from an associated course, the object will be replaced in the associated course.
Synching Courses
One of the best things about Blueprint courses is common navigation, content, assessments, and settings can be pushed (copied) to any associated course any time by synching the Blueprint course. This is great for setting up courses quickly and correcting errors but should also be done sparingly and communicated to all faculty prior to the synch. Generally, courses will be synched at the beginning of the semester and then as needed throughout the semester if there are any major errors that would affect the function or quality of the course. Synching repeatedly could cause confusion and challenges with the flow of the course and awareness of adjustments by both faculty and students.
At this time, the request for approval to develop a Blueprint course must be submitted to CMC and only then can change from a regular course to a Blueprint be performed by a CMC Canvas admin. This can not be done by faculty in Canvas, as this is an action that must be approved by the school and the program for any course to become a Blueprint.
All Blueprint courses will be associated with the appropriate courses and later synch by a Canvas administrator through approval by the CMC school or program representative.
Can students who take separate sections of the same course expect similar experiences, including the amount of time and effort they are required to engage? To meet this goal, faculty at CMC can develop a course that can be a "blueprint" in Canvas for multiple faculty to teach. In this way, faculty have some common structure, materials, assignments, and/or assessments and reach the learning outcomes with some consistency.
What does this mean for you as a faculty member at a public college?
Generally, it means that you must provide basic accessible access to all aspects of your course. You may wonder if you only have to provide accommodations if there is a student known to be disabled in your class, and the answer is that for some types of accommodations, yes that would be the case. However, to broadly address the issue of accessibility to content in such a way that avoids singling out students, institutions have adopted the requirements for access to online content that must be provided to all students as part of the basic course design and to meet ADA requirements.
Although following ADA requirements may seem like extra work, it is essential and is considered best practice for quality course design more generally. All students benefit from a principle known as Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Below are examples of effective ADA design benefits that positively affect other students.
Keep in mind that following ADA requirements is the law. There are potentially serious repercussions for both individual faculty members and institutions who do not make efforts to comply.
The seven (7) elements below must be met for any online content provided to students.
ADA requirements also apply to in-person learning, but with additional requirements. Two examples of ways the seven online elements might be used in face-to-face learning are given below.
In addition, the physical space of in-person learning must be accommodating.
Additional accommodations may also be provided for individual students depending on their specific needs.
Universal Design is a philosophy for developing systems that go beyond accessibility and accommodation to creatively design user experiences that work for all. In an educational setting, one resource, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), is a research-based framework for designing for all students.
Learner Engagement: Affective - The "Why" of learning
Learners differ markedly in the ways in which they can be engaged or motivated to learn.
Content Representation: Recognition - The "What" of learning
Learners differ in the ways that they perceive and comprehend information that is presented to them.
Action & Expression: Strategic - The "How" of learning
Learners differ in the ways that they can navigate a learning environment and express what they know.
Written by Abby Elder
This starter kit has been created to provide instructors with an introduction to the use and creation of open educational resources (OER). The text is broken into five sections: Getting Started, Copyright, Finding OER, Teaching with OER, and Creating OER. Although some chapters contain more advanced content, the starter kit is primarily intended for users who are entirely new to Open Education.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution
