Prepare Your Students
Prepare students for remote, hybrid, or online learning by:
- Determining the method you will use to communicate with your students.
- Offering low-stakes online assignments.
- Exposing students to learner-centered activities early in the semester.
- Sharing helpful online resources with students.
- Encouraging students to attend online office hours through Zoom.
- Designing online assignments that require the use of online library resources.
- Providing online collaboration spaces for student groups.
Communication
- Post an announcement to Blackboard to share critical information with your whole class. When you create an announcement, you can choose to send the message immediately to everyone’s email so that they will receive the information even if they do not log into Blackboard.
- Provide clear messages about how students should contact you – by email, phone, text or other methods – and provide them with your contact information.
- Set expectations about how soon students should expect to hear back from you. For example, between what days or hours should students expect a response from you?
- Provide clear information about changes in your students’ course experience. Explain how you have adapted the class for online learning.
- Direct students to course materials that are available online.
- Offer detailed instructions for engaging in online activities.
- Be very clear about any changes in the syllabus, such as adjustments in grading or due dates.
Low-stakes assignments
- Use the online discussion forum for student introductions.
- Ask students to complete an online survey of previous knowledge.
- Use the Blackboard journal tool to have students reflect on what they have learned through a reading or after a lecture.
Learner-centered activities
“Just about any active learning strategy that works well in a traditional classroom environment supports active engagement in an online course” (Nilson & Goodson, 2018, p. 83).
- Quizzes, interviews, surveys
- Debates and constructive controversy
- Interactive videos (integration of questions and reflection prompts)
- Blogs, group projects, wikis
- Well-moderated discussions
- Process-oriented guided inquiry learning in science courses (POGIL)
- Role plays, which can encourage understanding of different perspectives
Additional information can be found in Nilson, L. and Goodson, L. A. 2018. Online teaching at its best: Merging instructional design with teaching and learning research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, available in the CTSE library.
Online resources
In addition to the resources that are specific to your discipline, you may find these open and free resources helpful in meeting your course learning objectives:
- Khan Academy – a resource to help students brush up on prerequisites in disciplines ranging from biology to finance and history
- TED-Ed and TED Talks
In addition, you should:
- Use Zoom to hold individual or group office hours.
- Create a Q & A Discussion Forum in Blackboard to encourage students to post their questions so that everyone in the class can see your answer, rather than replying to individual email questions.
Library resources
Share Library resources with students and ensure that they can access the online content from home.
Collaboration
Student-to-student interaction is essential to the creation of a strong learning community. Here are some online tools for facilitating group work:
Stay connected
Faculty presence in the online learning environment can take many forms. Consider:
- Using pre-established methods of communication.
- Providing an open discussion forum for questions and answers.
- Using the Announcement feature in Blackboard to communicate with students so they both receive an email of the Announcement as well as see the Announcement post when logging into their Blackboard course.
- Giving feedback to uploaded assignments.
- Using the grade book feature of Blackboard.
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