Communication

Although not having the opportunity to see students in person may pose some challenges, online communication tools also have their strengths. As written communication plays a more central role in the remote or blended teaching and learning environment, it allows more time for both the instructor and students to compose questions and/or comments, and this may increase the depth and quality of the conversations.

Being very proactive about communicating with students will help them to feel more comfortable during a time of high anxiety. Faculty can help ease the adjustment for students who have never taken a remote or blended class, and who may not want to (i.e. try to make the class feel personal and interactive even though you may not be meeting face-to-face).

We recommend reaching out to your students even before the term begins to clarify how the course will run and reassure them that you are planning for an engaging learning experience. See a sample remote class letter and a sample on-campus class letter from CTL; we invite you to personalize them in your own voice and with relevant details for your course.

Maintain substantive interaction with your students via the Canvas discussion board and/or Zoom. Make sure to include links for your students to our student tech support guide and to our guide on Canvas student tools.

Set a good tone from the beginning of the course by communicating in a welcoming and supportive manner with a personal and course introduction, an approachable syllabus, and an interactive introduction discussion. You should also outline a communication plan that you share with your students. Below are items to address and general recommendations:

Communication Plan Component	Considerations and Recommendations
How do you prefer students contact you?	The two ways you are most likely to hear from students is through email and Canvas messaging. Tell them if you prefer only one of these, or if you prefer another method of communication.
What is your general availability for responding to questions and inquiries?	You don't have to feel compelled to be "on the clock" 7 days per week, but plan to check messages and respond to students frequently. If you plan to take screen-free time every Saturday to be with your family, for example, tell students that.
How quickly should students expect a reply from you -- to a question posted on a Q&A discussion board in Canvas, to emails, to Canvas messages, etc.?	The recommended baseline for online faculty is a response within 48 hours on weekdays.
How will you use Canvas Announcements?	Instructors use Announcements in very different ways, so it's a good idea to have a strategy for them that you communicate to students. For example, if it is important that they read a weekly overview announcement each Monday before they start any readings and assignments for the week, tell them to be sure to watch for those and read them.
Within how many days should expect to see a grade and feedback on assignments?	The recommended baseline for online faculty is feedback and grades returned within 5-7 days.
Do you offer office hours? How and when will they be conducted?	Virtual office hours via Zoom are recommended so that you can connect with students without having to meet in person and you do not need to give out personal contact information (such as a home phone number).

Moderating discussion forums

It is important that students don’t feel isolated in their remote courses. As an extension to any synchronous sessions you may be doing with your students, faculty can design class activities/assessment to encourage and foster peer-to-peer communication and collaboration through both synchronous and asynchronous activities. Whether you use formal discussion prompts or provide informal opportunities for collaboration or topical discussion, moderating these forums is different than moderating a whole class discussion in an in-person classroom.

On the previous page, we talked about forms of presence and "roles" you might play in your course's Canvas discussions. Below are some additional tips about moderating discussions.

Tips for moderating discussion forums:

It is not necessary (in fact, it is discouraged) to reply to every post every student makes in your discussion forum, with the exception of the General Q&A forum.
Commenting on around 1/3 of all substantive posts in the forum itself is a reasonable place to begin. (You might provide responses to other students as part of their grading.)
Spread your comments over the course of the week to encourage students to actively and consistently participate over time.
Model posting you would give full credit for. If you publicly value substantive discussion by giving points for it and modeling it in the forums, students will do the work.
Pull together threads of ideas or themes that you see across several students' posts and make connections back to the course text or primary concepts.
Make sure that when you post additional thoughts and questions that you're scaffolding their learning and not talking over their heads or possibly overwhelming them with information that is not critical to the course.

Prompting discussion:

Make sure your discussion prompt is actually a discussion prompt and not a regular assignment in disguise. "List three reasons why X happened. Justify your answers from the text" isn't actually a discussion prompt. It's a question that the student answers and then walks away having proved to the instructor that they read the book. If you just want to know that they read the book, try a reading quiz in the Quizzes tool.

If you want students to discuss why X happened, phrasing the prompt in a way that opens the door for discussion, such as:

"Based on the text, what do you think is the most logical reason that X happened? Explain your reasoning. Reply to at least two other classmates who suggested different reasons and explain whether or not you think that both reasons could have influenced X. Make sure to reply appropriately to anyone who replies substantively to any of your posts."

Instructions like this provide a rationale for replying to one another and provides a reasonable avenue for interaction. It also provides you with easier opportunities to participate by highlighting the complexities of pointing to one single antecedent to an event or movement. For more on using discussion forums, see "Discussion Board Assignments: Alternatives to the Question-and-Answer Format" from Faculty Focus.

You might also think about the role your students can play in producing good questions during this time of remote teaching where we need to make more of an effort than usual to draw students into engaged learning. For more on this topic, read "Bringing out Students' Best Assets in Remote Teaching: Questioning Reconsidered" by CTL's Funmi Amobi.

Providing Feedback

When students submit discussion contributions and assignments in Canvas, the SpeedGrader interface provides helpful tools for efficiently providing grades and feedback -- even using rubrics if you so choose!

Particularly in times of many challenges and ongoing stress, providing students with targeted, actionable feedback is critical for their success. Here are a few tips for helping to ensure that your feedback practices will be helpful to your students:

Distinguish between formative and summative assessments in your course, and be sure to give feedback on formative assignments that are intended to help students practice with skills and content. As its name suggests, formative assessment emphasizes the formation of the students' knowledge and skills, so the feedback required will help students to accurately identify strengths and weaknesses and to determine practical next steps for improvement.
Provide clear indications of not just what students need to improve on but also how they might improve. Telling a student that they need to work on APA style citations, for example, is very different than making that comment and then providing an example of where a source introduction could have been clearer and a citation needed to be structured differently. Providing one model for patterns of error will give the student a structure for correcting the other errors themselves. You can do this easily in SpeedGrader tools by making annotations on the student's submitted document.
Emphasize a growth mindset with your students. Let them know where you have seen progress and that you support them as they work on areas that need improvement. Especially when you do provide well-earned praise, be sure to attribute the success to the student's efforts, not to their intelligence or predisposition for doing well at something.

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