Onboarding / Syllabus activity

[9931696]

I was looking for a place to share ideas about onboarding students in an online course at the beginning of a semester. There is a lot of information for students to understand at the beginning of an online course, especially if it is their first time taking a course at the institution and also their first time taking a course with a specific instructor. There is navigational information (where do I find this, etc.) and there are specific course items to know. It seems instructors answer many of the same questions throughout the semester that are located in the syllabus or course information. 

so, I'm looking for engaging ways for students to go through this information in an engaging manner vs just reading a syllabus, checking a checkmark, and then still asking questions that they said they already read over. 

What does your institution do for this? 

[andrew_sheppard]

Hello!

Many of my colleagues at my college asks students to take a Syllabus quiz that is not worth many points. I think that's an okay approach, but more recently, I've invited my students to use the Canvas "annotation" assignment feature to encourage my students to interact with my syllabus. I ask them to highlight (in red) something about the course that makes them feel unpleasant, something in green that makes them feel good about the course, and to highlight a resource in yellow that they are most likely to use. A screenshot follows.

Syllabus Assignment Screenshot

I thought students might highlight the library or other campus resource in yellow, but quite a few highlighted my e-mail address, which I welcomed as well. I hope you might find this useful.

[9931696]

Great idea! Thank you. 

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Thanks for asking this question, @9931696. What I do in my asynchronous online classes is post an announcement a couple of days before the class officially begins with three components:

1. An embedded video with an enthusiastic welcome, sharing my excitement about our class together
2. A note to let them know that the class is now published and they can view the syllabus and that the first module will be available on the official class start date
3. Information about the tutorials provided by my college to help them be successful online students

I also remind students of the activities they have to do to retain their enrollment in the class (participate in introduction discussion, complete the pre-course survey, etc.).

I hope others in the Community share what they do to onboard students.

[andrew_sheppard]

An enthusiastic welcome video is a great idea!

[ddessauer]

I am an outlier in my course delivering some units as asynchronous online experiences, which means I need to go to some lengths explaining what that is and how it works in practice, on top of onboarding them with Canvas generally. I would summarise my approach with three key points:

1. It isn’t just explained in text, there’s an engaging animated video where I take them on a tour of Canvas and explain it as I would in person. 
2. I don’t just tell them “this is how I like to teach so this is how we will do it” - I focus on the importance of multi-modal ways of working that are increasingly common in industry - so understanding the difference between synchronous and asynchronous, the difference between remote and distributed teams, practicing structuring their own flexible work time, and so on, is all part of the employability skills they will get from the unit.
3. I have a survey at the end of the introduction module that doesn’t just collect some useful information from them (like what OS they use, preferred pronouns etc), it also checks that they understood all the key points of onboarding info, like how to ask a question privately vs publicly and so on. I know a ‘quiz’ doesn’t sound engaging, but the trick here is it isn’t just reiterating the info again and getting them to communicate if it is understood or not. It does do that but I also use the automated answer responses to turn it into an interactive conversation. So, for example, in the intro module there is a short trigger warning disclaimer. Then in the survey I ask them if they’d like more info how content can be triggering. If they say no it will reply that’s ok but they can repeat this any time if their answer has changed. But if they say yes, there’s a full page of detailed info about the difference between uncomfortable and triggering, what sort of content they could encounter and why, what sort of content we never include, and where to get further information and relevant help & support. So nothing in the survey is a simple one and done answer. Everything results in personalised information, and it’s in my voice too, so they are getting to know their teacher and build that relationship. 
   
   To do this in Canvas you need to build it as a quiz so that (for example) every choice in a multiple choice question can have a different response. But then when you have finished building it all, turn it into a survey. For some reason surveys don’t give that same granularity of responses, but do preserve everything you entered in the ‘quiz’. The reason you don’t want to leave it as a quiz is that it will consider some answers ‘right or wrong’ so it looks like you are judging their life decisions! Of course there’s no reason why you need to use this Canvas inbuilt tool for the interactive info - you could do something similar with a branching scenario in H5P or whatever other services you like to use to build content.