Course Development
Part IV: Setting Up Expectations
This is covered in the syllabus template, but it bears emphasizing: your course materials should be very precise about what you expect from students (e.g. due dates for assignments, participation in discussion board assignments, attendance, etc.) and likewise what students can expect from you as instructor (e.g. return of exams and assignments, checking emails, etc.)
- Articulate the communication expectations:
- When you will be checking email (be careful not to over commit; you may want to let them know if you won't be responding over the weekend)
- You may want to create a content button for student to post questions if the questions may be relevant for all students (it may prevent you from answering the same question on multiple emails).
- Specify guidelines for email communication
Put together what will work for you from of these resources on "netiquette:"- Guidelines for Internet Communication, by Todd Taylor, Associate Professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill. This is a guide for his ENG 300 course.
- Netiquette entry in Wikipedia, includes several useful links.
- Specify guidelines for online discussion forums
- Specify how often to check the forums; when and how often to post
- Specify expectations regarding length of postings, attention to grammar and spelling, etc.
- Specify percentage of grade and grading criteria, if any. You may want to establish criteria for both quantity and quality of participation. For example, you may specify that 30 or 50% of the grade is based on the student meeting the minimum quantity level of postings and the remainder is based on quality.
- Same "netiquette" rules apply for discussion forums.
- Resources on facilitating discussion forums
- Resources for Moderators and Facilitators of Online Discussion, very large list of links to scholarly articles on moderation/facilitation of online discussion. A very good summary is provided in an article, linked from the page by Zane Berge.
- Wearing Four Pairs of Shoes: The Roles of E-Learning Facilitators by Ed Hootstein, published in elearning 1.0 in 2002.
- Effective Online Facilitation, created by the Australian National Training Authority
- Be sure your students know that plagiarism is not tolerated; they should
always reference their sources.
- Resources to Assist Students to Learn About and Avoid Plagiarism (Center for Teaching and Learning)
- You may want to rotate students as facilitators after you model the role in order to stimulate active participation and clinical thinking and keep your workload manageable. When you have multiple discussion groups, you could have the facilitator of each group summarize the discussion and post the summary to the entire class