Orient Your Students to Your Online Course - Best Practices

Your online students need your help.  

Learning to navigate your course online is just one challenge online students face.  Along with learning your course expectations, online students have to learn to navigate your online course.  And just like in your face-to-face class, you have students with varying degrees of ability and experience.  Some may have taken a course in Canvas before,  perhaps even one of your courses.  Others will be new to Canvas or even new to online learning.

A few suggestions to help your students. 

Welcome your students to your online course with an introductory email.  FaCIT has created an email message template you can modify for your use. 

Direct students to the free, online course, Orientation to Online Learning.  This course walks students through the basics of functions of Canvas.  Add a link to the course by copy and pasting this URL, https://svcc.instructure.com/courses/65,  to your Canvas front page and into your syllabus.

Create a few introductory or practice assignments for your students.  Here are a few examples.

• Have students upload a "What I want to learn from this course."  Students will gain practice uploading files. 
• Create an introductory discussion, have students introduce themselves by posting a reply.  Students will then have practice posting to discussions. 
• Create a "Syllabus and My Course Policies" quiz. Ask questions to ensure students know important details about your class.  Students will gain practice with the quiz tool and also learn about your course. (Also, you will have on record that students were aware of due dates and policies.) Here are a few example questions: 
• I accept late work.  True/False
• Weekly assignments are due each week on [INSERT DATE and TIME]
• The best way to contact me is?
• My office number is?
• Quizzes are what percentage of your final grade?
• Assignment {INSERT ASSIGNMENT NAME} is due on what date?
• Pre-assess students.  Use publisher provided test questions to assess your students prior-knowledge of content.  

More ice-breaker or introductory activities for online courses can be found here. 

Do you have other examples of how you acclimate students to your online course?  Please post them in the comments.