Unit 5: Instructor Initiated Contact Strategies (Middle)

Contact Strategies (Middle)

There are several ways that you as the instructor can initiate and maintain contact with students during the middle of your online/hybrid course. Here is a list of some common strategies used by SMCCD faculty. However, this list is not exhaustive. We encourage you to get creative in engaging your students and staying in touch with them during the middle of your course.

• Feedback
• Participating in Discussions
• Personalized and Group
• Frequent Feedback
• Rubrics
• Submission Comments
• Discussion Summaries
• Themes
• Trends
• Summary Page in modules
• How to customize and make it relevant to this group
• Status Updates video
• Used on overview pages
• Also after major projects or assessments used videos as check-ins around major assessments, units, sections
• Announcements (Daily)
• Current events
• Reminders
• Tricks and Tricks
• Temperature Check -How are you doing?
• Surveys
• Anonymous or Not Anonymous
• Course Design feedback
• Office Hours
• Synchronous using Chat or Zoom

Chat

Many SMCCD Instructors are using Chat in Canvas to support both synchronous and asynchrounous contact with students. One of the most common ways that faculty are using Chat are to support online office hours, and course content review. Students and instructors can log on to chat at the same time and engage in conversation that supports student learning. To learn more about the features of Chat, check out the following video.

Chat Overview Video (3 minutes)

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Discussions

You are already familiar with participating in discussions as a student since discussions are an important part of this course. SMCCD faculy use discussions to encourage students to communicate with each other and share ideas, and to assess understanding and application of course content.

Discussions Overview (8 minutes)

516a - Discussions Overview Links to an external site. from Canvas LMS Links to an external site. on Vimeo Links to an external site..

Student Context Cards

What are Student Context Cards?

This feature allows instructors to view more details about the selected student in the People, Grades, and individual discussion topic pages. This information will display in a left-side pop-out window on each of these pages and is designed to improve instructor workflows. Please note that users in the student role cannot view context cards in a course and context cards are not supported for other user roles (e.g. observer, TA, or other instructor).

What the Student Context Card Displays

Context cards are meant to be a simplified overview of a student’s progress. The context is generated from grades in the Gradebook and standard page view and participation activity in course analytics. This feature will be helpful to quickly view a student's information so you can quickly determine how well the student is performing in the course. The following information will display on the course card.

• Profile picture  - If the student has added a profile picture.  Otherwise the default gray head profile picture will display.  
• Course name and section - Information about the course name, number and section. 
• Last login - Displays the last time the student logged into the course. 
• Current Grade -  According to set grading scheme configured in the course settings and assignment page. 
• Number of missing assignments - View the total of missing assignments based on student analytics data, which generates data for both online and no-submission assignments in Canvas; for submissions not submitted online, assignment calculations may not be entirely accurate as they are attempted based on the assignment’s grade and when the assignment was graded
• Number of late assignments  - This will be based on set due date for the assignment. 
• Number of last graded items in the course - view a maximum of 10 recently graded assignments with the assignment’s grade (shows according to grading scheme, but grades default to points if the grading scheme does not fit)
• Participation activity compared to class - View the standard deviation of the student’s participation in the course compared to other students (none, low, moderate, or high)
• Page views compared to class - View the standard deviation of the student’s page views in the course compared to other students (none, low, moderate, or high)

There will be quick links to the following items. 

• Student name - Click to view the student’s user profile page
• Message Student (email icon) - Creates a new message ready for you to add a subject line and body. 
• Grades - Displays the individual student grades page. 
• Analytics - Displays the individual student analytics page. 

Student Context Card Video Overview (43 sec)

Status Videos & Temperature Checks

When students are engaged in an online/hybrid courses, the semester goes by quickly and instructors don't often get to informally check in with their students to determine how students are doing. Creating status videos or temperature checks for students allows instructors to "nudge" students to keep returning to the course and the work at hand. Here is an example of how a colleague for a community college on Los Angeles uses the concept of temperature checks:

Learning Nudges Compilation (2 minutes)