Establish a Productive Learning Environment

Once you’ve laid out your course/class design, you will implement your design and related lesson plans in a classroom, learning management system, or other instructional space.

Course planning timeline - To run a productive course, check this list of things you should consider several months before, just prior, during, and after your course. 

For Blackboard and Beyond: The 5 C’s of Content Presentation - The course materials that we make available for our students (and we expect them to navigate) should be intuitive, engaging, informative, understandable, and relatable.  

Building community - If you want learners to be engaged, motivated contributors, they need a sense that they’re critical members in a learning community. 

Strategies to promote retention and persistence - It’s important to know which learners may be at risk. It’s also important to serve as an advocate for your learners as the individual who’s most connected to them on a regular basis. 

Motivating learners to read - We often hear “they don’t do the reading.” Though a valid concern, there are options to help students view readings as direct learning devices. 

Class management - To set the tone, maintain a productive pace, and manage challenges, it’s paramount to consider your classroom management style. 

Group work best practices - Do you want learners to really work together or just combine their work? To foster a group work culture, consider things such as how you introduce group work, team formation, team planning, and holistic assessment. 

Encouraging academic integrity - We have a range of strategies and tools at our disposal to help learners gain familiarity with the concept of academic integrity and to generate authentic work. 

Promoting metacognition - Do you ask your learners to self-reflect? This can be a useful tool in fostering self-directed learning.

Advanced questioning techniques - To help learners consider content in more thoughtful, complex ways, consider your questioning techniques. 

Making sense of student feedback - Student survey feedback can be useful and it can be tough. Here are some tips for processing your SOS/EOC results. 

Adjusting and Achieving with Emerging Teaching Methods - These videos, supplemented with tailored viewing guides, will apply the principles of sustainability to your teaching practice and outline strategies to translate your content for delivery in multiple modalities.