Are You a Current or Potential Instructor or Facilitator?

• Activate your course
• Post a welcome announcement that sets a positive, energetic, inclusive tone. Be sure it contains contact information for you, in case students have early questions or issues.
• Monitor the Introductions discussion board (Pro Tip: you can set up notifications), and respond at least briefly to each student’s introduction.

• Ideally, post at least two more announcements – one with deadline reminders, and perhaps one with an “insightful extra” – to demonstrate your presence. You can do these via text or video using the Announcements tool, based on your comfort level.
• Provide timely, constructive feedback and grading for any assigned activities.
• Watch engagement and reach out on day 2 or 3 to students who have not yet engaged. Your instructional designer will employ an Intelligent Agent in the course that will help with this task.
• Facilitate any live sessions or office hours, if applicable.
• Grade all assignments and provide feedback in Brightspace within 3 days of submission. (Pacing may be dependent upon course content and class size.)
• Provide basic technical support to students, including help with logins, accessing materials, and low-level issues. Escalate tech issues as appropriate to the instructional design team.
• Be available via email for student questions. Respond to student emails within 24 hours on weekdays and 48 hours on weekends.
• Contact your instructional designer if you need any support or need to make any content updates.

• Ideally, post 2-3 announcements per week to help students stay on track and engaged. Things we’ve seen work well:
  • Day 1 of the week: Post a welcome-to-the-week video or text announcement, giving students a quick sense of what the week will hold, deadlines they need to be aware of, and ways to request support if they need it.
  • Day 3-4 of the week: Post a deadline reminder and highlight some of the activity outcomes of the previous week. Many instructors find that using a “Key Takeaways/Muddy Moments” sort of discussion board each week can highlight where learners are shining and struggling.
  • Day 6-7 of the week: Post another deadline reminder, and an “insightful extra” – a deeper-dive link, a current article that’s relevant to that week’s content, etc.
  • During the final week, be sure to remind students to fill out the course evaluation.
• Keep an eye on engagement and continue to reach out to students who might be struggling.
• Facilitate any live sessions or office hours, if applicable.
• Grade all assignments and provide feedback in Brightspace within 3 days of submission. (Pacing may be dependent upon course content and class size.)
• Provide basic technical support to students, including help with logins, accessing materials, and low-level issues. Escalate tech issues as appropriate to the instructional design team.
• Be available via email for student questions. Respond to student emails within 24 hours on weekdays and 48 hours on weekends.
• Contact your instructional designer if you need any support or need to make any content updates.

The User Progress tool allows both instructors and students to monitor student progress in the course. You can view each student’s login history, grades, discussion responses, assignment submissions, quiz grades, and more from this area. You can also track how much of the course content students have viewed, and the date and time they viewed it. It gives a nice snapshot into how a student is moving through the course.

Class Progress is available to both instructors and students, providing multiple tools for students to self-monitor progress and instructors to identify students at-risk. This is dependent upon using Completion Tracking.

Brightspace offers a tool called Intelligent Agents that can be used to help monitor student engagement, and can help you automate messaging. These agents can be set up to do things like the following:

• Alert you to students who have not met particular deadlines.
• E-mail students who have or have not completed certain things.
• Act upon triggers you set up using other Brightspace tools like Checklists.
• Send student e-mails using a predetermined cadence, personalized so the e-mails feel like direct reach-outs.

The functionality of intelligent agents is vast, and can help support you in keeping students engaged, so we highly recommend their use. Our instructional design team can guide you in best-practice utilization of this tool.

Brightspace offers a tool called Checklists designed to help students stay on track with activities and assignments in your course. You can set up checklists to support students in multiple ways:

• You can create weekly checklists to help them track all activities assigned each week
• You can create project-oriented checklists to help them stay on track with longer assignments
• You can create multi-stepped checklists to help build a project

Checklists can also be used to trigger communication and reports via Intelligent Agents, which makes them an important student engagement tool. Our instructional design team can guide you in best-practice utilization of this tool.

Accessibility is a core value in any online program. The materials that online students access are their connection to UVM, and reducing friction in accessing them supports all learners. In particular, captioning all instructor-provided video content is essential, and the UVM Knowledge Base gives detailed instructions on making materials accessible to students.