This teaching tip focuses on effectively organizing and using your LEARN site to improve the student experience. We highly recommended walking your students through the LEARN site during class time. Ideally, this walkthrough would occur at the beginning of term (e.g., on the first day of class, and perhaps recorded for students who were unable to attend or enrolled late). If you would like pedagogical support with LEARN, please reach out to your CTE Faculty Liaison.
- Course outline. Upload your course outline as the first module in your course. Strategically placing your course outline as the first module increases the likelihood of students reviewing your expectations and helps to keep the expectations visible throughout the term.
- Note: Instructors are strongly encouraged (and may be required in some faculties) to create their course outline using the Outline tool. The Outline tool helps ensure course outlines are consistent and accessible across the University. The tool includes mandatory text as required by the Secretariat and your faculty or department. For more information, see the Getting Started webpage.
- Course communications.
- Let students know how they can best communicate with you and other students in the course. Should students email you and/or your Teaching Assistants from their UWaterloo account? Should they post their questions on discussion forums? If you use Announcements, show them how to check for new announcements, and be specific about how often you intend on posting announcements.
- LEARN is a “compose only” email system, which means that only the initial email will be sent from LEARN. All subsequent messages will be redirected to your UWaterloo email account. You may want to consider whether to use the LEARN email system depending on your needs and preferences for email tracking. An alternative way to email students outside of LEARN would be to download your classlist from Quest and use your email client to contact your students.
- Tell students if you would like them to put the course name and course number in any email to you so you can filter course email. Let them know the timeframe they can expect for a reply from you and/or your Teaching Assistants (e.g., 24 hours, 48 hours, not over weekends, etc.). If you work outside of typical business hours, let students know to not feel obligated to respond to your email outside of their core working hours.
- If you use discussion forums to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs), outline to students the best practices and expectations for engaging with the forums and let them know how often you will be checking the forums (subscribing to forums can help you, your Teaching Assistants, and students stay informed about new posts). Consider adding a forum for FAQs on how to navigate your LEARN site.
- Course calendar and schedule. Make a detailed schedule of class meeting times, assignment dates, and test dates available to your students at the beginning of term. A detailed schedule can be especially helpful for courses using a blended/flipped approach. Schedule templates are available in LEARN (see LEARN course templates for additional editable templates available to you). You may also wish to use the Calendar in LEARN to have the due dates appear on the course homepage.
- Course materials and activities. Use “Modules” to organize your course materials and activities in the Content area of your course. Once modules are created, then files, html pages, and links to course activities are added as “Topics” to the modules. Enumeration settings for modules and topics can also be used to organize the course materials by course topic, by week, or by activity. You can place the most frequently used items or the most current items at the top of the list of content items in a folder by using the drag and drop feature.
- Gradebook. The LEARN gradebook is found under the Grades tab on the course navigation bar. You can use the gradebook to assign marks and to give students individual feedback through the comments feature. Set expectations around your timeline for releasing grades and giving feedback at the beginning of term. LEARN has a good rubric tool available under the Resources tab on the course navigation bar. Rubrics can be created for the grading of most course activities and can be associated with dropboxes and other graded items in the gradebook so that students can see how you arrived at their mark using the rubric.
Support
If you would like support applying these tips to your own teaching, CTE staff members are here to help. View the CTE Support page to find the most relevant staff member to contact.
This Creative Commons license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon our work non-commercially, as long as they credit us and indicate if changes were made. Use this citation format: Five Things to Make Your Students Appreciate Your LEARN Site. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.