With AKO | LEARN sites being one of the most important ways that your students access information about your course – try to break down a daunting overall semester timetable by providing a weekly ‘mini-timetable’ with updates and expectations for each week. This can help by acting as a checklist for students – making time management (especially when undertaking several courses at once) a skill that can be developed and encouraged in an authentic way.
Weekly timetables like these can also be delivered as a quick video – allowing the students to see you and your engagement with keeping them up to date with important aspects of the course, and breaking away from the usual format of a text notice. It is also a way to inject some of the reality of who you are as a person – you can make it relevant with your perspectives on what is going on with the course, your research or what is going on in the wider world to have a real-time effect on engagement levels.
Please can you give a couple of examples?
Kia ora Carolyn,
Thanks for your post! A quick example below (from my previous life as an Anatomy Lecturer):
— — — — —
Kia ora koutou,
I hope you all had a nice weekend – it is lovely to see the leaves turning brown out here on campus, but the frosty mornings are taking some getting used to!
This week we have a lot of exciting material to work through about the musculoskeletal system. In terms of lectures, we have three that are focused on the skeletal system:
[ ] Bone Development (Tuesday 04 May)
[ ] Bone Classification (Wednesday 05 May)
[ ] Fractures and Repair (Friday 07 May)
In addition, we have the online laboratory which will focus on the concepts from last week regarding cell types of the body and the four basic tissues. Please make sure to revise last weeks lecture material, and post on the Student Forum if you have any questions or confusion about the concepts covered. We also have the Online Lab drop-ins scheduled as usual:
[ ] Online Lab drop-in (9-11am, Thursday 06 May) via Zoom – link here
Finally, we have the next ‘mini-quiz’ based on last weeks lecture and lab content. You have 3 attempts at this, and your best score will contribute as a percentage to your final grade:
[ ] ‘mini-quiz’ 2 (make sure you complete this by 11.59pm on Sunday 09 May)
As always, keep in touch via email or the student forum, look after yourselves and stay hydrated!
Ngā mihi nui,
The XYZ123 Teaching Team
— — — — —
You could also see how this type of post could easily be turned into a quick video, the content of which would only take 1-2mins to work thorugh. In the video, you could also perhaps quickly cover a key concept or sticking point from the previous weeks content (a nice way to further increase engagement – and a teaching tip that will follow in a future post).
Hope this helps!