Establish Clear Expectations 

Overview

Get your students off and running in your course by providing a “Start Here” page or “Welcome” announcement that includes key information for your course, including expectations for assignment completion, due dates, grading, engagement, workload, and any other key factors for your particular course. 

Assignment Completion

Explain any grading policies that students should know upfront, including whether or not you will drop the low scores  on any groups of assignments, whether you accept late work (and any penalties associated with that ), and whether students can resubmit assignments that they didn’t perform well on. If you have weekly quizzes, will students be allowed multiple attempts , and if so, which score will be kept? Will students need to complete assignments or score above a certain threshold before moving on  in the course? Try to communicate this information as clearly as possible as soon as possible to keep students informed and save yourself from a barrage of questions later on.

Due Dates

Make sure that all of your assignments have due dates listed when the course starts and be consistent on the dates/times that items are due. Most online courses run on a Monday-Sunday schedule with all work for the week due on Sunday at midnight. If you are using the CIDI “Visual” template, all your due dates will be set for Sundays at midnight. You can vary from this schedule, but make sure you communicate clearly to students when things are due.

Grading

Communicate to students when they can expect to receive grades for the different types of assignments that you are using in your course. For lower-stakes assignments, try to get student grades returned within a few days of the due date. For larger, higher-stakes assignments, try to complete your grading within a week of the due date. Make sure you have time to complete all grading and provide plenty of feedback on high-stakes assignments before the next big assignment is due. Look closely at your course schedule and make sure you’ve built enough time between high-stakes assignments to give yourself time to complete your grading.

Engagement

Make your expectations clear for how often students should be logging into the Canvas course, when/how often they should be participating in discussion boards, and any other engagement activities (like peer reviews ) that they will be responsible for. You may also want to provide a “Netiquette” statement  to set up expectations for how to communicate and interact online.

Workload

Provide a course-level and module-level expectation for workload in the class. At the course level, you can ask students to log in a minimum number of times per week and let them know they should expect to spend a certain number of hours per week engaging in the course material. At the module level, provide estimates of how long the readings, lectures, and supplemental material should take to get through and provide an estimate of how long they should expect to spend on the assignments/activities for the week.

Communication Overview

Canvas has multiple options for communicating with your students, and you should be familiar with all of them. You will want to know how to use the Canvas inbox, the “Announcements” tool, the Speedgrader, and the “Message Students who…” feature in the gradebook.

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