Effective Communication & Instructional Design

Imaging that you entered a room and the instructor looks you the eye and sternly states:

“Beachtung! Sie müssen Nummer zwei Bleistift und setzen Sie sich hin"

If you did not understand German, you may be baffled. Meanwhile the instructor is frustrated that you are not following instructions and holding up the class. Did the instructor give you directions? Yes, but the instructor did not communicate them to you.

Now, image you are a new freshman student unfamiliar with online learning and you are taking a fully online course with directions referring to “threads” and “dropboxes” while burying needed information deep within nested folders that are difficult to find. The new environment may as well be a different language and this can impede student success.

It is clear that increased communication with students while the class is in session should promote student success.

 

When teaching there are several tools and heuristics to promote success by offering prompt feedback (Chickering & Gamson, 1987), such as:

• Logging on three or more times a week to make a presence,
• Using an Announcement tool to send communications to students (at least once a week) that can be pushed to their phones.
• Taking advantage of the course messaging and email features to keep regular contact and to check up on delinquent students.

However, did you know that there are features of course design that can either aid or inhibit communication?

Sometimes the design of course can systemically affect communications. Simply, adopting certain best practices in course design can aid communication with students and contribute to their success.

This resource will review several aspects of how employing best practices can help reduce communicative mishaps and streamline the process of students understanding their learning objectives and how to meet them with minimal technological or course design issues to impede there success. In particular, it will focus on better instructional design that can be applied before the class even begins. This resource will review:

• Communicating expectations effectively
• Faculty Introductions that develop an effective learning environment
• Explicit feedback policies
• At-a-Glance pages
• Communicating Learning Objectives, and
• Grading Rubrics

With the intent to communicate expectations better and improve student success.

Below is a e-book, that can be downloaded as a PDF, with each section a corresponding video accompanies each section.  Be sure to click on the interactive object below to be able to see it in full screen and have other features, such as text searches and navigation tools.

Helping Students Sign on to Blackboard

Often students, as well as faculty, are new to the online tools of a college and logging onto the learning management system (LMS) can be intimidating.  The latter a student enters the class often contributes to the student not having enough time to complete course assignments or even knowing about the assignments.  Needless to say, it is critical for student success to get the students familiar with the online learning environment quickly so that they can focus on learning.  Sharing the video below as well as the PDF (downloadable below too) either from an email attachment or course hand out during the first day of class procatively addresses this issue and should increase your student success rate.

How do we get started?

You want to use the My SCCC Portal. You can get there, and then to Blackboard, by performing the following:

1. Go to the SCCC website (http://sunysccc.edu)
2. Select (click on) the MySCCC button in the top right corner. (it is the orange one)
3. Sign in using your email username and password to the SCCC Portal. If you do not know these, please contact the SCCC Help Desk at: (518) 381-1487
4. Look to the left column and notice the “Launchpad”
5. Scroll down and select (click on) the “BlackBoard” link

That is it. You are now in Blackboard. You should take a look at the institution page and notice your courses are on the top right corner as well as on the “courses” tab.

Now that you are in Blackboard, you can get started on completing your course work and getting your degree.

Below is a PDF you can download or print out to distribute to your students.