Module 8

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Module 8: Communicate with Your Students

Effective communication with students is an essential aspect of a successful course. Whether preparing to communicate to the whole class in the case of a short-term disruption or specific students who have had personal disruptions in their attendance, bCourses offers different avenues for timely communication. By using all the communication options available, you'll be able to connect with students on different levels and meet their varied needs. 

In this module, we'll take a closer look at how to communicate with students using tools in bCourses. We'll also examine some ways you can get information about how students are interacting with your bCourses site that can then inform your instruction. 

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you'll be able to:

  1. Use Announcements in bCourses to keep students up-to-date with course activities
  2. Use the Inbox in bCourses to communicate with individual and groups of students
  3. Use New Analytics in bCourses to assess how students are performing in the course
  4. View when students have logged into your course using the People page in bCourses
  5. Show students how to get bCourses technical support
  6. Apply best practices in communicating with students.

All of these learning objectives will help you to achieve the overall course objective: Communicate with students via bCourses and Zoom.

How To Do It

Use Announcements in bCourses to keep students up-to-date with course activities

Announcements are the best way to send one-way communication to students via bCourses. You can set whether an announcement is sent to the entire course or a specific section. Using Announcements with regularity provides additional opportunities to communicate with your students so that they can feel more engaged in what might otherwise be an isolating experience. The articles below from the Canvas Guides explain how to create an announcement.

If you'd like additional information about Announcements, review the full list of articles in the Announcements Links to an external site. section of the Canvas Guides.

When you post an announcement, it will always be visible in the Announcement section of the course. You can also set up your Course Home Page to display recent announcements. By enabling this setting, it ensures students won't miss any updates. The following article from the Canvas Guides explains how to enable this setting.

Use the Inbox in bCourses to communicate with individual and groups of students

The Inbox is bCourses' internal email system. The following articles from the Canvas Guides highlight how to use the Inbox and some of its key features.

Use New Analytics in bCourses to assess how students are performing in the course

New Analytics provides an overview of how students are performing in the course and allows you to review a specific student's progress. With this high level analysis, you can better tailor communication and outreach about specific issues in the course, and provide similar tailored feedback to specific students. The following resources below from the Canvas Guides explain how to use New Analytics

View when students have logged into the course using the People page in bCourses

In addition to the detailed information about student access that you get from New Analytics, you can also use the People page to quickly find basic student information such as the last time a student logged into bCourses. The following resources from the Canvas Guides provide an overview of the People page.

Show students how to get bCourses technical support

Though you will be the first person students contact when they have technical issues, remember that you do not need to fix those technical problems. If a student is having a technical issue with bCourses, you can direct to the DLS bCourses support page for students, linked below. There they will find helpful resources and contact information for help. 

Best Practices

Now that you know how to complete the activities covered in this module, read more about how best to use them in your course.