Opportunities for Instructor-Student Interaction
Announcements
Posting announcements in Canvas can increase instructor presence, transparency, and connection in your course.
Presence: When you post an announcement, your students see that you're present and engaged in their learning and progress. Consider using this space to include short, informal videos in which students can hear your voice and see your face.
Transparency: An announcement is a great place to clearly outline the week's tasks for each modality, enabling students to make informed decisions about how they plan to participate each week.
Connection: Particularly in a Flex class, announcements provide a place for an instructor to highlight asynchronous contributions and point out connections and big ideas from the previous week. In this way, announcements can keep students across all modalities informed, connected, and on the same page.
Examples of different types of announcements
Weekly overview announcement: A weekly overview announcement is posted at the beginning of the week with the purpose of providing students with an overview of what will be covered during the week ahead as well as how it ties into students' prior knowledge and previous course content. This is also an appropriate place to provide a list or schedule of tasks that the students will complete during the week, which can be organized in a table or bulleted list to clearly convey the tasks for each modality. Finally, the weekly overview announcement can also alert students to challenging concepts and hints for completing complex assignments.
Midweek announcement: A midweek announcement may or may not be necessary, depending on how you structure and organize your course, though it could be used as an opportunity to summarize and acknowledge asynchronous contributions to class activities, clarify challenging content, share current events related to the course content, or simply to touch base with students during the week to strengthen the sense of community across three modalities.
Weekly wrap-up announcement: A weekly wrap-up announcement is a great way to add closure to a week by providing a summary of what was covered, preview what's coming up, and highlighting successful or interesting student contributions and interactions across modalities that occurred during the week.
Feedback
Providing your students with timely and constructive feedback is critical for their learning and growth in your course. Providing feedback in a Flex modality is largely the same as providing feedback in a fully in-person or fully online course; however, in a flex modality, you'll also need to consider the equivalence of feedback across the different modalities.
For some types of assignments, you'll be able to give every student feedback in the same format. For example, if all students submit a written assignment or visual artifact, you can respond with written or audio feedback for each student; however, other types of assessments might look different depending upon whether a student completes it synchronously or asynchronously, such as a class discussion. For example, your feedback to a student who participates in the class discussion in person is likely to be verbal, whereas your feedback to a student who participates in the same discussion asynchronously might be in writing, though you could also respond with a recorded audio response. Whichever modality you use to provide feedback to your students, it's important to keep the quality of the feedback consistent for each student.
Grading
When planning assignments and activities in a Flex course, there are some extra considerations to be made when setting up your grading system.
Consistency across modalities should be the goal for grading whenever possible. It's easier to build and maintain a gradebook when all students are being graded on the same activities regardless of modality. Consider weekly capstone assignments that are hosted in Canvas and assigned to all students.
You can also allow for multiple submission options when building Assignments in Canvas. For example, a presentation assignment could be set up to allow file submissions or in-person performance, and still use the same grading rubric and point value in the gradebook.
Be wary of accidentally scrutinizing one modality more than another. For example, in-class discussions tend to be more informal and ungraded. Online discussion board activities tend to be more structured and, in some cases, are graded based on requirements like writing mechanics, citations, and participation metrics. Consider utilizing alternative grading practices like complete/incomplete when building equivalent assignments between modalities.
One-on-One Meetings and Office Hours
Meeting with students one-on-one, whether in person or over Zoom, is a great way to get to know them as individuals and for them to get to know you as an approachable, real person. Allowing students to schedule one-on-one meetings with you will provide your asynchronous online students with an equivalent experience to your synchronous students who are able to casually speak with you in person before or after class. For the students who are unable to meet with you synchronously, consider exchanging audio or video messages with them. Both Canvas and Flip, for example, provide quick and easy video and audio recording options. Hearing someone's voice and/or seeing them even for just a short time can go a long way toward building a connection.
Click Next to explore some example Flex teaching frameworks.