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Considerations for Supporting Learning This Semester
1 to 1s: If you have missed your 1-1 with your students, then be sure to reach out to the student and Lab Faculty ASAP. To locate a student’s Lab Faculty, look at the student’s contact information in Campus Cafe.
Attendance/Engagement: Engagement was due on Monday, August 28! Make sure to consistently complete the Engagement feature in Moodle – it’s extremely helpful and important. This video (9:20 minutes) explains how (and why) to use the Attendance: Engagement tool in Moodle.
We also wanted to elevate the fact that you can go back and edit past entries. For instance, if a student had an unexcused absence in Week 1 but you discovered something in week 2; you can go back and change that (and we encourage you to do so when it makes sense).
Missing Students? If a student has had no or little contact with you at this point and the Lab faculty member doesn’t have any updates or context, reach out to studentservices@collegeunbound.edu with a description of what has been going on.
Feedback & Tone
Our students are adults with complex lives and also, many students have negative experiences with traditional education. This means we need to take care in how we give feedback. Moodle gives us the opportunity to give textual, audio, and video feedback as well as help students see more clearly what they need to do (This 2:44 minute video shows how to give video/audio feedback).
In supporting student learning, we should be using an asset-based approach that recognizes their contributions and guiding them to improve through resubmissions and conversation. I know it can sometimes be hard to remember and we’re often busy trying to do so much to support our students, but when giving feedback – especially, textual feedback – it’s important to think about and anticipate the “worst possible interpretation” of feedback and how that might be experienced. It’s not that we believe students do or want to experience feedback like this, but it’s inevitable that with text, students (heck, all of us) are likely to project some of our own anxieties and angst onto what we read when it comes to feedback we receive. So we just continue to ask that you take care with how you are delivering feedback and listen to what they are saying in response to feedback as well.
Timely Feedback
We just also want to remind folks that it’s important to give timely feedback to students. It can be contextual within the course but generally speaking, students should have feedback (both commentary and grades) within a week of when they submit. Possibly, it should be sooner, especially if there is an activity due the next week that is in any way informed or can be informative to the student by your feedback. For instance, it’s important to give feedback on Week 2’s discussion before the half-way point into Week 3’s discussion (otherwise, students’ don’t have the chance to course correct).
Beyond that, I wanted to reshare some videos with you that might be helpful right now in getting in and giving feedback to students:
We hope this is helpful and as always, as you have questions & concerns to reach out to us!
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