By Matthew Curtis, Fourth-Year Journalism, Carleton University
From course outlines to lecture slides and all sorts of assessments in between, instructors have a lot to keep track of. Rachelle Thibodeau (Centre for Initiatives in Education) recently facilitated a Welcome to My Classroom session on The Organized Professor and she’s helped us compile this top 10 list of practical tips and tools that will get your ducks not only in a row, but colour coordinated as well.
Give everything a home
When it comes to listing key course details, Thibodeau stresses the importance of making sure the information lives in one place and one place only. “What I do is I only put my dates in my course outline,” says Thibodeau. “I don’t put them anywhere else that I would have to remember, to update a million little things.” She explains this gives both her and her students a single place for important dates, which seems to reduce the chance for errors.
Schedule, schedule, schedule
cuLearn makes this one easy – Thibodeau suggests using its built-in Scheduler tool to keep track of student appointments and office hours.
Use ‘Ask the Instructor’ to quell questions
This is another cuLearn tool which Thibodeau says is great because “it allows students to ask questions anonymously, so they might not be as shy to ask as they would be in class or on the forum.”
Roll up your inbox with unroll.me
Thibodeau says she uses a service called unroll.me, which combines all your email subscriptions into one daily email. It declutters your inbox, making it easier to find important emails at a glance. Though, Thibodeau says it probably isn’t a good solution for people who are more cautious about security because the app has access to your email.
Colour code. Everything.
Not just for your wardrobe, colour coordinating your files and folders helps you instantly recognize which folder belongs to which course, making it much easier to find what you’re looking for.
Early bird gets the office hours
“One of the instructors [in the Welcome to My Classroom session] said, surprisingly, that 7:30 a.m. office hours turned out to be very popular,” says Thibodeau. As hard to believe as it is, “apparently her students really liked them.”
Tidy up your cuLearn page
Thibodeau says embedding links from Dropbox is a handy way of avoiding cluttering your cuLearn course page with uploaded documents. By embedding one permanent Dropbox link on the cuLearn page, students can click and open the document online. Additionally, once you edit and re-upload the document to Dropbox, it overwrites the old file, keeping the link current.
Make good use of the discussion board
Thibodeau gets her students to post questions that don’t contain personal information on discussion boards. Whether the question is about class, references, or their own assignment “anybody in the class can learn from that, so I make a post instead of dealing with a million emails on the same topic.”
Checklists? Check.
When reviewing your course at the end of the year, Thibodeau suggests you have a set of steps you need to take to complete your review. “Keeping it in a checklist format makes sure you don’t forget any little details.”
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V
Once your course is finished, Thibodeau suggests heading to your forum on cuLearn and copying and pasting all the useful questions and answers into a document you can distribute to your next class. You’ll have the answers ready for all those same questions when they inevitably come back up.