{"id":22207,"date":"2019-02-13T08:44:29","date_gmt":"2019-02-13T13:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/edc\/?p=22207"},"modified":"2022-01-13T13:52:05","modified_gmt":"2022-01-13T18:52:05","slug":"top-10-tips-for-becoming-an-organized-professor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/tls\/2019\/top-10-tips-for-becoming-an-organized-professor\/","title":{"rendered":"Top 10 tips for becoming an organized professor"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rachelle<\/a>By Matthew Curtis, Fourth-Year Journalism, Carleton University<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Give everything a home<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. \u201cWhat I do is I only put my dates in my course outline,\u201d says Thibodeau. \u201cI don’t put them anywhere else that I would have to remember, to update a million little things.\u201d She explains this gives both her and her students a single place for important dates, which seems to reduce the chance for errors.<\/p>\n

Schedule, schedule, schedule<\/strong><\/p>\n

cuLearn makes this one easy \u2013 Thibodeau suggests using its built-in Scheduler tool to keep track of student appointments and office hours.<\/p>\n

Use \u2018Ask the Instructor\u2019 to quell questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is another cuLearn tool which Thibodeau says is great because \u201cit 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roll up your inbox with unroll.me<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t a good solution for people who are more cautious about security because the app has access to your email.<\/p>\n

Colour code. Everything.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019re looking for.<\/p>\n

Early bird gets the office hours<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOne 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,\u201d says Thibodeau. As hard to believe as it is, \u201capparently her students really liked them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tidy up your cuLearn page<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Make good use of the discussion board<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thibodeau gets her students to post questions that don\u2019t contain personal information on discussion boards. Whether the question is about class, references, or their own assignment \u201canybody in the class can learn from that, so I make a post instead of dealing with a million emails on the same topic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Checklists? Check.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. \u201cKeeping it in a checklist format makes sure you don\u2019t forget any little details.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019ll have the answers ready for all those same questions when they inevitably come back up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s helped us compile this top 10 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nTop 10 tips for becoming an organized professor - 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