Ways to Welcome

The Welcome Letter

You can start building relationships with your students and building that trust before your class even starts with a welcome letter. Sure, your students may have seen the course description in the schedule, but that language is often academic and doesn't tell the student anything about you, the human, who will be supporting them in the course. 

Tone

Keep in mind that you are writing a welcome letter. So let's be sure to not fill it with formal jargon, policies, SCARY RED ALL CAPS TEXT, or dense and confusing language. These do not convey a sense of welcoming to the reader. On the first day of your face-to-face class, you most likely help your students feel at ease with a smile and your winning personality. Does your letter do the same? Though letters may be, by nature, formal, the welcome letter is a great opportunity to downplay the formality and emphasize your personality with a little bit of outreach from the start.

Length

And, a welcoming letter that is too long won’t be welcoming, either. Hone the letter to the most important things you want your students to know, such as:

• The date the course starts
• "When to" and "How to" login
• Required Zoom meeting times (if applicable)
• What they will need to do to be considered active participants in the course
• What they can do to be ready
• Where they can go if they need help, like Canvas 24/7 (1-844-612-7421), and you!

Remember that you'll have another place to provide the nitty-gritty details once they are inside Canvas, namely, the orientation module. The goal of your welcome letter is to get students feeling at ease and logging in successfully to get to the orientation module, where they can find out all the subsequent details. 

How To

Here are a couple ways for you to send a welcome letter to your students:

1. It can be sent as a Canvas Announcement. Be sure that your course is published [How to post a Canvas announcement.] Links to an external site.
2. It can be sent as a Canvas Message. Be sure that your course is published. [How to send an Inbox message to all students.] Links to an external site.
3. It can be emailed to students using the email addresses on your PeopleSoft course roster.

Welcome Video

If the goal is to humanize your online course, then take that welcome letter a step further and record a welcome video for your course. You can share the human being behind that written text, and that goes a long way in an online course format. Costa (2020) compares this to greeting students at the door of our classrooms. We'll share some examples below. 

Examples

Here's Cara's ARTF111 Welcome Video

Lou Ann's CHIL 101 Welcome Video

How To

Keep it simple. Use whatever tools/workflow already works for you. This might be the very first time that you've ever recorded a video for students. Don't make it a huge time intensive project editing project that requires tons of new hardware and software. The more polished it is, the less human you will convey yourself to students.

We recommend Canvas Studio. It's free and built into Canvas already. It's also mobile-friendly, allowing you to record on your phone if you don't have a webcam. Canvas Studio is an excellent option for recording a Welcome Video for your students. For the how to on recording a Welcome Video with Canvas Studio, be sure to check out our Recording Videos to Humanize module of this course.

Costa, Karen. (2020). 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: a guide for online teachers and flipped classes. Stylus Publishing.

Welcoming Home Page

Your home page needs to do four things:

1. Show a friendly human face.
2. Welcome students to the course.
3. Tell students where to go next. (an orientation module!)
4. And not be cluttered with much more than that. 

Welcome students with clarity and simplicity on this page. Yes, you can add visuals, but the most essential visual is a picture of you! I have shared the template for this simple and effective home page to the Canvas Commons. So you don't have to start from scratch. 

Or if you want to build a simple effective Canvas home page from scratch, here is a video tutorial with places pause so that you can follow along with the instructions.

If you're interested in importing a home page template from the Canvas Commons.:

• search Canvas Commons for "Katie Palacios" for the Home Page templates she's shared. The "Home Page - Simple" is the one that I'm using in the video above.
• By the way, searching the Canvas Commons for SDCCD you'll find all sorts of other stuff that has been shared by our colleagues too!

A Welcoming Syllabus

Syllabus Language

As we begin writing course policies, it's helpful to consider how our language choice impacts the first impression we give to our students. Mesa Buddy and English Professor Mariam Kushkaki has shared a slide deck on Syllabus Redesign below. In it she includes sample syllabi and reflection questions we can ask as we review the language choice in our syllabus. She shares some great design tips too. (Click on the magnifying glass icon to preview directly inside Canvas.)

Syllabus Redesign (PDF) Download Syllabus Redesign (PDF)

How To

There are different ways to add your syllabus to your Canvas course. The first video shows you three of the most basic options:

Syllabus in Canvas: 3 Options Links to an external site.

1. As a linked file on your home page. Links to an external site.
2. As a file added to a module. Links to an external site.
3. Using the Canvas Syllabus tool.  Links to an external site.(You can now disable the "Course Summary" from displaying!)

Of course you can also do all three of these options. If you'd prefer here's the Canvas Guide for Instructors on How Do I Use the Syllabus as an Instructor? Links to an external site.

Using a Liquid Syllabus

A liquid syllabus is a non-traditional syllabus that incorporates welcoming student-centered language. It's a website that is made available to students outside Canvas before they register for the class to help them learn more about you and more about the course. To explore creating a liquid syllabus, we encourage you to check out our Syllabus Redesign module.