Send a Welcome Email

Tone

First impressions really matter, so before you even start thinking about content, we urge you to think about tone. When we speak, the words are accompanied by a host of cues that help the listener unpack the message. Listeners use these cues to help decipher the message. Writing, however, lacks these cues. It can be hard to hear someone's tone, and we are prone to misreading written words depending on our own mood and writing preferences. Here are some basics when it comes to formatting:

• Steer clear from entire phrase capitalization since that comes across as yelling.
• Use a consistent simple bold format to accentuate text when needed.
• Underlined text should be saved for links.
• Very rarely should you use a color font. Black text on white background provides the best contrast for readability, so it's recommended to stick with that.

Start Date & Canvas Availability Date

Students may be enrolled in multiple classes at multiple institutions. Remind them of the date when the class starts. Every instructor handles the Canvas shell availability a little differently, so it's helpful to let students know when they can expect your Canvas shell to be available to them. If it's going to be available early, then let them know when, so that they can plan start completing the those required first week activities. 

Logging In

This will depend on your course modality. For online courses that don't have a building and room number, students new to online learning will need you to briefly explain how they'll access your course, and they will definitely need explicit instructions for when--and where--they need to log in. Since most welcome letters are emailed, you may even want to include a link to our SDCCD Canvas--though it may seem obvious to you, it could be hard to find for a new student. 

Week One Instructions

In addition to instructions on how and when to log in, students will need to know what they should do in week one (and when they should do it!). Think carefully about this, as students dropping and adding are an important part of your administrative work in an online class. Federal financial aid guidelines state that merely logging into your Canvas course is not enough to be considered active in an online class. Students will need to do something -- submit an assignment, post to a discussion, take a survey -- in order to be considered active in an online class. Take a minute to think about what activities students need to do in your class to be considered active. It might be helpful to include a brief mention of these in the welcome email. This will help students to budget their time accordingly.

Brevity

Sometimes it's more about what not to include! It's so tempting to cram everything in the welcome email. But the longer that email is, the bigger that task (barrier?) becomes before students can login to Canvas and get connected to each other and learning with each other. Remember that there are other spaces such as the homepage and the orientation module that may be a better spot for all of the stuff that you might want students to know about in case they need it without cluttering up your welcome email.