Start of semester communication

READING TIME: 7 minutes

First of all, apologies for the slightly (well, it’s more than slightly) delayed post this week. A perfect storm of a work trip, start of semester and coming down with a cold meant that I ended up a little behind where I would have liked to have been.

With Autumn semester starting, the students are back and classes are full. The weather is finally cooling down and it’s a wonderful time of year. It’s also a really important time of the year as getting off to a good start with your classes can make a huge difference. A famous study from the early 1993’s found that ratings based on only 30 seconds of nonverbal behaviour is strongly predictive of end of semester ratings (although concerns have been raised over the replicability of this study). Regardless, it’s nice to get off to a good start.

Which brings me to the focus of my post today – setting up a comms plan for the start of semester. Communication is increasingly critical for graduates (it is one of the five UTS Business School Graduate Atributes, and I daresay it is one of yours), but it’s also important for us as academics. It’s also especially relevant if you’re like me, and have multiple post-graduate seminars and may only meet 10% – 15% of the students in person.

Objective

When setting this up I try to keep in mind what I’m trying to achieve. The context here is important. My class is a postgraduate introductory accounting subject with a diverse student cohort and with the majority of students not taking an accounting degree. Most are new to UTS, and nearly all are new to accounting.

The purpose of the pre-class communication is to help them a) understand what is expected throughout the semester; b) get them to prepare for the first week of class so we’re not starting cold; c) have a better sense of who I am, even those who won’t ever meet me; and finally d) provide a bit of excitement and energy leading in. Remember, as surprising as it may seem, not everyone has a positive view of accounting.

How
Every subject within the Business School at UTS (or at least within Accounting) has a welcome page on the Learning Management System which includes a welcome video, subject outline and FAQ sheet.
For the welcome video, there’s lots of different ways to go about this, from short 90 second clips to longer 10 minute videos. In terms of production values, it can be done as an actual video talking to the camera, mixed with animations, using a green screen, or simply a screencast working off PowerPoint. Personally, I just work off PowerPoint, and have kept the same script (with small tweaks) for the last 3 years or so. It takes about 30 minutes work to get the new one up and running. Here’s my version from this session. A couple of things to note

• We have about 380 enrolled in the subject, and the video is unlisted. The view/enrolment count is greater than 100%. Most subjects have view/enrolments counts < 15%. I’ll talk about that a little later.
• Note the small activation hook at the end of the video. For the FAQ, I previously used a simple word document to make them available, but more recently have moved to using a free template on Canva. Whilst I don’t have any empirical evidence on the effectiveness of the switch, it didn’t take much time, and looks way better.

One of the most important things I do is to have an email campaign in the week prior to classes starting. I’ve noticed many colleagues put their material up, and then don’t reach out to students. Or it’s quite a succinct email once just before classes start.

I’ll have an initial email go out on the Monday prior to class, then again Wednesday with a gentle nudge about the prize draw. This times well as our postgrad orientation event is on the Thursday night. I’ll then send out a follow up email with a more specific reminder about the prize draw. Monday morning of the first day of class will see another email head out. Whilst they aren’t the shortest of emails, the tone is kept fairly casual, but also with the aim of pumping up the energy (as much as can be done) before the first class starts. I also make it really clear that if they have any questions they can contact me, and quite a number do.

If you’re concerned about the workload – all of these announcements are based on templates I wrote in the first semester teaching the subject. Apart from some minor tweaks, very little needs to be done on repeat viewings. Outcome In the first time out with the subject, I changed nothing other than the way we communicated with students, and the feedback from students was the highest it had been in the subject in a decade. You’re creating a personal link with them, which by far is one of the most important things as educators we can do.

Kia kaha

I’d also like to add my thoughts and prayers to those in Christchurch, who have been affected by the senseless act which was perpetrated on Friday.