It is helpful to contact your full class via email a few days prior to your course start date to let them know when and how to access the course site.

You can use this email template (or adapt it to your needs):

It also helps to survey your students to find out where in the world they are (useful for scheduling classes in real-time), what their technology capabilities are and what access they may have to resources important to your class. Surveys can be created in Moodle or using Google forms (for anonymous surveys).

You can email students in your class directly from Moodle in two ways:

• Through your Participants list you can select to send a message to all or selected students in your class.
• Through the Quickmail feature at the bottom of your right-hand menu, which allows you to include attachments.

Establish a communication hub in the first sections of your Moodle page to announce special instructions, post new notices, house key documents and general introduction on the course. Inform students at the start of the course where and how you will communicate new updates within Moodle to ensure everyone is on the same page and so you can confirm that all students have access to this general information.

Some instructors go so far as to not answer any content questions about the class via email, directing students to post questions in a central forum instead so that all students can read the answers!

It is best practice to post changes in multiple places, for example

• Describe changes in the first section of your Moodle page.
• Repeat instructions in the description of the week when changes take effect.
• Email the whole group (with course name and number in the subject line).

These multiple modes of communication also work to ensure all students have up-to-date information about the course.

To make an online class feel active and alive, students need to be regularly checking in and engaging in a variety of ways—whether through sharing images, writing, participating in informal chats or forum discussions, or many other options.

Fostering engagement in online classes is very similar to how you would do that in person – students need to see a reason to connect to the curriculum (they need to know why this class is important) and they need opportunities to connect with you, the instructor and their peers.

Participation in an online class can look quite different than it does in a face-to-face class. Online, it might not be enough to just show up for class – students might need to participate actively in a Teams discussion or post regularly to Moodle forums. Or maybe they can participate through activating and monitoring the Teams chat during lectures.

It will be very important for you to state your expectations for participation clearly and directly—ideally in your course outline, but certainly in some centralized space that all students can and do access regularly. It is also useful to incentivize participation directly: assigning course credit to different types of participation can ensure that students know what they need to do in order to succeed in the class.

For example, if you want students to post written critiques in a forum or blog, tell them how many they need to do and how long (roughly) each critique should be. This doesn’t need to be a top-down decision: you can decide as a class what the expectations will be. But once they are decided, they should be communicated clearly to everyone somewhere that students can refer to throughout the course.

For those using Moodle, it is also helpful to point out to students (again in your course outline) that you can see how and how often students are engaging with the materials on the site: if you set a variety of tasks for a week and you can see a student only checked in with Moodle for 20 minutes once during the week, you will be able to see that.

Strategic uses of feedback are key to promoting persistence in online classes and avoid the dreaded “drift” – where a student who was doing well for the first few weeks of a term “drifts away” from the online class, disappearing behind a black Teams square or falling silent in Moodle forums.

While you don’t need to comment on every forum post, or nudge every quiet student on Teams, regularly making your interest in and care for their learning visible to students can go a long way. The ideas below are some suggestions on how to use feedback to keep students engaged and motivated to learn.