As faculty continue course design and planning, we offer some resources to support your amazing work. To provide insights about 7-week modules and other strategies for success, we share this Course Planning Quick Start Guide developed this spring by our colleagues at Wellesley College Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center. We also supplement their suggestions with resources that have been developed or shared by various Bates offices and staff in recent months and a few resources from colleagues beyond Bates.

Strategies for Success in 7-week Courses

• The students.  Engage students quickly with a detailed syllabus and pre-course readiness activities.
• The instructor.  Stay connected with students, teach with care, and remind them of Bates support resources for accessible education, academic support, peer educators, and more.
• The materials, resources, and methods.  Build modular structures that offer opportunities for active learning and deep dives into key learning objective(s) with varied activities, even among traditional practices such as writing, reading, quantitative thinking, etc.
• The learning community.  Emphasize inclusive pedagogy, educational justice, and collaborative learning.
• The assessment activities.  Utilize more formative assessments and frequent feedback from instructor and peers to break down larger assignments and increase communication.

Strategies for Success in Hybrid and Remote Courses

• The students. Explore student-directed learning experiences.
• The instructor. Coordinate and facilitate learning opportunities beyond the class meeting times, such as discussion forums on Lyceum.
• The materials, resources, and methods. Utilize various platforms and methods of exchanging ideas and learning materials.
• The learning community. Foster asynchronous and virtual connections.
• The assessment activities. Support students with transparency through use of rubrics and various types of assessments to enhance academic integrity.

… and In-person Courses

There is a significant pool of research and resources about best practices in remote and hybrid teaching modes as mentioned in the Wellesley guide, explored in international literature and offered by multiple Bates offices on college webpages. However, teaching in-person while implementing social distancing and other required practices of this pandemic is a new context for everyone, so we have added some external resources that could support these efforts.

• Communicating with a mask requires re-thinking how we teach, show expression, and engage in social emotional interaction.
• Active learning is still possible to adapt to various modes (including asynchronous, synchronous, hybrid and physically distanced in-person), especially with efforts to implement “resilient pedagogy.”

Next Steps

If you have any questions, want to share new ideas, or are interested in feedback, we are always eager to support the faculty and academic staff at Bates. Please reach out to us as individuals, groups, or departments/programs.

Krista Aronson, Associate Dean of the Faculty karsonson@bates.edu
Áslaug Ásgeirsdóttir, Associate Dean of the Faculty aasgeirs@bates.edu
Noelle Chaddock, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion nchaddoc@bates.edu
Shauna’h Fuegen, Senior Academic Technology Consultant sfuegen@bates.edu
Daniel Sanford, Director of Writing at Bates and of ARC dsanford@bates.edu
Courtney Seymour, Associate College Librarian for Research Services cseymour@bates.edu
Kika Stump, Learning Assessment Specialist estump@bates.edu