7. Teaching your class

What are the most important things I should keep in mind for teaching?

Be consistent. When preparing your course and throughout the term, you should first think about what you want your students to know, or be able to do, after taking your class. Then think about how you can find out if your teaching strategy was effective, and design your assessment (exams, homework, presentations, etc.) accordingly. After that, think about how you will teach your class so that your students are not just “exposed” to what you want them to learn but have enough opportunities to practice and get feedback.

Communicate. Explain to your students why you are doing what you are doing, what you expect them to do, and why. You may need to repeat this information several times throughout the term. Clarifying your expectations does not mean “teaching to the test,” but it is important that your students understand what they are supposed to gain from the learning activities and assignments, etc. You should also communicate the standards you are aiming for, as well as provide clear statements about what you consider to be collaboration, as opposed to plagiarism. The Academic Integrity Portal and the Academic Integrity Badge have general and discipline-specific resources to support instructors and students in applying the values of academic integrity in course activities.

Focus. When you are teaching, focus on your students and your interaction with them. That is sometimes easier said than done when you are juggling grant deadlines, research issues in your most recent project, or theses that need to be read. If you allow yourself to get distracted by issues like these, your students may think you don’t care about them, and they won’t notice your passion for the subject you are teaching. Most students are quite forgiving when it comes to a new instructor not being perfect—unless they get the feeling that the instructor doesn’t care. Being prepared for class, demonstrating your passion for your subject, and caring about your students’ learning experience will take you a long way toward having a successful first year of teaching. When teaching online, even asynchronous courses benefit from the strong social presence of the instructor.

Know your audience. A large first-year service course requires a different approach than a small graduate seminar course. You should also keep in mind that students may be different than you in their motivation, previous education, and expectations. Additionally, the student population at UPEI has a substantial proportion of international students and may be much more or less diverse than what you may have experienced at other universities.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help. Your colleagues, departmental chairs or faculty deans, the TLC, and other people at the University are here to give you practical, technical, and pedagogical advice and support.

Can I get help with designing my assignments and exams?

In many departments, your new colleagues will generously share their course materials with you if you ask them. Departments will have syllabi from previous semesters for courses already in the calendar. Whenever you would like to use material prepared by someone else (not just exams, but also assignments, etc.), make sure you obtain the author’s permission first. If you have permission to use old exams, keep in mind that at least some of your students will likely have copies too, possibly from a friend who took the course previously or from a website. It will be important to change the specific exam questions used. You could also make one or more of the old exams available to your students for practice, so they will get an idea of what your exam will look like. Moodle provides methods for creating question banks and randomizing questions. Contact the Teaching and Learning Centre for support designing assignments, activities, and assessments.

How creative can I get with my course and exam design?

According to the collective agreement between UPEI and the UPEI Faculty Association, you have academic freedom for your teaching and research endeavours. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind. Whenever you would like to do something new in your class, think carefully about where it stands in the curriculum. If you are teaching a required course that is a prerequisite for other courses, especially a first-year service course, it is important to be consistent with previous (and future) iterations of the course. That means your course content has to be largely the same, so that your students are prepared for courses building upon yours, and similarity with the assessment methods will allow for comparison between different years. If your course is not required and is not one of the core courses of your program, you have more freedom in designing and delivering it.

Resources are available to support development of alternatives to high-stakes final exams on the Teaching Online website.

Do I have to submit the exams? When do they have to be prepared?

Well before the end of the term, ask your department chair or administrative assistant about relevant deadlines and procedures, which differ in each department. Keep in mind that for large courses, you may want to have your exam printed in Central Printing instead of making photocopies. This may require additional time. Similarly, if you need support to prepare an online exam, reach out to Moodle Support as soon as possible.

Are there any restrictions on when I can schedule a midterm or test during the semester?

Please ensure that you do NOT schedule any assessments including tests, quizzes, or assignments during the weeks designated for the fall or winter mid-semester break. The UPEI Academic Calendar clearly states in “Undergraduate Academic Regulation 13a” that “no quizzes, tests, or examinations of any kind are to be held during the two-week period preceding the final day of classes, nor during any reading period, without the permission of the chair and the appropriate dean….”

What do I need to know about invigilation of exams?

Exam procedures, including information about large/multi-section courses, student identification, entrance and exit, etc., are outlined on the Examination Regulations webpage in the UPEI calendar.  While these rules are mandatory only for final exams, you might find some of them useful for midterms. Therefore, looking at the website early in the term could be helpful.

How should I inform students about their grades?

Timely feedback on their grades is very important for your students, so that they know how well they are doing in the course and can learn from their assignments for future assessment. Providing timely feedback prior to the deadline to withdraw from courses is also important for students. You can find info on current deadlines here.

Workshops are offered about setting up and using the gradebook in Moodle. You can review the Using the gradebook section of the Faculty and Staff Moodle Support course for reference or contact Moodle Support to help you set up the gradebook for your course.

If you use the Moodle learning management system for your course (a practice that is strongly recommended), your students can see their marks to date at any time (unless you change the settings to hide some grades). You or your laboratory instructors/teaching assistants can enter the grades from assignments by hand or do a mass upload using a spreadsheet.

Some external learning technologies are set up to enter the marks into Moodle automatically. Ask the E-learning Office team whether this applies to the technology you want to use.

If you are using external technology such as clickers, Perusall, etc., you should upload the students’ marks after the first few weeks at the latest to check that the platform works properly. Ideally, uploading should happen immediately after first use of the external technology so that any technical problems can be addressed quickly.

General information about grading systems and policies, including conversion between GPA and letter grades for undergraduate and graduate courses, can be found in the Academic Calendar. You should become familiar with Undergraduate Academic Regulation #10, which also specifies special grading rules for certain programs (i.e., pass/fail or other models as outlined for education and veterinary medicine). For graduate studies, you should refer to Graduate Program Regulation #3.

How long do I have to keep midterms, exams, and records of grades?

Please refer to Academic Regulation 10g for retention information. Make sure that, besides these formal requirements, you also follow what is considered standard in your department, e.g., returning midterms to the students, but keeping final exams.

Where do I have to submit my course grades?

All grades must be entered online through UPEI’s Moodle interface with myUPEI. Instructions for uploading grades are available on the Faculty and Staff Moodle Support course. Review the section called “Submitting Final Grades to the Registrar’s Office”. Remember to save your grades after uploading. Your students will be able to access their grades once they have been uploaded to myUPEI.

Grade submission deadlines for final exams: Ask your department chair about the due date for submission of final grades. These deadlines can be found at the Registrar’s Office Calendar Dates..

What do I have to know about privacy regarding student grades, etc.?

Academic Regulation 10 has some general information, but it does not address specific questions about the use of learning technology. Since UPEI is now subject to the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPP), it is important to ensure that your treatment of student data is in agreement with this legislation. All faculty have an obligation to protect students’ personal information. This includes not collecting personal information unnecessarily; informing students how their personal information will be used; using the information you have access to only as authorized; sharing information internally on a need-to-know basis only; and not releasing information externally without student consent or other legal authority. The UPEI Access to Information and Protection of Personal Information and Privacy policy can be found here, and more information about FOIPP and privacy at UPEI can be found at myUPEI.

If you are using the Moodle gradebook to store your students’ grades, you are meeting privacy requirements. If you are using technology that stores your students’ grades elsewhere, you should check with the University’s Access to Information and Privacy Office, email: accessprivacy@upei.ca, phone: – 902-894-2840, Kelley Memorial Building 305.

What should I do when a student misses a final exam?

Procedures for a missed examination are covered under Academic Regulation 13c in the Academic Calendar. The Missed Examination application form on myUPEI is made available to students during the appropriate time period when it may be needed. If a student misses a final exam and doesn’t contact you even after you have reached out to them, the student will receive a final grade based on performance and weighting of all graded work (including an exam with a grade of 0) as outlined in the course syllabus.

The linked policies (above) also explain what to do in case of “examination hardship” for the student, defined as three or more end-of-term examinations scheduled within a 24-hour period, or an examination at one location (e.g., the main campus) followed immediately by an exam at another location (e.g., the St. Peter’s Bay campus).

Examination regulations to address online examination issues are presently under review.

What should I do when a student misses an assignment?

There are no strict policies for missed assignments. If a student has a valid doctor’s or counsellor’s note, instructors can decide whether they will grant the student an extension or require them to make up the assignment. Sometimes students would like to make up missed term work, for example, to improve their grade. You are not obligated to create another assignment for them, but if you can spare the time, your student would probably be grateful. If you cannot offer a make-up assignment, you may simply adjust the marking scheme for this student accordingly. You should talk to your colleagues to find out what the departmental culture around this practice is.

In some cases, you may get a request from a UPEI student-athlete to adjust deadlines for an assignment because they are playing in a competition, or from students who are participating in a competition related to their studies (e.g., a business case competition). You are strongly encouraged to support these students by allowing them to make up the missed assignment or mid-term exam. It is also possible for student-athletes to take mid-term exams on the road. In this situation, the exam would be given to the coach in a sealed envelope and administered during travel. The student athletes, in turn, are asked to inform their instructors about any scheduled absences at the beginning of the term. You are encouraged to contact Panther Athletics to discuss any questions you may have and to get help in minimizing additional work for you, such as additional time for invigilation.

Early in your course, you may wish to reach out to students as a whole to encourage them to let you know if they require academic accommodations. If a student who is receiving academic accommodations has missed an assignment, you may wish to contact Accessibility Services for advice.

How will the student evaluations of my classes be done?

Student Opinion and Teaching Surveys (SOTS) are a required student evaluation of the course conducted at the end of classes. Towards the end of the semester, your department’s administrative assistant will provide you with printed student feedback forms. You are responsible for administering the evaluation in one of the last classes of the term. You will be required to leave the room while the students fill in the forms, and you will have to ask one of the students to return the forms to the departmental office. For online courses, the SOTS are done via course Moodle pages. A few weeks before the end of the semester, an automated procedure creates a link to your course Moodle page that will take students to the SOTS for your course. As the instructor, you will not have access to this link. Faculty teaching DVM preclinical courses and clinical rotations at AVC should direct students to the AVC curriculum management system (E*Value) to complete SOTS. A notification inviting students to complete SOTS, including direct links, is also sent to their UPEI email accounts. The results of your SOTS will be provided to you following the end of the exam period and submission of final grades.

For more information about SOTS, you can refer to section E1.3.1 of the collective agreement (Redbook), which is available on the UPEI Faculty Association website.

In addition to the formal end-of-semester SOTS, faculty members are encouraged to check in with their students and get some formative feedback partway through the semester. You can request feedback from students using paper forms in class, a Google form, and the questionnaire activity in Moodle.  Some departments may also do informal peer evaluation, i.e., class visits by colleagues. This practice provides an added dimension to the feedback you receive through student surveys.

What do I need to do if I get sick and cannot teach, or if I cannot get to the campus?

If you are unable to teach your scheduled class, notify your students by email or through Moodle as soon as possible and advise the department chair and administrative assistant so that a notice of class cancellation can be posted on the classroom door if you have a campus-based class.

In winter, the campus is sometimes closed for the day or closes part-way through the day because of poor weather conditions. For weather and road updates, listen to a local radio station or check the UPEI SAFE app, the UPEI website, or Twitter feed. Instructors should communicate the consequences of a missed class to students (e.g., the missed class is rescheduled at a later date, material will be covered during next class, etc.)