Virtual Learning Environments: Top Tips
Get support
Your department should offer support with setting up your VLE. Find out who your support people are and ask them for advice or help with fixing any issues.
Use and adapt your course menu
Find out how to adapt your course navigation bar. You can create new sections (e.g. for particular weeks or topics) from here. This helps to structure the content.
Support good study habits with your VLE design
Complaining about student’s lack of good study habits (like preparing for a lecture or attempting tutorial questions before the tutorial) is very easy – and often justified. But remember that we can help our students to adopt these skills. Present your content material clearly and highlight what students need to do and when.
Using documents as part of your VLE
Most of us upload documents (e.g. pptx or pdf files) with lecture notes/slides and tutorial questions. Students will often download and perhaps annotate these files. This can be great, but also means that ideally these documents (once uploaded) do not change. If they do you ought to label this clearly. Information which is likely to change or update (like assessment info or organisational informational should be communicated directly through the VLE and not through a document.
Expectations
What do you expect from your students? What can they expect from you? Make a clear statement to clarify this. If you make it clear to students what information will be communicated through the VLE - and stick to this- you can save your inbox and time in your office hours.
Ask your colleagues
Talk to experienced colleagues to find out what works for them. But make sure to ask them how they know what works. They may not have water-tight causal evidence but hopefully some anecdotal evidence.
Teaching staff session
Introduce all teaching staff in a dedicated section. Do include pictures if colleagues are happy with this, as well as links to your staff’s research, office hour info and contact details.
Assessment info session
Many students’ queries centre around assessment. You need to provide coherent and clear communication on this. Consider creating an Assessment Info section in your VLE through which you communicate all relevant info. All further queries can then be referred to this.
