Welcoming Your Students in Fall 2020 – Duke Learning Innovation

Before class starts, send a welcome email to your students. Starting your course by emphasizing communication and community will help you and your students have a positive experience. Begin with a welcoming and personal note, telling students you are looking forward to meeting them, even virtually, and consider that your email can set the tone for the course. Here are some things you could include:

Despite all of these ideas, consider brevity! There will be a lot of information flooding everyone’s inbox at the start of the semester. Send one of the shorter emails so it’s more likely to be read.

Consider that your students may not all have good internet connectivity or may be facing other issues. For students in online courses, perhaps send a survey that asks about internet connection, home study/work space, their anxieties for the semester, and other external factors that they think could influence their work in the class, etc.

Here is a Qualtrics template you can use to create such a survey. After you download the file, go to Qualtrics and create a new survey by clicking on “Create Your Own.” You will then get a screen where you can select “from a file” and upload this template to your library to use it.

Let students know that responding is optional, and that their answers are only for you.  You could share your own answers to the same survey questions when you share the link to the survey. Sharing your answers could help form community, showing that we are all in this together.

Also welcome your students on the first day of class, both in your online course and in your course site. Here are some things you can do:

There are many more ways of welcoming your students! Let us know what worked for you.