A Session About Placing Directions in Course Shells

At Telecoop last week, Mary Croissant from FRCC provided this session on writing instructions and getting students to read them:

Instructions provide the path.
Let learners take responsibility for reading and following instructions.
Smart Redundancy: She supports placing instructions in more than one place and provides them in multiple ways.

Possible Places in a course shell where you can place directions:

Learning Module
Course Contents
Assignment Drop Boxes
Audio Presentations
Video Presentations
Home Page as Separate Icon
In Announcements (with the email option)
In the Calendar

Can there be overkill w/ redundancy?

Redundancy can mean you provide directions in text and auditory formats.
Robert C from CMC tells students to use the assignments page as a checklist.
Keep a course blog where the directions are posted.

Mary's experiences:
She participated in a peer, writing-across-the-curriculum. She re-wrote directions and said the quality of papers has improved. She checks in student view once a week to double check it is where you think it is. She also sought student advice.

Student advice:
Be funny.
One faculty included a weird phrase in the directions (ex. “green duck”). We are supposed to put the phrase on our papers to indicate we read the directions.
“Say it out loud as well as in print.”

Don’t include dates in the directions if you plan to use material again.

Side Info: She said that the GT course expectation that 25% of a course assessments will call for writing.

Communication is such a complex process. I really appreciated this session. The only thing I'd personally add is an anonymous discussion topic for each week where students can ask questions about the directions...