An adapted excerpt from Google Course Builder

 

 

Announcements

The official course content you create is, of course, a major part of the formal communication between you and your students. However, it is not the only communication.

Here, we distinguish between formal communication, typically initiated by the course staff, from informal web forum communication, frequently initiated by students. All of these efforts are important in creating a successful feeling of community for your students and your course staff.

The types of formal communication we typically see are:

Type	Typical implementation	Examples
Reminder announcements	Email, backup to announcements tab	Deadlines for assessments. Release of new units.
Informative announcements	Web forum post, backup to Announcements tab	A standard answer to a question that came up repeatedly in any student communication. For example, if the wording of an activity question confused a lot of students, you might decide to post a clarification.
Optional course material	Web forum post, Google+ page or Blog post	Background reading for students who might need a little extra help getting started. Slightly off-topic or more advanced material for students who want to explore aspects of the topic not covered in the main materials or who want more challenging activities to strengthen their knowledge of the main materials.

A variety of technologies are available to you for each of these kinds of communication. Which you choose to use depends on your circumstances. What we describe below are the choices we made for Power Searching.

Reminder announcements

You may choose to send reminder announcements to students at important points along the way. Consider sending the following reminder announcements:

• At course registration
  Let students know their registration has been processed and include a brief description of the course, the high-level schedule for the course, an introduction to the community features available to students, and so on.
• Whenever you release new content
  Link to the new content and mention any upcoming deadlines.
• Partway through, to students who have registered but not started the course
  This is in addition to the regular emails announcing the release of new content. Sometimes students register and then forget to start a course. Partway through the course, send just these people a reminder that they might want to start.
• Before a special event
  For example, if you have online office hours, send a reminder message shortly before it occurs.
• Upon submission of final assessment
  Notification of whether or not the student has passed and when to expect the certificate (if any).

Whateveour MOOC "Power Searching with Google", we noticed a significant spike in student engagement each time we sent out reminder announcements, which we did using email. We chose to use email because students are more likely (though not guaranteed) to see the emails than to see things posted in other ways.

Tip: Use other mechanisms, such as your Google+ page or your forum, for less important announcements and for informative announcements. If you decide to not use email, use one of those mechanisms for all announcements.

Informative announcements

During the course, you may want to let your students know something that is optional or that you otherwise do not think it worth sending to all their email accounts.

Consider creating a top-level Announcements category in your forum. Use that to post daily updates, FAQs, and so on.

For example, you may receive the same question from many students, over a variety of your communication mechanisms. At first, you probably answer these questions one at a time, in whatever place the question was asked. Once you notice the trend, however, you may want to create a standard answer to that question, post it in one place, and remove duplicates to minimize confusion.

Although answering a standard question could be considered a formal announcement, treating it in a more informal manner is appropriate. We suggest using your web forum for this purpose.

If you use a forum post for these announcements, you can mark duplicates of the question the post answers and cut down on the noise in your forum.