Week Zero: Why you should engage students before classes start.

You arrive at the mall with a long list of things to do. You’ve got 6 or 7 places you need to visit and a lot to get in each one. You may have been to this mall before but you’ve never been to any of the stores that you need to visit today. Each one is a specialty story and you are going to have to put in some time in each one. As you walk in, you realized that you have arrived early and the mall doesn’t open for another hour. Fortunately one of the stores that you need has opened early. You go in and take your time looking around, asking questions, and becoming acquainted with the items in the store and the staff. By the time you are done the mall has opened and you rush out with the rest of the crowd to finish the errands you came to complete that day.

Welcome to Week Zero.

There are a lot of reasons that professors don’t take advantage of week zero. In my opinion the most popular one is that they aren’t thinking things through. I have found that by offering a week zero for my students, that they are much better prepared once the class gets going than when they are accessing the class for the first time on the day classes start. It initiates a relationship between the professor and the student that prepares them to start and lets them know what to expect.

In a traditional class that may be as simple as emailing students the syllabus and a welcome message the weekend before classes start.

In an online class it is fairly simple to set up the majority of your course structure and allow students to get in and look around, read through the links and notes. We often wonder why students don’t read through everything thoroughly. If you have been given six syllabi over two days you might skim some of the material, forget some, and even mix some up.

By offering your students early access to your content you are getting their undivided attention and laying groundwork for success and retention.

Yes, this means you have to have your prep completed a week early. But that also gives you that last week to communicate with students and attend all the meetings that you are required to go to. It also leaves a little more time for wandering the halls and catching up with your fellow faculty who have been gone all summer.

Tags: Blackboard, college, googleplus, higher ed, Online Learning, Teaching, week zero