The First Week Assignment
The first week assignment (or assignments) have a number of roles; the most important is ensuring all your students are in Canvas and are able to participate in the class. The assignment can be community-building, a quick quiz or pre-assessment of student knowledge in the course, or other activity.
- Pro tip: use this chance to bump your cultural responsiveness efforts by learning more about the students in your class!
For face-to-face classes and hybrid classes, it gets students to look into the online materials and understand how you're using them in relation to the classroom experience.
For online classes, students must complete a substantive activity that is turned into you within the first three days of the class start date. There are two reasons for this:
- Financial aid reporting requires students to participate in the class in a substantive way in order to count as having "attended" the class.
- Student add/drop, and the ability to add wait-listed students, are based on whether someone has "attended".
The substantive activity serves as the way of taking attendance in an online class.
When should it be due?
It's best to aim for third day of the quarter. While we want to know as soon as possible, it may take students a few days to sort out their online access. (And like us, they're overwhelmed with the practicalities of starting a new quarter). For online students, they're in the class for schedule flexibility. We need to allow a few days for them to get the time to work on the assignments. The first day that students can be withdrawn by the instructor is the fourth day of the quarter, so a third-day deadline works well.
What does "substantive" mean?
For online classes, the assignment needs to be "academically substantive." Broadly, that means it is relevant to the content of the course. Here are a some characteristics that can help guide you in creating an activity.
- The activity can be an assignment or quiz, as long as some gradeable activity is submitted by the student, to you.
- The activity should be focused on the course content. In other words, the student should be responding to something or demonstrating knowledge of something on the course outline.
- It can't be administrative ("I got into my email!") or even geared primarily to community building (e.g. "post your bio to the class discussion").
Examples
It's difficult to identify examples that work across disciplines, but the following might help. Students could:
- Take a quiz testing prior knowledge of the subject matter.
- Submit a response paper or discussion post about a short video or document related to the course content.
- Complete a (very brief) instructional module and submit an assignment from that module.