Alternating Day Attendance
With new social distancing guidelines, many classes will need to move to alternating day attendance where only some of the class attends on any given day. The college will aid in this process by setting up groups for undergraduates in the Canvas course. Faculty can see which students are in which groups and easily send Canvas email messages to one set of students or the other separately. Graduate programs can set up their own processes for alternate day attendance, but they are welcome to use this process.
MW and TR classes
As a college, we are setting up and recommending that for undergraduate classes, students with last names that start with A-K attend alternating day classes on the first meeting day of the week and those students with last names that start with L-Z attend alternating day classes on the second day of the meeting week. There are a few classes where a slightly different cutoff point need to be used. In these cases we'll pick a nearby cutoff point that works. The groups in MW classes will be in a group set called Group Day and will be called Monday Group and Wednesday Group. A similar naming convention will be used for TR classes.
MWF classes
We have just a few MWF classes. For some MWF classes, enrollment levels high enough where students can only meet one day per week. To make it roughly consistent with the two day a week classes, the first third of the alphabet attends M, the last third of the alphabet attends W and the middle third attends on F. For other MWF classes enrollment levels afford meeting half the time in class--a little trickier with a three day a week class. In this case the A-K meets in-person every Monday and every other Friday. L-Z meets in person on Wednesday and every other Friday.
Why have this sort of setup for undergraduate classes?
For faculty, this sort of consistent setup means that several of the steps can be done for you. Groups will be set up in Canvas that correspond to the attendance days. See below for a description of how to send a Canvas email to just the Monday Group that could be used to send an email letting students know the day that they attend Monday.
For students, this sort of setup would minimize the number of back-to-back classes that would change modality. As there is much less space in our building, it will be difficult for students to have one class that they attend in-person immediately followed by another class that they attend online. For example, imagine a student had a TR 11:00-12:15 class and a TR 12:30-1:45 class that were both alternating day attendance B&E classes. Students at the beginning of the alphabet would attend both classes in-person on T and attend both classes online on R. Students at the end of the alphabet would attend both classes online on T and attend both classes in-person on R.
How do I send an email to one of these groups or another to notify them of the day they are expected to attend in-person?
Once these groups are set up in your Canvas course, you can quickly send a Canvas email to students. It would be best to send this email before classes start and the sooner the better. In this email we recommend that you welcome students to the class, tell them which course you are talking about, let them know exactly which days they should attend in-person and which days (if any) that they attend online, and any other information you would like. It would Note that to complete this process, you have to have published your Canvas course. This looks like a long list, but it won't take very long to do. The steps to send an email in Canvas to a group are:
1) Log into Canvas.
2) Click on the Inbox button (the third button from the bottom on the blue bar on the left of the screen).
3) The Canvas email page should come up. Near the top middle of the window there should be a small Compose a new message icon that looks like a pencil in a square. Click on this icon to open a blank email message.
4) At the top of the email message click on Select course to bring up a menu.
5) In the menu that comes up select Favorite courses and a sub-menu should come up.
6) Select your course in the sub-menu.
7) The next line of the mail is the To box. To the right of the two box is an icon that looks like a person in a rectangle. Click this icon.
8) A menu comes up at or near the bottom of this menu, click on Student Groups.
9) A sub-menu comes up. For example, in a MW class there should be a Monday Group and a Wednesday Group as options. Click on Monday Group. If there are no groups visible, it could be that you haven't published your Canvas course yet.
10) The sub-menu should change and the first item should be All in Monday Group followed by all the individual student names. Click on All in Monday Group. This will address the message to every Student in the Monday Group.
11) Fill in the Subject line for the email.
12) You might want to check the box that says Send an individual message to each recipient. This means that on the student end, it appears as though the message is from you just to the student.
13) Fill in the body of the email with the message. In this email we recommend that you welcome students to the class, tell them which course you are talking about, let them know exactly which days they should attend in-person and which days (if any) that they attend online, and any other information you would like. Before you send the email you might want to copy the body as most of that can be reused with minor editing to send to the Wednesday class.
14) Click on the blue Send button to send the email.
15) Go back to Step 2 and repeat for the other group (e.g., Wednesday Group).
Is that all?
Not quite. While we need to let students know as soon as possible about the attendance day, other students will have until the drop/add deadline at the end of the first week of classes to enroll in your class. Canvas groups will help here as well. Below are directions where you can view and edit the lists, including identifying newly enrolled students and adding newly enrolled students to a group.
1) Log into your Canvas course.
2) Click on the People text in the navigation area on the left.
3) Click on the Group Day tab near the top.
4) You should see your groups here. If you click on the little arrow to the left of each group it toggles between showing the students in the group and hiding the students in the group.
5) If new students have enrolled, they should show up as unassigned students. To the left of the groups it should tell you the number of unassigned students and the individual names of the unassigned students. Check their last names to see if assigning them according to A-K for the first day and L-Z for the second day will work (i.e., there appears to be enough capacity to do so).
6) For each of the unassigned students, send an email welcoming them to class and telling them their attendance days. You might consider doing this in a different window so you can come back to the Group Day window easily.
7) After you've send the email, go back to the Group day window and drop and drag the student name to the appropriate group. The name should disappear from the unassigned column and the number of students in the group should increase by one.
8) Repeat steps 6 and 7 until there are no more unassigned students.