UW-Platteville School of Business New Online Instructor Information

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

New Online Instructor Information

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WELCOME

Welcome to the School of Business!

We are happy to have you on board to teach with us in our online programs. We have been offering programs online since 1999 and were the first university in Wisconsin to offer a fully online degree. Today we offer an online Associate in Business, a Bachelor of Business Administration with five majors online: Finance, Human Resources Management, Management, Marketing, and Supply Chain Management. We also offer several online graduate programs: Healthcare Administration (a collaboration with other UW System schools), Supply Chain Management, Organizational Change Leadership, Project Management (accredited through PMI), and Management. The School is currently seeking accreditation with ACBSP for its undergraduate and select graduate programs. We have monthly meetings for all faculty, staff, and instructors. You are welcome to join via Zoom, but if unable, your program manager will update you via email on items that impact your work with us as a part-time online instructor.

PEOPLE YOU MAY WORK WITH:

LES HOLLINGSWORTH Director of the School of Business

CARYN STANLEY Assistant Director of the School of Business and Associate Professor of Business

BILL HASKINS Program Manager for Project Management and Supply Change Management

BECCA BARTUSEWICH Program Manager for the BBA, Organizational Change Leadership, Healthcare Administration, Management, and Associate Degrees in Business

NEED TO KNOW

OFFICES INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICES (ITS) ITS hosts the Canvas administration team and they will be your point of contact for password support, general technology support, and Canvas-specific needs.

They can be reached at 608-342-1400 or helpdesk@uwplatt.edu.

CENTER FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING (CETL) CETL hosts instructor training and the Instructional Design team.

SYSTEMS

Canvas This is the Learning Management System or Digital Learning Environment.

Help Guides available.

PASS This is the student information system where you will enter grades and do a change of grade if needed. The registrar’s office will email you about grades and attendance, including ‘how-to’ guides.

Navigate Student success software used for submitting academic alerts and progress reports (see below).

Academic Calendar You will want to be looking at the Distance/Grad section.

Note that we have full-term and 8-week course options.

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COURSE SPECIFIC INFORMATION

ABOUT OUR COURSES COURSE STYLE Our courses are all online asynchronous and hosted in Canvas. Each course derives from a “blueprint”, meaning every section of that course includes the same core content. Instructors can add content but cannot remove content.

Assignments may also be edited but should align with course outcomes. Courses are regularly revised (see below).

COURSE REVISIONS A revision is a collaboration between the faculty subject matter expert and the instructional design team, with guidance from the program manager. A revision is often triggered by a new textbook edition, a textbook change, or to update content.

COURSE SETUP About 60 days before the course starts, you gain access to your course in Canvas.

This is the time you have to prepare your course for student readiness. You are expected to assign due dates to assignments, add dates to the course calendar document, link any digital content (you will be given instructions), add a welcome announcement and weekly announcements, create any additional help videos, etc. It is recommended you add an announcement each week of the course introducing material, offering guidance on difficult topics, or as a wrap-up. This is also a good place to add short videos. If there are edits that you cannot make because you are locked out, email the request to helpdesk@uwplatt.edu. You will need to publish your course so students can see it for preview week (see below in the courses section). It is best not to publish too early since your course may be subdivided into two if there are a lot of students registered (we aim to cap courses at 25-30 for undergrad).

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GRADING All courses should have an established grading scale in the syllabus, and the grade book is pre-set. Some graduatelevel courses do not have “+” or “-”grades, so be sure to note what grading scale has been chosen and presented in the syllabus. If you opt to give an incomplete, this extra time is unpaid work for you and should be based on exceptional circumstances. A mutually agreed on extended time should be recorded on the Course Completion Contract, available on the Registrar’s Forms page. This course completion document is required for undergraduate courses but not required for graduate courses. Students are granted six months to complete by default, but shorter time frames usually mean better success. You will want to extend their access in Canvas beyond the standard end date. On the home page in the right navigation, click on “Extend Student Access.” From there, you can assign a new end date to a specific student; you will also write the reason why.

GROUP PROJECTS If your course has group projects, wait until the end of week one to create groups, as students can change their registration through week one of the term.

LATE POLICY This is not pre-determined. You will need to determine yours and post it in your course (on the calendar or as an announcement).

PREVIEW WEEK The week before the course starts, students gain access to their courses to preview content and plan their terms. Be sure to publish your course on or before the start of Preview Week.

PROCTORING We have Respondus monitor and lockdown browser available. If you opt to add this to an exam, you need to announce it to students so they are aware at start of class, as it does require certain technical requirements (camera, etc.).

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STUDENT SPECIFIC INFORMATION

SUPPORTING OUR STUDENTS OUR STUDENT DEMOGRAPHIC Many of our students are adult learners who have returned to or started college later in life. They seek content to connect to their work and hope that a degree will advance their career or accelerate them to a new one.

Academic writing is often unfamiliar to them, so they may need time to adjust to APA formatting and style. Such students may either want to talk to you about their needs or want to stay invisible. They take classes part-time and have many competing priorities. You will also have traditional-aged students in your classes.

As an instructor, you will likely need to be accommodating to many types of students.

STUDENT RESOURCES Students have tutoring, writing, and general support through the university. They also have access to professional advisors in their academic departments. If you’d like more details or to connect with an advisor, ask your program manager.”

TEXTBOOKS UW-Platteville is part of a textbook rental system. Students pay a low per-credit fee to rent their textbooks for the semester. This also applies to digital textbooks; the same fee applies if it is a physical book or an e-book access code. Textbooks are chosen well before the term starts and in consultation with your Program Manager. A textbook change necessitates a course revision.

PROGRESS REPORTS These are semesterly reports for you to complete about specific populations of students, chosen based on previous grades, probation status, whether or not they are a student-athlete, etc. You will be asked via your UW-Platteville email to use Navigate, a student success software, to respond about these students.

ATTENDANCE CONFIRMATION The Registrar’s Office will ask that you confirm attendance in PASS for all of your students within the first few days of term. This conforms to federal regulations about student attendance and financial aid, academic progress, etc. You can decide what to count as attendance, but it should be something in the first week or so of class that students must submit (a discussion, assignment, etc.). It is good practice to tell them what counts as attendance for this process.

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ACADEMIC ALERTS These are alerts that go to advising about a student. If you have not “seen” them in the course or they seem to be struggling in some way, an alert is a good idea. Review the how-to guide on the Navigate FAQ page to submit an alert.

ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT There is a process for reporting on the Dean of Students webpage.

You can also call them with questions and help in the process. Turnitin within Canvas is a good tool to help track and redirect misconduct. Turnitin can also identify AI-created content. You are encouraged to discuss misconduct with your program manager and Dean of Students before acting. Adult students do not always remember citations and may unintentionally plagiarize, so be sure to provide them with resources and guidance. With AI such as ChatGPT, Turnitin is now able to identify generated text, but it is not perfect. It also flags anything submitted through Grammarly as AI-generated, so aim to always talk to your student first. Your program manager is also a good resource to help direct you or talk through an issue.

TUTORING/WRITING SUPPORT Online undergraduate students have some access to campus tutoring services, but it is not all topics Brainfuse is an add-on for them to access tutoring on any topic in their Canvas course. Please encourage them to use it if you feel it would be helpful. While some academic topics may not be highlevel enough for graduate students, the writing support is very beneficial for APA citations, grammar, sentence structure, etc.

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PROCESS/PAYMENTS/TRAINING

MORE TO KNOW INSTRUCTIONAL AGREEMENTS These MOUs define your pay scale for the term and what standard best practices are for teaching online. Your Program Manager may have additional expectations they will share out. Generally you will receive this agreement to sign via email before courses are available in Canvas (about 60 days before term start). *Your program manager will likely email to confirm your availability and interest in teaching quite a bit before the MOU is sent.

PAYMENTS During spring and fall semesters, the university makes instructional payments in two lump sum installments. In the summer term, it’s four payments instead.

Payment terms are included in the instructional agreement and on the summer payment process form.

SECTION SPLITS Some courses will have multiple sections but only have one section students can register for in PASS. This means if you are assigned to the primary section, you will see more students than you will have in the course. If you have the secondary section, you will see no students in the course until near preview week. Students are split into other sections one week before preview week.

TRAINING FOR ONLINE TEACHING There is required training for online instructors, called the Alternative Modality Professional Development Course. You may receive emails about this from CETL or your program manager. It is required every three years. There is also a resource for online instructors hosted by CETL.