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 can access tutoring and writing assistance called Brainfuse (see below under tutoring and writing). Students also have access to professional advisors and the Office of Professional Program Support (see section above), which exists specifically to support our online students. If you want to meet the advisors, just 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.

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.