Teaching Expectations
As evidenced by the successes of College of Business graduate programs and courses, the College has outstanding teachers that also excel in research and service. Due to the complexity of graduate program design and delivery in the College, teaching in graduate programs requires a willingness to collaborate across departments, work with program directors and/or certificate leaders, and adhere to program standards for class delivery. All faculty are expected to be committed to upholding rigorous graduate academic standards, student-centered in their teaching, current in their field, and to reflect their relevancy and expertise through their teaching.
Most non-Athens based graduate students are working professionals with industry experience that are also balancing family and personal obligations while furthering their education. Athens based students, in general, more closely resemble a traditional graduate student profile and the vast majority are full-time students.
Each program relies on a collaborative leadership model that includes the department chair, program director, and graduate administrators. In this way, the uniqueness of each program is recognized while providing standardizations across graduate programs that provide efficiency in teaching and a common student experience. The selection of faculty is led by department chairs with input from program directors.
Teaching Professional Development
Prior to the start of the semester, required onboarding sessions are provided in a partnership between the Office of Instructional Innovation, COB Graduate Administration, and program directors. Sessions are provided for faculty teaching their first course in a COB online or professional programs. During these sessions, faculty will acquire a bigger picture understanding of the program including student demographics, program standards, and key program technologies. Additional sessions covering the finer details of virtual session software, best practices for running virtual sessions, and Blackboard onboarding are also available. Please contact Senior Director, Instructional Operations, Technology, and Learner Success to learn more, or to schedule a session.
Faculty interested in additional professional development should work collaboratively with the program director, department chair, and the Senior Director, Instructional Operations, Technology, and Learner Success to identify other opportunities.
Course Availability
Online course delivery requires collaboration between the Instructor of Record and Instructional Technology staff to ensure a successful launch each term.
Course launches are managed to ensure a consistent and excellent student experience. A successful course launch means that all course content is complete and tested, the course is available, and a welcome announcement has been posted. New course launches are part of the 18 standard OII course development process and occur as the delivery phase is completed. For all existing courses, Instructional Technology staff will work with faculty to ensure a successful course launch. This process involves collaboratively updating a master course, copying the master course to the official Blackboard course, performing course merge operations to add sibling course section enrollments into parent course sections, making post-course copy adjustments, and testing course content. This process kicks off 3-4 weeks before the course start date to have most courses ready for launch early in the week and all courses launched by 5pm Friday prior to the course start date.
All courses āgo liveā on Blackboard by 5pm EST on the Friday prior to the official start date of the course. If courses are not made available by this time, technology staff with make them available. It is recommended that faculty provide course overview information (i.e., syllabus and schedule) to students one week before the official start date.
Course Introduction
Every course will have a course introduction in the form of a recorded video or written document (established during course design and consistent with templates provided by program directors) that includes:
- General overview of the course
- Narrative summary of the course
- Course structure and any distinctive components of the course
- Course learning outcomes
Course Delivery
Every course will have an in-person or virtual class (recorded for students unable to attend) early the first week of the course that includes:
- Instructor introduction
- Review of course introduction
- Review of course syllabus while the syllabus is visible to students (in classroom or virtually)
- Review of all key dates for the course while the schedule is visible to students (in classroom or virtually)
- Expectations for students related to participation (student to student, instructor to student, student to instructor)
- Faculty tips for student success in the course
- How to appropriately contact the faculty member and expected response time
- Student Q&A
Timely Feedback
Assignments should be graded and returned to students within 5 days of the assignment due date.
Course Evaluations
Program Directors will remind students to complete course evaluations.
- Students will receive an email on the final Wednesday of the course with a link to the evaluation.
- Students will receive a reminder 1 week later.
- Evaluations will be open for 14 days.