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► Sustainable Teaching with Resource Constraints Guide
How Resource Constraints Impact Teaching
Changes to the size and membership of the instructional team—such as reductions in the number of graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) assigned to a given course or a shift to using undergraduate TAs—will impact both the design and day-to-day teaching of the course. By making changes to course design and instructional decisions, the teaching team can maintain equitable access to learning and help manage instructional time and labor without reducing course rigor or removing opportunities for high-impact student engagement.
Strategies for Sustainable Teaching with Resource Constraints
The following TLC guide to Sustainable Teaching with Resource Constraints highlights five major areas of course design, instruction, or teaching team coordination where instructors can focus their efforts while having a high impact. Please visit the guide for detailed information on implementing each strategy.
- Organize the teaching team in strategic, creative ways, such as developing templates for teaching team coordination that can be adapted and reused over time, or maintaining strong communications across the teaching team with a live Q&A reference document for common questions.
- Involve students in assessment and feedback through a range of self- and peer-review activities, which can reduce grading time, increase student ownership in their learning, and give students opportunities to engage with their classmates’ ideas.
- Use available technologies to automate or reduce the time required to grade and provide feedback through approaches such as using auto-graded assignments, the “Comment Library” in the Canvas Speedgrader to save and reuse common student feedback, and the “Set Default Grade” feature in the Canvas gradebook for low-stakes assignments.
- Employ “small” active learning strategies in lecture, such as adopting a regular “minute thesis” activity to facilitate brief opportunities for key skill building, or providing students with a basic framework of lecture in the form of a note-taking outline that they can use to make connections to the lecture.
- Consider adopting alternative grading practices, such as “planned flexibility” policies like no-penalty deadline extensions and grace periods, to reduce time spent negotiating late submissions, absences from class, and deadline extensions.
TLC Guides About Sustainable Teaching with Resource Constraints
The TLC Sustainable Teaching with Resource Constraints Guide.
See Also
Active Learning
Assessment
Canvas
Giving Student Feedback
Rubrics