Setting clear unit expectations

For many students, an online unit marks a big change from a traditional classroom. This change can be even more challenging for students with physical or learning disabilities, as they can feel disconnected from their instructor and other support systems. Connect provides unit designers with flexibility in how they set up and organize content, however it can still be daunting for students who rely on assistive technologies to navigate Connect, find unit materials, and find and complete assignments.
To help your students effectively use your online unit, consider the following design guidelines:

• Use Unit Home to help familiarize your students with your unit content.
• Create a news topic on Unit Home that introduces yourself (the unit instructor) and any teaching assistants. Include contact information and encourage students to contact you if they have concerns, questions, or additional needs.
• Include your unit overview as a news topic, or provide a link in an announcement to your overview on the Unit Home. Make each item in the overview a Quicklink to the actual item in your unit. Quicklinks provide a navigation shortcut to important content and helps students with learning disabilities clearly see how unit content relates to unit expectations.
• Include an announcement on the Unit Home that highlights some of the personal tools available to students, such as User Profile, User Settings, and Class Progress.
• Build redundancy into your unit by repeating unit information within different tools. For example, you can include all unit overview information in the unit calendar, and include information on how much a quiz, discussion topic, or assignment is worth in the description of the overview entry for the content item. When unit expectations are clearly communicated in the unit design, students can focus on learning content.
• Set up a clear hierarchy in your unit content using enumerations. In Content settings, set up enumerations so that the unit structure is easier to navigate for users of screen readers and students with learning disabilities.