This template is designed for DE courses - but can easily be adapted for in-person courses

Introduction

One of the best practices in online teaching and learning is to send out a welcome letter to your students that guides them in "getting" to your class, provides help resources, and outlines important information advantageous to know before the first day of class. Some items to include:

Fascinating topics to look forward to in the class
Textbook information
Technology information (Zoom etc)
Technology Help and Support Resources
An opportunity to get a head start on the material
Facts about yourself and your interests

You are of course welcome to add anything else that you think your students would benefit from knowing before the start of the semester.

Getting Started

Download the Welcome Letter template document so you can edit
The document contains instructions/recommendations highlighted in yellow – you may delete that when you customize it to your specifications.
Items that you need to fill in are highlighted in blue

Creating a clean document

A key best practice for creating an accessible document involves making a “clean” document. Copy/pasting from another document brings with it all the underlying formatting code that you can’t see but that can cause problems for screen readers

The best way: Type in your information, the first time you use this template
May work but not a sure thing: Copy and paste plain text (choose option keep text only when you paste)

Once you have your own ‘clean’ syllabus file, it should be quick to update each semester.

Finally, Check Accessibility

After you have created your welcome letter, make sure you check it for accessibility by running the Word accessibility checker. Here’s a video that shows how to: Check word document accessibility.

All done! You can now save it in both Word and make a PDF copy.

Note: To make a PDF copy, do not use "save as PDF" or "Print to PDF" command. PDF made this way are not screen reader compatible as they may lose all the document structure tags. Instead, go to Acrobat in the Word menu and click on Create PDF.

Click Next to Continue