UT’s Office of Innovative Technologies (OIT) has developed the Online Instructor Toolkit to assist instructors in preparing and teaching their online courses. Topics covered include course design, teaching tools and campus resources.

The Blended Learning Toolkit is a free, open repository of information, resources, models, and research related to blended learning. Funded by a Next Generation Learning Challenge Wave 1 grant, the Toolkit is a collaboration between the University of Central Florida (UCF) and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

The University of Central Florida’s (UCF) Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) offers the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository (TOPR) as a public resource for faculty and instructional designers interested in online and blended teaching strategies.

This advice guide from the Chronicle of Higher Education (2013) includes 10 essential practices and principles for success in the online classroom.

A well-thought-out syllabus can be used to establish instructor presence, facilitate engagement, manage the classroom, foster inclusion, clarify important course details and much more.

The UT Knoxville Online Course Syllabus template was designed with you and your students in mind. The template includes components that support best practices in online course design and delivery. The template is meant to serve as an example, and it contains navigation links and specific language that you can modify and use when developing your own syllabus. As you utilize the template, you may add, change, or delete portions of the document to meet your needs. If you are teaching a hybrid class, make it very clear in the course schedule which days are for in-class meetings and which days are for online instruction and participation.

The syllabus template has been formatted using the Styles feature in Word to differentiate headings from normal text (for screen readers and easy editing).

Teaching Tip: Give students a syllabus quiz – you’ve taken the time to develop it and it contains important information. This also allows students to practice taking a low-stakes assessment using the Canvas quiz tool.

From the Office of Innovative Technologies: You’ve decided to deliver your course online or as a hybrid. Using a template will make it easier.

A template turns a blank course shell into a fill-in-the-blank Canvas course. New online faculty, or faculty short on time, can begin with a pre-built point of launch. Faculty power users can take and modify the template without needing to start from zero.

The UT Canvas Course Template will help you to easily create a structure and load examples that you can duplicate in your own course.

The UT Canvas Course Template is available in the Canvas Commons. Please follow these steps to preview the template and import it into a course shell:

1. In the Global Navigation menu (grey menu underneath the Power T), click the Commons link.

2. Using the Search field, copy and paste this text: UT Canvas Course Template. Press Enter.

3. Click the resource title

4. To import the resource, click the Import/Download button.

5. Select the course(s) you wish to import the template into. Then, click the Import into Course button.

6. Navigate to the course site you selected to view the imported content.

Use the template as a base design to develop your desired course. There is the pre-filled text as suggested information. This content can be changed. There are highlighted areas that need to be updated with your unique course content.

The Template populates into the course. The template provides one, pre-filled module (Module 0) with basic information your students will need. Edit this information as needed.