This article highlights two teaching strategies you can apply to your courses with student wellbeing in mind: distilling assignments into manageable steps and adding check-in assignments to foster a climate of care. These strategies can be incorporated in person and in Canvas, which can be an important extension of your physical classroom. 

Strategy #1: Distill Assignments into Manageable Steps 

Think about how you communicate course assignments or project expectations to learners. If you’re explaining an assignment synchronously (in-person or via Zoom, for example), consider sharing each step and component of the assignment in a document or directly in Canvas so learners don’t have to recall the details from memory. This approach is especially helpful for students with cognitive disabilities or difficulties such as brain fog. You can also create a video outlining each step. Panopto, Ball State University’s new video platform, allows you to add in-video questions so you can ask students questions about a project to check for understanding after each explained step. 

Our busy working Ball State learners benefit from explicit assignment rationale, instructions, and success criteria. Distilling assignments helps dispel hidden curriculum. Sharing these elements transparently with each assignment or task helps to break down an assignment into smaller, manageable steps. Without these steps, an assignment can feel too big. We can help our students take one bite at a time, avoiding feeling overwhelmed, which can lead to procrastination. 

Breaking up content also helps reduce fatigue and increase comprehension and motivation. This is important because exhaustion or fatigue is the number one cited challenge for our Ball State learners from a recent Student Satisfaction Survey deployed at the end of each semester. Exhaustion is the most common challenge for a wide range of students. Importantly, students facing moderate or serious exhaustion are also more likely to be facing other challenges, such as mental health challenges (94%) and motivation to complete schoolwork (88%), which are significantly more common among exhausted students.  
 
Sarah Ackermann, executive director for teaching innovation at Ball State, breaks down important steps of an asynchronous assignment in her article, Leaning into My Strengths as an Instructional Designer. In the following exercise, Ackermann prepared a collaborative slide deck for students using VoiceThread, a tool that allows learners to contribute reflections in either text, audio, or video form. Students are guided to look through a provided deck of images. In step two, students circle back and leave a comment on two different images. In the final step, students review the contributions of their peers and leave feedback. 

The Activity Prompt below provides another instructive example. Eva Grouling Snider, senior instructional consultant at Ball State, uses an accordion design to outline steps for an assignment in her professional writing course. Students can click the “+” icon within the accordion for more details within each step.

Strategy #2: Use Check-In Assignments to Foster a Climate of Care

As a first-generation college student who consistently worked full time throughout my academic career, I struggled to adopt useful strategies to stay on top of my courses. Homework piled up on the weekends, exacerbating my anxiety over balancing work and school. I would have benefited from low-stake planning opportunities: when could I fit in reading course texts before the weekend, for example? 
 
As an instructor teaching online courses, I recognize the value of requiring periodic, asynchronous check-ins so students can assess their progress and evaluate their plan to engage in the course material. Check-ins can serve as an important but easy way to show students you care about how they’re fitting education into their lives.  
 
To help my students schedule time for coursework, I adopted the check-in quizzes available to Ball State faculty in our Canvas course template. The first image below is a quiz question students answer in Week 2 about how they will find time each week for the course. In Week 4, students identify whether they were able to stick to their plan. This low-stake quiz provides them an opportunity to reflect on what’s working and what’s not and to adjust accordingly. 

Conclusion

Student wellbeing won’t be solved with course design alone. However, we can support students experiencing fatigue and stress by distilling down assignments and adding check-in assignments to foster a climate of care. Is there a course project you’ve distilled into smaller steps? We’d love to learn more. Share how you’ve helped students progress through a complex assignment, one bite at a time.