How to successfully kick off your course

By Chelsea Wilson

Instructor Support

Summary

Maven's guide for starting your cohort and welcoming your students.

Summary

Welcome your students to your cohort by orienting them to the Student Portal and cohort community.
Set up your Student Portal and customize the intro template.
Send your students a welcome message using the Broadcast feature.

What happens when students enroll in your course?

Once a student enrolls, they will:

Receive an automated email letting them know they've enrolled successfully; you can edit this email in the Emails tab of your dashboard (under "Activity emails").
See a countdown to your course start date. On the portal open date, this countdown will disappear and students will have access to your course Home page. You can update the student portal open date in your course settings.
Automatically receive invitations for events. If you haven't published any events, enrolled students will receive the invitations as soon as you publish them.

Students will automatically get access to your syllabus and community when the portal opens. Until then, you can polish your content and start welcoming students to the cohort.

Set up the student portal

Maven gives your students one centralized hub to find everything related to your course—the student portal. This is where they can find the calendar, syllabus, and cohort community.

Before you send an orientation email, make sure your Student Portal is open.
Turn on the Maven community feature.
Customize the intro template for your course community.
Finalize your syllabus
Integrate your Zoom account so you can easily create Zoom meetings for events and automatically upload recordings.
Create and publish your events.

Send your orientation email using broadcast

Use Maven's email broadcast feature to email all your enrolled students. Here's a template you can use as a starting point. Feel free to adjust it to your needs.

Subject: Kicking off {{ CourseName }}

Hi {{ StudentName }},

I’m so excited for you to join me for this upcoming cohort of {{ CourseName }}!

We’re getting started on {{ CohortStartDate }}, and I just want to get you oriented to how I’ll run this cohort.

Events. You’ll receive Calendar invites to each live workshop. Please make sure these are in your calendar. If they aren't, please let me know.

Community. Join our cohort community to connect with fellow students and check out the resources in the syllabus. Click this link to access the community: {maven.com/school/course/login}. Use the email address you’re receiving this email with.

Syllabus/Pre-work. The syllabus is where I’ll house all the pre-readings and bonus materials. There’s a small amount of reading you need to do before each workshop so you get the foundational concepts. Check it out here {maven.com/school/course/syllabus}

You’ve joined an incredible group of individuals and I’m excited you're here. This will be a collaborative experience - that’s right, no sitting back!

Our first workshop is on {{ CohortStartDate }}. Check your calendar or the Events section of the student portal for the Zoom link. In case you miss a session, each workshop is recorded and uploaded into the student portal.

If you have any questions, just reply directly to this email and I’ll help you out.

See you soon!

{Your Name}

P.S. Learning is more fun with friends. If you know someone who should be a part of this, send them this link to apply: {apply link}.

What's next?

After you prepare the student portal and send students an orientation email, get ready to teach your live sessions! Check out this Maven workshop facilitation guide to help you get ready for your first live class.