Policies and Expectations for all UCI DCE Instructors

New UCI Division of Continuing Education (DCE) instructors usually have previous teaching experience from other educational institutions or from corporate settings, and in some situations can apply that experience to continuing education without needing to change much about their teaching style. While it is beyond the scope of this Instructor Resources website to provide complete training on effective teaching practices, there are several key points worth summarizing here:

Instructor Policies

Syllabus

Prior to the start of course development, instructors are required to submit a completed syllabus to your program director for review. Once approved, discuss any suggested changes with your program director for approval. All syllabi must comply with our guidelines and use our standardized template found in the Course Development page.

Additional Policies

Instructor Expectations

Facilitation

In both on campus and online courses, UCI Division of Continuing Education encourages instructors to be facilitators of learning, which means creating a context in which students learn from each other and from other sources as well as directly from the instructor. It also means instilling a sense of curiosity that motivates students to explore a topic independently thereby potentially uncovering additional layers of knowledge beyond what the course formally addresses. In continuing education, students are often seasoned professionals who have much to share with their classmates. An effective facilitator knows how to use this as a way of broadening the amount of knowledge to which students are exposed as well as to help draw connections between concepts learned in class with real-world practice. Of course, the personal knowledge and experience instructors bring to their teaching form the basic elements of any effective course.

Interactive Learning

In keeping with the emphasis on facilitation, UCI Division of Continuing Education expects all instructors to create numerous opportunities for students to interact with each other as they learn. In classroom-based courses, this might consist of class discussions and/or periodic breakout sessions in which small groups of students work on classroom assignments together. Online it often involves the use of asynchronous discussion forums, synchronous webinars, and coordinated group projects.

Assessment

For both classroom-based and online courses, it is important to have well-defined, action-oriented learning objectives that are measurable and quantifiable. This means that an instructor can create student learning assessments such as quizzes, term papers, projects, and homework assignments that require students to demonstrate what they can do with the knowledge they have acquired in the course. Ideally, each course should have at least two or three different kinds of assessment so that students with different kinds of learning abilities all have an opportunity to perform. In addition, it is vital to provide timely feedback to students on their performance so they have an opportunity to improve.