Faculty Documentation: Best Practices for Sign-Up Tool

Overview

The sign-Up tool is a way for instructors to be transparent with the students about times that they are available to meet throughout the semester. It is a much better alternative to the sign-up sheet on the door and convenient for the students too! 

 

Recommendations for Creating Meetings

TIP #1: You can make the Sign-Up available to certain groups within a site which can make it easier if you only want a few people setting up meetings with you at a time. 
TIP #2: We recommend turning on Notifications of participant actions, so you will receive an email when a student signs up or cancels an appointment. 
TIP #3: Use Announce Availability to send an email notification to all potential participants. 
TIP #4: Do not use the option Assign Participants & Publish unless you want to manually enter students for each time slot you have available. 


Creating a Sign-Up

  1. First, go to the Sign-Up tool in your course site. 

  2. Click  on the top of the page. 

  3. You will then be prompted to enter a Title, Location, and Description of the meeting. 

  4. Next, you will want to fill out the Start Time, End Time, and Meeting Frequency. 

  5. Decide who you want to make this Sign-Up Available To, and then decide the Meeting Type.

  6. When you are satisfied with the settings, click Next. 

  7. You will be shown a Meeting Summary which you should review to make sure that all the settings are correct. 

  8. When you are finished reviewing the settings, click Publish or Assign Participants & Publish. 

 

Types of Sign-Up Meetings 

 

1. Open Meetings

  • No sign-up is necessary. 

  • It is a way to tell students that an event is occurring during a specific time period and that they are all invited.

  • Alternative to using calendar, but can also be used in conjunction with calendar. 

2. Single Slot 

  • Can configure the attendance list to allow unlimited participants or only allow a limited amount of students to sign-up. 

  • Students must sign-up in order to appear on the attendance list

  • This is a good option if you want to have a running list of how many students plan on attending the event. 

3. Multiple Slots 

  • This is the best option if you are meeting with students one-on-one or in small groups to discuss group assignments.

  • If you set up a three-hour meeting, you can divide up the three hours into six half-hour slots or twelve quarter-hour slots. 

 

Instructor View

TIP #5: If you believe that too many people have signed-up for a specific time period, you can click on a time slot and select Lock, which will prevent any more students from signing-up for that given time. 

 

Other Default Settings

RECOMMENDATION: We encourage you to use these settings. For Max # of time slots, it would be beneficial for students to be allowed to sign-up for at least two times if you think they need to have some options and there is only one available slot per time allowed. 

 

Student View