Instructor Prep Kit
Case study · AI Tools & Strategy · Learning Design
Everything the faculty member who will teach this course needs to take it over, make it their own, and run it well. A course should never be handed off without directions; this is the directions.
Hand an incoming instructor a rigorous, standards-aligned course and everything they need to own it, verify it, record it, and run it, so they start from a finished draft rather than a blank page, and so nothing about how to teach it is left to guesswork.
Read this first, meet with the designer, verify the content as the subject-matter expert, record your short videos, and set up your weekly interaction. Then you teach.
1. Read this first
2. You are not doing this alone
- Meet with the learning designer. Before the course goes live, the designer walks the whole course through with you and customizes it to how you actually teach: your examples, your voice, your dataset, your emphasis.
- Reach out to the learning designer any time to talk through the pedagogy, the standards, the assessments, or anything you want to change. That is what the role is for.
- Take your center’s online-teaching certificate. If you have not already, enroll in the online-teaching certificate your teaching-and-learning center recommends. It is the single best preparation for running a course like this, and it covers the getting-started module, presence, and interaction in depth.
3. What is in the package
- The full course: modules, materials with licenses, the simulation-based assessments, and the rubrics.
- The syllabus and the 15-week schedule, with the seat-time budget (135 hours; every module and task states its time).
- The eight module slide decks, one per module, each with speaker notes that are your intro scripts.
- The student software-and-recording guide (what students install, with a pre-week-one checklist).
- The course-improvement and metrics instruments (end-of-course survey, seat-time validation, learning measurement).
- The AI course tutor (a public Gemini Notebook, see section 7).
4. Recording your videos
The one rule: never post a video over 20 minutes.
You will lose your audience. It is good practice, and this course is built for it. Your videos here are short by design: a 2 to 4 minute module intro and a brief concept walkthrough per module. The time is already budgeted in the course, so you do not have to find room for it.
Your scripts are already written. Open any module deck and look at the speaker notes under each slide, that is your module intro and the bullet points to cover, in order. Present the deck, keep it under 20 minutes, done.
Your recording tool. You do not need PowerPoint or anything fancy. Pick one:
- OBS Studio (free, Mac/Windows/Linux, best quality; the student guide has a five-minute setup that works for you too), or
- Zoom local recording, Loom, QuickTime (Mac), Xbox Game Bar (Windows), or Panopto if your LMS has it.
Caption every video (accessibility requirement). Loom, Panopto, and Zoom auto-caption; for OBS or QuickTime, upload the video unlisted to YouTube for auto-captions and download the .srt.
- Record a 60-second test clip and play it back before you record anything real.
- Quiet room, decent mic, clear speech, better audio means better auto-captions.
- Save as .mp4, name it clearly, keep it under 20 minutes.
5. Your weekly rhythm, this is the RSI, and it is required
Regular and Substantive Interaction is a federal requirement for online courses, and it has to be instructor-initiated and human. The course has the plan built in; here is what you do, every week:
- Monday: post an announcement and your short intro video for the week.
- Midweek: hold a live working session, and keep an eye on the Q&A discussion.
- Midweek early-alert: reach out to any student who has not engaged yet. Use the LMS “message students who” tool.
- Friday: post a short teaching reflection on what you actually saw in the cohort’s work that week, one thing done well, one common misstep and how to fix it. Not a canned announcement.
- All week: answer email and questions within 24 to 48 hours, and give feedback that says what went well, what needs work, and the next step.
The full presence-and-communication plan is in the course under Instructor presence and communication.
6. What is safe to change, and what keeps it aligned
Make this yours. But a few things hold the course to standard, so talk to the learning designer before you touch them.
- Change freely: your examples, your voice, the dataset, the pace within a week, which optional resources you emphasize, the tone of your videos.
- Change with the designer: the learning outcomes, the alignment between each assessment and its outcome, the seat-time budget, and the accessibility features. These are what keep the course compliant, editing them without a check can quietly break it.
7. The AI course tutor (a public Gemini Notebook)
A course-grounded tutor is live for your students as a public Gemini Notebook: a chatbot loaded with this course’s own materials and its open resources, so it answers about this course with citations, not the open web. Gemini Notebook was chosen over a general chatbot because it grounds strictly in the sources you give it and reads the actual open resources rather than the open internet. It is 24/7 student support and a Universal Design for Learning win. It is not your RSI, that has to be you. To set it up:
Notebook name
Advanced Data Science, Course Tutor
Chat behavior (Gemini Notebook → Customize)
“You are a patient tutor for the graduate course Advanced Data Science. Answer only from the course materials provided in your knowledge (syllabus, schedule, readings list, rubrics, assignment briefs, and FAQ). Explain concepts, point students to the exact reading or interactive for a topic, and help them plan their week against the stated time budget. If a question is outside the course materials, say so and suggest they post it in the course Q&A for the instructor. Never complete a graded assignment, the private-test prediction, or the oral defense for a student, coach them toward doing it themselves and remind them to disclose any AI help per the course policy. If you are unsure, say so rather than guessing.”
Sources to add
Upload the course knowledge file (syllabus, schedule, readings and interactives list, rubrics, assignment briefs, and FAQ, harvested into one document), then add the text-based open resources as Website sources so the tutor can read them directly. Refresh the sources when you revise the course.
Share
Set the notebook to “Anyone with the link” and link it from the top of the course.
Discussion helper, optional. The course simulations already cast AI as the client, the reviewer, and the governance board. You can build a second notebook as a role-play partner so students can rehearse the executive briefing or the ethics review against a bot that pushes back. Keep the boundary: bots are for practice; every graded defense stays a live meeting with you.
8. Before day one, a checklist
- Reviewed the course for accuracy and currency, as the subject-matter expert.
- Met with the learning designer and flagged anything to customize.
- Recorded your welcome video and course-orientation tour (short, captioned).
- Recorded, or scheduled, your module intro videos from the deck speaker notes.
- Set and posted your availability and your 24 to 48 hour response window.
- Confirmed the syllabus, the schedule, and the getting-started module.
- Checked that students know the software they need (the student guide).
- Set up the AI tutor Gemini Notebook with the current course files.
- Enrolled in your center’s online-teaching certificate if you have not.
This resource is an open educational resource by Michelle Blomberg, released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Reuse, adapt, and share for noncommercial purposes with attribution, under the same license.