Promoting Courses

Promoting courses

The following guidance on promoting courses can be shared with faculty, staff, and others asking for support to promote courses.

Eliminating course announcements

In the past, course announcements often have been requested by faculty for courses that have low enrollments and are at risk of not being offered. By the time these announcements are requested, created, and sent, most students have selected their courses for the semester, and there is very little ability to increase enrollment. Announcements are sent via the ‘CEHD-announcements@lists.umn.edu’ listserv which includes all CEHD employees and not CEHD students unless they are also an employee, so in addition to the inappropriate timeliness of these announcements, they also do not reach the intended audience in a meaningful way. 

Our goal is to adopt a college-wide practice of eliminating the effort involved to create course announcements for low enrollment courses that utilize an inappropriate listserv to advertise those courses. There are college-wide practices that can be adopted instead by departments, best utilizing their department marketer to help courses at least reach minimum enrollment standards, listed below.

Establishing consistent tactics to market courses

• When developing a new course title and description, contact your marketing and communications lead and a student and ask them to review/provide advice.

• Work with your marketing and communications lead at least a month in advance of registration to plan targeted promotion for these two types of courses only:

  • New course offerings

    • Note: If a new course receives approval after registration opens, talk with your marketing and communications lead about what tactics are possible and will be effective in the time you have to promote your course.

  • Courses outside of a major or minor, appealing to a broad audience outside of CEHD that may be bundled (examples: summer ASL courses or fall exercise courses through Kinesiology).

• For existing courses, revisit your course title and description and ask your marketing and communications lead and a student to review/provide advice.

• Always make sure your online profile page is attractive and up-to-date. Students interested in a course may look you up online.

• Consider how your course might work as part of a program and make sure program advisors are aware when courses are offered and share that with students who need it for requirements or to fulfill an elective.

• Share information about upcoming courses you will teach with students in your classes well in advance of registration.

• Courses will no longer be promoted on CEHD announcements. It is an employee listserv/Google Group and not an appropriate or effective place to promote courses to a student audience.