Frequently Asked Questions for Faculty

Use the table of contents below to browse frequently asked questions for faculty using Teachly. You can get more detailed help on our support page.

If you have any questions about Teachly not covered here, please do not hesitate to contact us. Please use the options below:

If your school (e.g. HKS, HSPH) is part of an existing Teachly pilot, please contact your local ed tech administrator for help.

If your Harvard school is not part of an existing pilot, please contact academictechnology@harvard.edu.

If you are a Teachly user from outside the Harvard community, please do not hesitate to contact us at teachlyhelp@gmail.com.

What is Teachly?

Teachly is an ed-tech application that strives to make higher education classrooms both more inclusive and more effective by providing faculty a window into their teaching that they would otherwise not have. Teachly creates increasingly personalized learning experiences for students by making data readily available to faculty and their teaching teams.

Data are critical to Teachly’s mission — data about students, about faculty teaching habits, and about in-class interactions. Teachly lowers the barriers to use data by bringing the data faculty need into one place to help faculty take more immediate action in the classroom. Teachly has 3 key features:

• Real-Time Stats: Teachly generates session-by-session analytics — combined into thematic dashboards — that identify patterns and help to flag students that may be falling through the cracks.
• Student Profiles: Teachly builds rich, searchable student profiles about their backgrounds, interests, and goals. This allows for personalized interactions with each student.
• Interactive Seating Chart: By visualizing data as they’re laid out in the real world, Teachly focuses attention on spatial blind spots, as well as on individual students that may need support.

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How do I log into Teachly?

• Harvard affiliates: Please navigate to teachly.harvard.edu and use your HarvardKey credentials to log in. HarvardKey will then authenticate your account and open your profile. If you are an open Teachly user, please follow the self-registration process to create your account and continue into the site.

• Non-Harvard Affiliates: Please navigate to app.teachly.me and use your preferred email credentials to create an account, selecting the “I am an Educator” option. You will then be asked to create your course (the rest of our user support guide will help you with this!).

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I have a teaching assistant, how do I give them access to Teachly?

In the course set up process, you will be asked to submit information about your TA at Step 2. If you do not know the information at this time, you will be able to add your TA under Manage Course.

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Can I use Teachly without a teaching assistant?

While it is possible to have students fill out their profile information to gain insights on their backgrounds, it would be difficult to track participation on your own without a teaching assistant.

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How do I add students to Teachly?

There are 3 ways to add students to Teachly.

1. Enrollment link
2. Enrollment QR code
3. Manual search and add

Visit our support page within the Teachly web app for more details on each option.

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Can I add or remove questions from student profiles?

At this time, faculty cannot edit what is asked in student profiles.

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What if students join the class late or leave?

On your course page, navigate to Individual Student Profiles. On this screen you can remove students via the actions buttons on the right-hand side. You can also add students by clicking on the Add Students button in the upper right-hand corner.

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What if I don’t use assigned seats?

You can still use Teachly if you do not assign seats in your class. Instead of setting up the seating chart when you start a session, you can click Switch to List View to view your student names and photos in alphabetical order by last name. You can capture participation, take attendance, and view the heatmap function from this view.

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Do I have to set the seating chart each time?

Once you create your seating chart in your first session, the seating chart will copy over to following sessions.

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Can I create sessions in advance for my whole semester?

You can create sessions in advance, but be sure to have set up your seating chart before doing so since the seating chart carries over from the previous session.

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How do I interpret my course dashboard?

Please see our Support page for an overview of the dashboard and a brief video on interpreting your dashboard.

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How do I export participation data for grading?

Under “Manage Course”, there is a Download CSV of Student Participation option under the Learn About Your Teaching heading. Click this link to download a CSV of student attendance and participation up to that day.

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Can two assistants track participation at the same time?

Yes! Multiple TAs can be logged into a session at the same time. As they record participation, their names will show in the activity record as having saved that particular participation event.

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Do you have any teaching tips for faculty?

Yes, please check out the tips below and let us know if you have any others to add.

• Wait for 10 seconds before calling on a student. When you ask a question, literally count until 10 (in your mind) before you call on a student. It gives students more time to think, which can translate into many benefits for learning, quality of discussion, and diversity of participation. Here is a classic article and a video on wait time.

• Ask open-ended questions to promote learning and participation. In general, it is best to avoid questions that can be answered with a yes or no, as they seldom lead to generative discussion. Good questions depend on your students, the goals of your class session, and the content of your class. Here are some tips for questioning, listening, and responding in class.

• Be intentional about who you call on first. If you are finding that certain groups of students have not been participating in your classes, try to call on someone from that group as your first call in your next class. This might help break the pattern established in previous classes and establish a new and more inclusive pattern. Here is an article about an instructor’s effort to have equitable class discussions.

• Have students pair up and then share in classwide discussions. Allowing students to have time to discuss with a partner provides some of the more introverted students and/or slower processors an opportunity to test their ideas, increasing the chances they can participate in class. Here is an article about how to incorporate this approach to your teaching.

• Don’t talk at your students; engage them in class discussions. Discussion leads to greater student learning and the development of critical-thinking skills. As reported in this article and elsewhere, students learn more when they are actively engaged with the material, the instructor, and their classmates.

• Poll your students to know what they are thinking. Anonymous polling can help you understand how students are really reacting to your content. Here is a guide to polling and a list of high and low tech ways to poll your students.

• Don’t limit yourself to ping-pong; play some volleyball. Exchanges that proceed from student to student without you serving as mediator (i.e., volleyball rather than ping-pong) can be extremely valuable. Here is a video on this topic from a master educator.

• Consider using cold calling. Not every faculty member likes calling on students who don’t volunteer to participate, but here is a video arguing that you should consider using this method widely used in business and law schools.

• Model effective class participation. As an instructor, you can model norms for actively listening and by building on your students’ comments. This video explains why and how to do this.

• Encourage in your students a willingness to get it wrong. Students pay attention to what you do when they give wrong answers. You can help them take intellectual risks by normalizing the process of being incorrect as a crucial step on the journey toward understanding. Watch this video to see how a master educator does this.

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