The Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon University suggests the first class meeting should serve at least two basic purposes:
To clarify all reasonable questions students might have relative to the course objectives, as well as your expectations for their performance in class. As students leave the first meeting, they should believe in your competence to teach the course, be able to predict the nature of your instruction, and know what you will require of them.
To give you an understanding of who is taking your course and what their expectations are.
A few actions that can help facilitate those purposes are:
The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Iowa State recommends that you Visit the classroom prior to the first day your class meets, and try out the technology, microphone, lights, etc.. I add that if you need assistance with technology in your classroom, contact your university’s support team early so they can have a chance to address the problem in a timely manner. If you have not been on campus for a while and your classroom is located away from your department, travel to your class to see if your walking route is the same, or if you need to allot more time for travel. (Especially if you are on a campus that is able to build and redesign).
“Professors who established a special trust with their students often displayed the kind of openness in which they might, from time to time, talk about their intellectual journey, its ambitions, triumphs, frustrations, and failures, and encourage students to be similarly reflective and candid.”
–From the chapter “How Do They Treat Their Students” in Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard Press, 2004), available in the CFT Library
Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching Excellence recommends that you Arrive early on the first day your class meets and greet students as they arrive. Introduce yourself and post how you want students to address you, (Professor, Dr., first name?) course name, and section of the class on the projector screen, so that when students walk in, they know that they are in the correct place. IU’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning reminds that you can send a welcome email to your students, perhaps inviting them to use NameCoach (if you have access to it https://cloud.name-coach.com/) to record and learn the pronunciation of each other's names.
The Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University suggest you consider, What do students want to know about you as their instructor? Consider sharing with students how you teach and/or how you expect students to learn. One way to help increase engagement with students is to share with students why the subject is interesting to you, or ways of learning successfully in the class. You can also include comments from students in previous classes, personal history of your work in this subject, or examples showing:
how you apply the course content in your work or use it to solve problems
how content is used in industry or other parts of society.
Share some information that will personalize you – your teaching experience, the reason you entered your discipline, an anecdote from your undergraduate learning days. This point is meant to encourage you to let your students see the enthusiasm you have for your subject and your love of teaching. It’s much more effective to begin the course letting students know that this is a course you want to teach with content you love, and that you are there to help them learn. If you have graduate teaching assistants, introduce them, and let them tell something about themselves as well.
Set up clear communication strategies for the students. These could include when you will have office hours, the best way to contact you, e-mail parameters, phone policies, as well as whether you will use a backchannel such as Microsoft Teams or Slack in your course, and if so, how will it be used.
Most of these tips align with the key principles provided by James Lang (author of Small Teaching), in an article for the Chronicle for Higher Education. These principles are intended to help faculty decide which activities and approaches will best draw students into the course and prepare them to learn. https://www-chronicle-com.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/article/how-to-teach-a-good-first-day-of-class/