The COVID-19 pandemic has increased stress and mental health challenges for many people, including instructors, staff, and students. To help our students, and each other, to build or rebuild resilience we need to take a multi-pronged approach. While the university…
During in-class discussions, the entire class and the instructor may be part of the same discussion, but sometimes instructors put students into smaller groups, with multiple discussions happening around the room. While the instructor may be able to walk around…
Many instructors indicate that they struggle with how to come up with good questions of students, whether during a synchronous session (in-person or on Zoom) or in the discussion forums in Canvas. The purpose of this post is to help…
The University of Saskatchewan is a leader in Canada around open educational resources (e.g. textbooks) and is moving toward wider integration of open pedagogy (students as contributors, not just consumers of knowledge). As part of this, and in the spirit…
This is the second in a short series on having challenging conversations either in your classes or individually with students. The topics covered in these posts come from the GMCTL short-course Challenging Conversations. The ideas and concepts shared in the…
This is the first in a short series on having challenging conversations either in your classes or individually with students. The topics covered in these posts come from the GMCTL short-course Challenging Conversations. The ideas and concepts shared in the…
The syllabus is often the first window that students get into a course. An instructor may post it to Canvas, email it, or even still hand out printed copies. While the university sees it as a contract, and instructors and students see…
Open educational resources (OER), particularly open textbooks, have become widely used at USask since the first adoption for a large class in early 2015. More than 8,000 students used OER instead of commercial materials during the 2020-2021 academic year. That…
There have been some recent inquiries about how to subscribe to this blog, which is great. We love to hear that readers are finding this site helpful. This post will explain how to use RSS (Real Simple Syndication) to subscribe to…
As I write this, USask has almost completed the transition from Blackboard to Canvas. While Canvas may be a lot different, many of the same tools and integrations instructors and students used in Blackboard are still available. Panopto and various…
By David Greaves, ICT Support Services What does a good student presentation look like in an online learning environment? Take a moment to think about it. While you were thinking, you likely made the realization that the learning environment makes a difference. This post will guide…
Just as students appreciate seeing good examples of work before doing their own, instructors designing courses often feel the same way. As the U of S transitions to Canvas we want to provide you with some such examples through the…
Peer feedback involves students providing feedback to each other on work, prior to a final or revised version being submitted to the instructor. This creates the opportunity for students to receive formative feedback, improve on their work, and then submit…
Authentic assessments are activities, whether for marks or not, that involve students addressing “real-world” problems in a way that reflects activities they might engage in as a professional in the discipline. Authentic assessments can provide several benefits to both students…
As part of our move to the Canvas LMS, the U of S gains the use of the Canvas Commons. The Canvas website describe it as: Commons is a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share…
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