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…
This is the third post in a series of four about using discussions in Canvas to support student learning. Once you’ve settled on why and how discussions will be used in your course and have set up the initial discussion(s)…
This is the second post in a series of four about using discussions in Canvas to support student learning. Discussions can be set up from within a module, or from the Discussions index page found by clicking on the Discussions…
This is the second post in a series about how you can use Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. You can find more about these principles here, but in this post, we’ll be looking at the first…
Technology and education go together like strawberries and cream, or peanut butter and jelly, and in this time of remote instruction, teaching and learning are both enabled by and reliant on technology. In order for us to be successful in an…
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…
When we move to remote teaching, we need to consider how we will continue to provide students with student-instructor interaction. One way of offering this is through office hours. While we used to offer office hours outside of lecture or…
Download: Planning for Modules with Labs Lab experiences are often rich, hands-on elements of courses that build on learning outcomes from lectures or achieve a different set of outcomes. There are typically three key buildings blocks to any lab experience.…
DOWNLOAD: Planning for Modules Excel Template LINK: Module Checklist Take a look at your course syllabus. What do you want learners to be able to do by the end of the course? Review your learning outcomes and consider these questions:…
In an online remote context, virtual learning communities (VLCs) allow us to plan for: Interaction Communication Collaboration This video highlights some of the reasons we might want to develop rich VLCs in remote teaching. Below are some strategies framed from…
Let’s boil this down. What’s most important for us to rethink as we use our precious hours to redesign our courses for remote learning? Work with a colleague, friend, or student to talk through your answers after you fill this…
As you prepare to create and teach courses remotely this spring and summer terms, we asked some U of S instructors experienced with this type of teaching to share some quick words of wisdom based on what they learned from…
Are you worried about non-permitted collaboration? It’s true, students can seek each other out for help, examples, interpretations, translations, feedback, and peer teaching when unsupervised. In fact, we often encourage students to do so as part of the learning process. …
You might feel like the first thing to do for creating an online course is to understand the technology. Before, you dive into that first assess what you’ve currently got going for you in your course as you have been…
As we all rapidly transition to remote instruction this week due to COVID-19, it is actually better to keep it simple. When a friend sent me a blog post called Please do a bad job of putting your course online,…