If someone asked you “How is online teaching different from face-to-face teaching?”, the first thing you might say is that face-to-face teaching involves real time interaction between students and instructors (synchronous) whereas online teaching happens through a computer, with students typically…
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…
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…
The transition to remote learning has been in progress for almost a year now, with many instructors grabbing the Canvas bull by the horns and learning how to use the different Canvas tools to provide their students with the best…
It’s been a while since I wrote a conversational blog post – in a pre-pandemic world, more of our content on this site was first-person and took the tone of a friendly colleague. In the pandemic context, our blog quickly…
This post is part of a series about using Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. You can find more about these principles here; in this post, we look at the seventh principle. Designed to enable connection: Learners exist…
The technical creation of a discussion in Canvas is relatively straightforward and intuitive. What requires deeper initial consideration is how using the discussion tool will support student learning. Here, we look at the necessary planning for setting up purposeful discussions,…
This is the sixth 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 fifth…
This is the fifth 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 fourth…
This is the third 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 second…
While we do recommend designing your course for mostly asynchronous learning, and we definitely recommend being explicit and overt about netiquette from the start of the semester, we understand that some of your course will be conducted over live, synchronous…
The move to remote learning has created challenges for actively engaging students in our classes. A simple think-pair-share activity now requires extensive descriptions of who is partnered with who, how will you communicate, and how much time do you have…
In the previous post about open educational practices (OEP) at USask, I explained what they are. In this post, we will explore why so many people are already engaging in OEP, and why you should consider integrating these practices into…
We have seen significant growth in the use of open educational resources at the U of S in the past six years. As of this fall, more than a dozen open textbooks have been created or adapted at by instructors…
The causes of academic misconduct have been well-studied and the following points explain most of this concerning behavior. Research shows that very few students plan on doing things like buying papers or crowd-sourcing exam questions when they enroll in courses. …