Category Archives: Remote Teaching

How Canvas’ intuitive interface makes it easy to use

Posted on by
Reply

This is the seventh 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 sixth principle.

  1. Efficient and easy to use: Learners need to work in a system that is fluid and requires a minimum number of steps in systems that are intuitive and integrated.   

Efficient and Easy to Use  

During the search for a new LMS, instructors said ‘ease of use’ was a top principle for choosing technology to support student learning. If a platform is intuitive and easy to navigate, students can focus on their course work rather than trying to find their way through multiple steps to access content, submit assignments and interact with other students and their instructor. An LMS can be a boon to provide access to content in remote, face-to-face, and blended instructional contexts, especially for courses seen as content heavy (Squires et al., 2017). It is also vital to meet student expectations for a 21st century education.  

 Canvas’ Intuitive Interface   

Multiple Canvas features support students in finding their way around a well-designed Canvas course. These design features assist users in accessing and organizing materials, assignments, and due dates; a few of them are highlighted here.  

On everyone’s Dashboard, a To Do list appears in the right sidebar, showing upcoming assignments and events (students) and items to be graded or dates to be noted (instructors). Those with dual roles of instructor and student may see both types of items in their To Dos; each course also has its own To Do list. This electronic list serves up timely reminders, with direct links to all items in the list, helping to keep users on track.  

The Modules index page usually holds all modules and items for a course, controlling the flow of the course. Index pages for each of announcements, assignments, quizzes, discussions, collaborations, and even pages, offer a place where all alike items are listed by due date or date of creation. Each index page allows for creation of new, corresponding items (i.e. – a new discussion creation from the discussions index page)

The Global Navigation Menu is visible, regardless of where you are in a Canvas course, giving access to all ‘account level’ features. Here are just a few of the easy to use features:  

  • In your Account, Notification preferences can be changed with the click of your mouse when you’d like to receive or change how often you receive messages about activity in all your courses, and you can even specify preferences for each course individually.
  • One of the features that adds so much ease of organization for instructors and students alike is the Calendar, a place where events, due dates, office hours, and exams for all of your courses are pulled together for use at a glance, distinguished by course by colour-coding! It even provides a link for syncing with common calendar tools such as Outlook and Google.
  • The Help feature at the bottom of the Menu, has all of your Canvas support options curated in a list, with links that take you to the type of help you prefer, from Live Chat to a phone number to email support.

Finally, Speedgrader is the Canvas online assessment and grading tool that lets instructors compose, input, and then share annotations, feedback, and grades seamlessly with students. It is easy to use, while it can perform many complex functions. It can be accessed from multiple places in the course and can even be used by students as an assignment annotation tool when doing peer assessments. 

References  

 Squires, V., Turner, N., Bassendowski,  S. L., Wilson, J., & Bens, S. (2017). Enhance, extend, empower: Understanding faculty use of e-learning technologies. 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances, HEAd’17 Universitat Politecnica de Val ` encia, Val ` encia, 2017 `’ http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/HEAd17.2017.5508   

Using Canvas New Analytics to see how students are doing in your course.

Posted on by
Reply

Having to teach remotely may have left some of us feeling like we are teaching in a vacuum. Without the usual cues that face-to-face teaching provides, it can be difficult to tell whether students are engaging or participating with their course materials. Even if you feel like you have a good sense of how your students are engaging with the course, New Analytics can help confirm these feelings. 

What is New Analytics? New Analytics is a tool that can track and report student activity within Canvas. Student activity is defined by two data points: Page Views and Participations. The table below shows the difference between the two.

Page Views • Are based on requests to the server (this means that the numbers of page views may be greater than what we traditionally think of as a page view).  • Therefore, page view data can be used as an approximation to student activity and not an absolute metric.   Note: This data is most useful when seeking to understand if activity did occur, and as a means of a comparison across students within a course or when viewing trends from week to week. Participations • Announcements - posts a new comment to an announcement  • Assignments - submits an assignment  • Collaborations - loads a collaboration to view/edit a document  • Conferences - joins a web conference  • Discussions - posts a new comment to a discussion  • Pages - creates a page  • Quizzes – starts or submits a quiz Note: These actions generate analytics for participations
How to access New Analytics.

You can easily access New Analytics through the course Home Page or from the course navigation menu (if you have set it to be visible in the menu).

Accessing New analytics

Using New Analytics

Weekly online activity

You can use New Analytics to view and compare several items such as average course grades, which show if students are keeping up with their assignments, and average weekly online participation which show if students are engaging with the course material. Using these analytics can help you to identify at- risk students based on their course grades or participation criteria.

Once at-risk students have been identified, you can intervene and send targeted messages to their Canvas Inbox. By sending a personal message to your students, you are showing them that you care and are available to help them with any issues they are experiencing. If you prefer, you can also send emails. For instructions to generate a list of student emails using New Analytics, watch this video.

New Analytics also generates reports on missing, late, or excused assignments, class roster, and course activity that can be easily viewed and download .

Looking at Particular Students

If you want to know how a particular student is doing in your course, you can access New Analytics for individual students or the Course Access Report for that student. The access report will show you:

  • The content the user has viewed.
  • The number of times the user viewed the content. A view is counted each time a user navigates to the URL where the content resides or downloads an attachment.
  • The number of times the user participated (if applicable, such as posting to a discussion or submitting an assignment).
  • The last time the user viewed the content.

You can also access a student’s Interaction Report where you can:

  • view the last time you interacted with the student
  • see the current grade for that student
  • see if there are any submitted but ungraded assignments for the student
  • quickly access the Conversations page to send a message to the student by clicking the message icon.

Course statistics give a glimpse into which assignments, discussions and quizzes are engaging students and what might be improved in the future, knowing this helps you to better engage your students.

Good to Know:

  • Page views and participation metrics include an aggregate across all devices (i.e., desktop, mobile).
  • Data is refreshed in New Analytics every 24 hours – so check the time the data was last updated in the course, as content may be outdated compared to recent course activity and student submissions.
  • Only active and completed student enrollments are included in data for New Analytics. Deleted or inactive user enrollment will not generate data.

If you find yourself wondering whether students are looking at your course, engaging with the content or keeping on top of the coursework, a glimpse into the New Analytics and Course Statistics is a good place to start. If you find that students are not engaging or are falling behind – reach out to them. It could make the difference between them completing the course or not.

 

How Canvas supports student control and ownership of learning

Posted on by

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 principle.

5. Designed for student control and ownership of learning: Learners create and control spaces for learning, understanding and retaining ownership, and purposefully choosing how and when they share.

Student Control and Ownership of Learning

Practices that facilitate student choice can have a positive impact on their participation and motivation, and thus, academic performance. Students with choices can engage in higher-level learning for many reasons; feeling more engaged, intrinsically motivated, and joyful in their learning can lead to deeper learning, better processing and more effective long-range memory storage. Choice supports the enhancement of creativity, leading to other positive habits like self-initiated revision and editing (Jensen & McConchie, 2020).

Students doing different work allows for richer and more diverse discussions and in-turn, the learning environment can become less competitive, more collaborative and supportive of higher order knowledge creation and application. (Smyth et al., 2011). When students have choice in their learning, enhancing their sense of autonomy, power and control, social and emotional learning can also increase, elements which are significant in adult learning. Student choice around assessment also lends to more independent decision-making. All of this contributes to few problems around academic integrity as well.

How Canvas supports student control and ownership of learning

Canvas has multiple ways students can design opportunities to develop and demonstrate their knowledge and skills, fostering their independence as learners.

The Rich Content Editor, available in most areas in Canvas, provides space for students to choose to create and respond:

  • in text, audio or video created inside Canvas,
  • attach files, links to external URLs and/or
  • embed YouTube videos or upload their own videos

Canvas also allows for student empowerment as content creators, through

  • editable pages set-up by the instructor
  • student created discussion boards, collaborative documents, pages, files, and announcements within student groups, accessed through group home pages, and
  • if instructors permit, self-sign-up in groups, as well as creation of announcements, discussions, and collaborations within the wider course environment.

Additionally, student-controlled spaces give opportunity for students to support their own learning and that of their peers through collaborative knowledge creation and peer review on assignments and in discussions. For more on the benefits of using peer review, see the blog Utilizing Peer Feedback in Canvas.

With the What-If Grades feature, students can view their grades and input scores to see how grades may be affected, and then make decisions around submitting or resubmitting assignments.

The Folio link for USask users, accessed on the Account menu, links to an ePortfolio site and provides a space for students and faculty to create a profile, upload a CV or resume, feature top skills and best work (uploaded from Canvas or other sources) and connect with others. This feature affords a convenient way to create, store, and update a portfolio over time, giving students access and control of their work across classes, as they advance through studies.

New Analytics displays grade averages, online activity by week and participation in communication tools, allowing students to view their individual progress and use the up-to-date information to assess their progress and improve or shift their activities.

References

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: 7 research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Anderson, M. (2016). Learning to choose, choosing to learn. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Jensen, E., & McConchie, L. (2020). Brain-based teaching: Teaching the way students really learn. 3rd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Smyth, K., Bruce, S., Fortheringham, J., & Mainka, C. (2011). Benchmark for the use of technology in modules. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh Napier University.

Posting Feedback and Grades in Canvas

Posted on by

Once students start completing quizzes and assignments in your course, you may start wondering how students access this feedback. You may also be wondering if you need to do anything to release the feedback. You may also wondering, to be frank, about a lot of things.

Grade Posting Policy for an Individual Assignment

By default, feedback, comments, and grades in Canvas are automatically shared with students as soon as they are generated. This means that as soon as you grade an individual student’s submission, these details will become visible to them. Students may even receive an email notification about this, depending on their notification settings. If you want to keep all of this hidden until you have finished grading all of the students, you will need to manually hide it. This can be a bit complicated to do as you can’t hide grades in SpeedGrader until grades exist. Your best way to hide grades for an individual assignment is to go to Grades, navigate to the assignment column, click on the three dots beside the name, and click Grade Posting Policy. Here you will be able to switch to Manually post the grades. Once you complete grading, come back here and post the grades.

Grade Posting Policy for the Course

If you know that you will always want to keep feedback, comments, and grades hidden until you manually release them, you can change the default course Grade Posting Policy. Here’s a guide to that: How do I select a grade posting policy for a course in the Gradebook?

Grade Posting Policy for a Quiz

These same grade posting policies apply for quizzes. If you leave do not change the grade posting policy to manually, students will be able to immediately see their score after submitting the quiz. This is the case even if you have chosen to not “Let Students See Their Quiz Responses” in the quiz settings (see this post for more details). You likely have a personal preference for one way or the other.

One important caution is that if your quiz contains any manually graded questions, students will see a total quiz score that is allocating a zero for all of the manually graded questions until they have been graded. This may frighten your students! In these cases, it’d be better to keep the quiz grades hidden until all of the questions have been graded.

Student Access to their Grades

Once grades are posted (either automatically or manually), they become visible to students when they navigate to the assignment or quiz. They also become visible with Grades. When students go to Grades, their view looks similar to the image below. An individual student will only see their own grades. If you have Assignment Groups set up, students will see the weighting [1] and their score so far on that group [2]. To see their feedback and comments on each assignment or quiz, they click on the name.

Student Access to the Grade Distribution

By default, students have access to box-and-whisker plots of the class’s grade distribution on assignments. If you prefer to keep this hidden, here’s a guide: How do I hide grade distribution scoring details from students?

Student Access to their Total Course Grade

Another default setting is for students to have access to their Total course grade in Grades. This can be helpful for students to track how they are doing and allows them to use the What-If Grades function to predict their grade and set goals for assignment grades. Luckily, this is only available to students in you have set up weighted Assignment Groups because if you had not, the Total score could be meaningless. If you would prefer to keep the Total hidden, here’s a guide: How do I hide totals in my students’ grade summaries?

For help with these options and settings, please access Canvas Help within the global navigation menu on the left-hand side of Canvas. If you are experiencing technical issues, the first line of support is Canvas Help and then itsupport@usask.ca.

The Canvas Inbox (is better than you think)

Posted on by

Did you know that messages in Canvas are also called Conversations? And that when you send a message you are actually starting a conversation thread which is stored within Canvas? Since all messages (or conversations) are stored within Canvas you never have to worry about missing or losing any messages.  

The Canvas Inbox is an internal messaging system that allows you to send messages to: 

  • specific courses 
  • specific groups
  • sections in a course 
  • all students in a course,
  • groups of students in a course, and if you click the Send an individual message to each recipient checkbox, then each person in this group will not be able to see who has been included in the message 
  • individual students in a course  
  • people in your courses with specific roles (such as TA’s or instructors) 

When you have a message in your Canvas inbox, a notification will be sent to your regular USask NSID email (abc123@mail.usask.ca) to alert you. Notifications can push out to email, or text message depending upon your selection. 

You can reply to Canvas notifications fromyour USask Outlook email as long as your outgoing email address is your NSID@mail.usask.ca but if you have an email alias (e.g., firstname.lastname@usask.ca) you must add it to Canvas so that it recognizes both emails and allows you to respond to notifications from your USask Outlook email.   

The video, Replying to Canvas notifications from your email inbox  shows you how to set up your email alias in Canvas.  

There are many advantages to replying to Canvas messages through the Canvas inbox such as: 

  • it is one way to maintain privacy as everything is contained within Canvas and you do not need to use personal or other emails 
  • important conversations are kept within Canvas and are easy to find
  • you can easily select who you want to send messages to 
  • you can easily track communications with students
  • any comments that students make on their assignment submissions are copied to your inbox and any comments you make on student assignment submissions are copied into their inbox, so there is no need to go looking for comments/ feedback. You can filter your messages by type and find these comments under Submission Comments. 

Inbox

If you would like to receive a copy of the messages (or conversations) you send in Canvas you simply have to configure your general notifications so that you are notified right away whenever you start a conversation. You can also choose to receive a copy of any announcements you create in your course. 

The illustration below shows you the changes you need to make to your general notification preferences. To access the general notification preferences, click on the account link in the global navigation menu and then notifications. 

Notifications Menu

Everyone also has the ability to customize their Notification preferences for individual Canvas courses. These are known as course level notifications. Changes at the course level give you the opportunity to choose: 

  • which courses you want to receive notifications from,
  • which notifications you want to receive,  
  • how often you want to receive them and  
  • where you want to receive these notifications.

To change course level notification preferences simply go to the course home page and select View Course Notifications from the sidebar. 

The illustration below shows you what the course level notifications page looks like.  

Course notification preferencesNote – Whether or not students are alerted of Canvas messages in their USask Outlook email will depend on how they have set up their own notification preferences, they may only see their Canvas messages once they are logged in to Canvas. However by default, Canvas notification preferences are set so that they are notified right away whenever an announcement has been made in your course or when they have been sent a Canvas message. Whilst you cannot control how students set up their notifications, rest assured that any messages you send through Canvas will be there when they log in.

How Canvas supports students remixing and / or creating

Posted on by

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 principle.

4. Designed for students who are remixing and/or creating: Learning is most effective when systems are designed to help learners find, create, and/or repurpose significant content for the value of themselves and others. 

Remixing and/or Creating

Bloom developed a classification of thinking skills, which he ranked in order of complexity – remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating and creating. These six skills are used to design learning objectives that describe the skills and abilities instructors want their students to master and demonstrate. When students have to reorganize their learning and create something new, they are performing the most difficult mental function, which leads to a deeper level of learning.

How Canvas supports students remixing and/ or creating

Canvas leverages collaborative technology to allow multiple users to work together on the same project at the same time. Canvas allows you to create Group Sets that can house a number of student groups. Student groups can share files, create Canvas pages, send announcements, and have access to their own calendar, discussion board and collaboration tools, allowing them to work together more effectively.

Office 365 is integrated within Canvas allowing collaborations in Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Word files. Other collaborative tools approved for Canvas integration include Perusall and Padlet. Students can also create individual presentations using PowerPoint and videos using Panopto that can easily be shared in Canvas.

Canvas Commons allows for student created (and instructor created) materials to also be shared with other instructors and learners.

References

 

Student presentations in Canvas

Posted on by

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 you through the technology selection process as you design your student presentation. 

Let’s start with some assumptions: 

  • It is not best to try to recreate a live student presentation in an online learning environment 
  • The technologies we choose should allow our students to showcase their learning in the best possible light 
  • Students should spend more time learning your course’s actual content than learning new technologies 
  • You are using Canvas to host your course (since this is a Canvas-specific series) 

Thinking About Your Courses 

One of the many reasons we chose Canvas as our next LMS is that it can easily be used for active and social learning. How social is this presentation intended to be? Is it just for the instructor, or should other students view it too? 

A great advantage of student presentations in a classroom is that they can build community and encourage students to learn from their peers. How are you encouraging this sort of a classroom community in your online classroom environment?

You may want to ask your students to post their videos to a discussion (could you build it as a graded discussion post?) or otherwise you may want to allow students to see each other’s videos in your Panopto folders. It’s a good idea to plan for this social learning, when appropriate. 

To help you parse through the many considerations in designing the assessment, here are some questions you can think about in your own context: 

  • What learning outcome were you hoping to see from the presentation that you would not get from another assessment tool?
  • Is it necessary that your students all use the same technology for their video? Think about how technology choices affect the reliability and validity of your evaluation.
  • How should other students engage with their classmate’s presentation, if at all? 
  • Will students be presenting in groups or as individuals? 

Selecting a Technology 

Now, with your thoughts about your courses, let’s finally take a look at the pros and cons of technology options that are available to you and your students in this video.

If none of those sound like they will work in your case, then it may be worthwhile to consider your assessment’s design to see if it can be adapted to make better use of one of our supported technologies.  

In any case, you may have thought that there was more than one good option for your assessment. Ask yourself if you should accept presentations in a variety of formats. While this will result in an inconsistent viewing experience for you, it would mean that your students would be able to use the technology that is most intuitive for them, mitigating some of the technological difficulties they may experience with the assessment. 

While the number of technology options available in Canvas can be overwhelming at times, the flexibility helps us deliver accessible, learning-centered assessments that are designed for students who are creating, and that enable connections – each of which is a principle of our Learning Technology Ecosystem.

Putting the Plan into Action 

Is a plan now coming to life in your mind? Do you know what your next steps are? Videos are provided below to show you how to create the video assignment in Canvas, as well as how students submit these assignments.

You can contact the Gwenna Moss Centre to discuss your choice of platform, or IT Support Services to for support in getting everything properly configured in your Canvas course with the external tools. 

Understanding Timer, Availability, and Accommodation Settings for Canvas Classic Quizzes

Posted on by

As we continue our move to Canvas after a decade with Blackboard, there are some new settings to highlight and understand with setting up Classic Quizzes in Canvas. This post aims to clarify these settings to allow for the smoothest experience for you and your students.

Time Limit

  • The time limit is the amount of time students have to complete the quiz from when they first open it. If they navigate away from the page, restart their computer, etc. the timer continues to run. Once the timer runs out, the quiz auto-submits unless the Available Until time occurs first

Available Until Time

  • The Available Until time is when the quiz ends and is no longer available. The quiz auto-submits at this time even if there is time left on the student’s timer
    • For example, if a quiz is available until 12:00 and has a time limit of 60 minutes, if a student were to begin the quiz 11:30, it will auto-submit at 12:00 even though the student still has 30 minutes left on the timer
    • This operates differently than the timer on Blackboard’s Test tool
    • It is imperative that you inform your students that the quiz will auto-submit at the Available Until time, no matter when they begin the quiz
      • Canvas will also warn the student if they begin the quiz with less time remaining until the Available Until time than the full allowed Time Limit

Available From Time

  • The Available From time is when students can first open the quiz. If the quiz is Published, students will be able to see that the quiz exists prior to this time, but it will be locked to them if they try to access it

Publishing the Quiz

  • As mentioned above, if a quiz is Published, students will be able to see that the quiz exists prior to this time, but it will be locked to them if they try to access it
  • Publishing is necessary in order to set up accommodations for students, such as time-and-a-half
  • Published quizzes appear by default within the Quizzes and Assignments menu items. They also appear in Modules, if you have added it to a module

Providing Students with Extra Time or Attempts

  • If you want or need to provide with students with quiz accommodations, such as time-and-a-half, you will first need to publish your quiz. Once published, you can access Moderate This Quiz
    • Within Moderate This Quiz, you can click on the edit pencil next to each student’s name to provide extra time or extra attempts
      • Note that this entry is for extra time and not the total time. For example, if you quiz is 60 minutes and you want the student to get 90 minutes, you enter 30 minutes
    • VERY IMPORTANT: The Available Until time will override this added extra time. If you are only providing students with an exam writing window that matches the Time Limit, you will need to change the Available Until for the accommodated students. This is done by adding exceptions to the Assign field on the Edit page for the quiz
    • The Moderate This Quiz settings only apply for this specific quiz. They need to be set up each student each time you offer a quiz

For help with these options and settings access Canvas Help within the global menu on the left-hand side of Canvas. To discuss the best approach to using these settings in your course, email movetocanvas@usask.ca.

Active and social learning in Canvas

Posted on by

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 principle.

2. Active and Social: Learning is a process of meaning making, constructed through learning with others, and as part of an intentional, deliberate system within a course and across experiences.

Active and Social learning enhances student engagement and promotes comprehension and memory. These types of learning are important elements in a learner-centered approach to knowledge. In order for learning to be considered active, a student must be processing, discovering and applying information, not just passively listening or reading. Offering students the opportunity to actively participate in their learning in a social learning space has been shown to enhance student engagement and promote both comprehension and memory.  

Active and Social Learning in Canvas 

Canvas has several features that can be used to facilitate active and social learning. This may be more important in a remote setting as it can help mitigate feelings of isolation in students and promote the connectivity and social aspect that face-to-face classes intrinsically offer.  

Canvas has a discussions feature that can be used to promote active and social learning. Discussions can be focused or threaded and can be used to analyze or solve problems and offer opinions. It is an asynchronous communication tool allowing posts to be read or replied to at any time within the discussion availability window. 

Groups and group sets can be set up in Canvas to allow students to work collaboratively and build learning communities. When students are part of a group they have their own workspace where they can work on group assignments, share files, create pages and start their own discussions; in this way you can encourage social learning.   

Student collaborations allow students to work together on the same document. Only students in each group can see collaborations for their group but instructors can view them all. The University of Saskatchewan supports Microsoft Office 365 as its collaborative tool. This means that Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint can be used for collaboration. 

References 

How does Canvas make learning accessible?

Posted on by

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 principle.

  1. Accessible: Learning must be found easily at any time, and all learners and teachers have equitable access, regardless of culture, language, ability, etc. 

Accessible education gives everyone equal access to content and ensures that all learners have equitable access to course content regardless of their culture, language, age gender, preferred learning style or ability. Accessible courses remove barriers that may exist for some students and reduce the instructor’s need to make individual student accommodations.  

Accessible education has advantages for both students and instructors.   

Advantages for instructors Advantages for students
A course that is designed to be accessible for many students reduces the likelihood of instructors having to arrange individual or specialized accommodations for students  Students can determine when, where and how to access course information
An accessible course can improve student learning and show clearer evidence of that learning  Students can spend more time focusing on course content
An accessible course can improve student engagement and may have a positive effect on course evaluations More inclusive of students with different abilities and backgrounds

How does Canvas make learning accessible? 

Canvas has an Accessibility Checker that ensures any content created within the Rich Content Editor follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines  (WCAG 2.1). The Accessibility Checker ensures that text is easy to read, that tables include captions and header rows, and that images include alternative text describing their content. All of these features give students with disabilities equitable access to course content.   

Assessments are important to evaluate student learning and Canvas has several features that can accommodate student needs and personalize their learning experience. Mastery Paths  allow Instructors to customize student’s learning experiences based on their performance. Instructors can give students extra time to complete a quiz or allow them to try it multiple times. Instructors also have the option to customize assignment due dates for individual students.  

Canvas Mobile Apps are available for both Android and iOS devices and are designed to allow students and instructors to access their courses at anytime from anywhere they have Internet access. The Canvas student app allows students to do many things on the go, such as submit assignments and participate in discussions. The Canvas teacher app allows instructors the flexibility to grade assignments and communicate with students from their mobile devices. 

References 

Read more about Canvas accessibility. 

 

 

Reading the Remote Room: Surveying your students

Posted on by

It is always a good idea to collect feedback from your students about your teaching, but this importance is magnified while teaching remotely.

  • if you’re teaching primarily synchronously, such as on WebEx, you might be getting a sense that things are going well, without realizing that some students are struggling with the content and/or their internet connections
  • if you’re teaching primarily asynchronously and don’t have regular assessment and engagement methods in place, you might be finding it difficult to get much of a read at all

Now that we’re a month into the term, it would be a great time to anonymously survey your students for feedback. Both Canvas and Blackboard have built-in survey tools, but their abilities to be truly anonymous are limited. Due to this, I would suggest surveying your students using another USask tool: SurveyMonkey.

Creating and Sending the Survey

You can access the USask login for SurveyMonkey at https://surveymonkey.usask.ca/. Once you create the survey, you can distribute it to your students as a Web Link. Depending on the LMS you are teaching in, you can send it via email or the Canvas Inbox tool. You could also include the Web Link URL in your course. When students respond, their responses will be anonymous. For assistance with the specific survey building steps in SurveyMonkey, view this video.

What to ask?

If you’re not sure what questions to ask, a great place to start would be with a Stop-Start-Continue. This set of questions can provide a breadth of feedback on not only things that students are having issues with, but also on the things that are working well. You simply ask the students:

  • What is something you would like me/us to STOP doing regarding the teaching and design of this course?
  • What is something you would like me/us to START doing regarding the teaching and design of this course?
  • What is something you would like me/us to CONTINUE doing regarding the teaching and design of this course?

You may want to ask for feedback around how much time the students are putting into the course each week, what technical issues they are having, and/or anything else you are wondering about regarding the course.

After you collect the feedback, make sure to let students know that you reviewed it and highlight some changes you have made.

Please contact the team at the GMCTL for further support.

Grading Discussions in Canvas

Posted on by

You’ve set up and run your first graded discussion in Canvas – and the volume of posts seems a bit daunting. Now it’s time to assess the individual student contributions against the defined criteria, and get results out to them before the next discussion goes up.

Here are some tips for grading discussions, using tools in Canvas to assist with the task.

  • Discussions and Settings Gear ButtonsCanvas automatically marks posts as ‘read’ when you scroll down the page (changing the green dot left of the post to white). This function might interfere with keeping track of what you’ve read, and be a time waster if you have to backtrack through posts automatically marked as read that you didn’t actually read. You can choose to ‘Manually mark posts as read’ by navigating to the Discussions Index page and clicking on the gear pictured here.
  • On the discussion page you wish to grade, choose SpeedGrader in Options (grey box, three dots) which will sort individual student posts into one column, from that discussion only. If you want to pop back to the discussion to see a student’s replies in context, a link to view the full discussion is at the top of the summary. The video Canvas Speedgrader gives a brief overview of navigating through this tool.
  • If you created groups for a discussion, you can also access their discussion through their group’s home page menu, and proceed to SpeedGrader via Options (grey box, three dots)
  • Comments on the posts can be made in text, audio or video, all composed within SpeedGrader. Video comments might be especially appropriate if the students’ posts and replies were video responses. Once you have the knack of doing video comments, you may find them quicker to compose than typed text. Also, video comments are just one more way for you to ‘be present’ for students in remote delivery.
  • If you invested time in building a good rubric for discussions, the reward comes not just in alignment with learning outcomes and student understanding of requirements, but also in minimizing grading bias. In addition, the ranking you choose for each criterion should reduce the number of comments needed to communicate to students what they did well and where they can improve.

Using Your Rubric in SpeedGrader:

Speedgrader and Rubric Example

  • View the rubric in Speedgrader alongside an individual student’s posts and use it to calculate the grade by clicking on the rankings, shown above at [1]. The Canvas guide for using rubrics in SpeedGrader walks you through the process.
  • Override rating numbers by entering a number manually in the Points (Pts) box [2]. If you find yourself overriding the rating number consistently, think about adjusting the ratings to a number range for the next discussion, or adding a rating level or two, to your criteria.
  • You can enter text comments for any criterion in the rubric by clicking on the comment icon. [3] Additional comments (text, audio or video) are entered below the rubric.
  • Rubrics in Canvas can be used for multiple discussions; however, if you want to make modifications to a rubric each time, you need to make a copy and edit that copy while setting up a new discussion.

What’s a Well-Designed Canvas Course Look Like?

Posted on by

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 following two examples. In both cases, student information and data has been removed.

ETAD 402 – Multimedia Design and Production
This course from Professor Marguerite Koole in the College of Education is a blended course in that it’s a mix of asynchronous and synchronous delivery.

ENVS 818 – Introduction to Sustainability
This course from Professor Maureen Reed from the School of Environment and Sustainability. This is an example of an asynchronous course and is also a condensed course, delivered over only two weeks. It makes extensive use of Discussions.

While building your own course in Canvas, or reviewing it once it’s built, you may find this checklist useful. The checklist covers details related to the course navigation and information, content, student assessment, and course accessibility. The checklist will support you in achieving our Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles and other principles of effective instructional design.

Finally, the video below explores a course that is poorly organized. This is not an actual course, but may reflect issues that you’re trying to avoid. This post explains the purpose and how to use modules in your remote courses to avoid these issues. There are also a number of additional resources available on remote teaching and using Canvas at the U of S.

Small group synchronous discussion or presentations using WebEX

Posted on by

WebEx has a new feature that allows you to automatically or manually sort your students into small groups so they can remotely do the types of small group activities you had them do in your face to face classroom. While they are in groups, you can:

  • send a message to give instructions, to all or some of the rooms or people
  • pop into the rooms to observe
  • invite people back to the main room
  • end all the break out rooms to automatically close them

When students return to the main meeting room, they have video off and be muted, but they can change those settings once they are back.

The 5-minute video below is a step by step video of how to set up breakout rooms and use the features.

Using Authentic Assessment to Integrate Current Events Into Courses

Posted on by

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 and instructors, including:

  • Enabling students to actively engage with current issues to increase engagement in learning
  • Allowing students to see the role the discipline may play in addressing issues
  • Broadening the audience, which may lead to increased effort and quality
  • Sharing potential solutions outside of institution is “what the world needs”
  • Reducing issues around academic integrity

When creating such activities for your students there are a number of things that you will need to consider. You want to make sure that any assessments align with your course learning, so always start with the outcomes and then choose an appropriate assessment. What do you want students to be able to demonstrate in terms of knowledge, skill, understanding, etc. by the end of your course? Those are your course outcomes.

Based on your outcomes, think about what an authentic assessment in your discipline addressing these outcomes may look like.

  • Do you have an existing activity that could be modified or will you be creating a new assessment?
  • What will you accept as evidence toward students achieving those outcomes?
  • How will you differentiate between “well” and “really well”?

The “what” you assess could be a product the students produce such as a poster, video, or webpage, or you could assess the students’ reflections on the learning process. See this post on how a U of S instructor is already doing this.

You should also consider how students might share their work. If they are creating something like a video or poster, others may benefit from their work. Plus, research shows that students whose work is shared with an audience larger than just the instructor produce higher quality work.

If you are looking at ways for students to share their finished work, you should provide them with individual choices as to whether they’ll share it, if so, what license they’d like on their work.

Other considerations include:

  • What is a need in your discipline (for information or ideas) that your students could fill?
  • Who is the audience that needs this information?
  • What is the best way of presenting the information to make it easiest for the audience to understand it, be interested in it, and stumble across it?
  • How will you or others review what your students create for accuracy and quality?
  • How will your students be assessed? Can you use experts and community members to provide feedback to your students during or after the project?
  • Are funding and technical supports available to help you?
  • How will your students work together on shared documents and idea generation?  Consider communication platforms, project management materials, etc.

To help you move forward with authentic assessment, here are some ideas for embedding such activities into your courses, whether undergraduate or graduate:

  • History – make an ongoing project out of improving existing Canadian History open textbooks to better reflect the history and contributions of groups often excluded from history texts.
  • Marketing – have students create and publicly share marketing campaigns around raising awareness of one or more pressing issues. Such a project was done in British Columbia to create a plan to raise awareness about the United Nations Climate Action Campaign.
  • AgBio – as people are more interested in home gardens, have students create plain language tip sheets or brochures (openly licensed and freely downloadable) for those who are  just getting started growing food in their own yards or community gardens.
  • Education – have students create and publicly share resources for teachers and students on how to teach / learn remotely, addressing concerns around access and time management.
  • Health Sciences – have students revise existing open resources on taking patient histories when needing to do patient intake through virtual means OR have students revise such resources to be more culturally inclusive.
  • Kinesiology – have students create and openly share resources for people to be more active at home.
  • Engineering – have students collaborate on potential solutions to some of the issues facing schools and post-secondary institutions around the use of on campus classrooms during a health crisis, sharing their results with relevant stakeholders in the community and farther reaching.

If you have questions or would like more information about authentic assessment or would like to apply for some potential funding to support authentic assessment, please email us at the GMCTL.