DEU | Online Teaching & Edtech ideas
Instructional design ideas, online teaching tools, and best practices for learning from the USask Distance Education Unit
Poll Everywhere is a web-based polling tool now available at USask. It allows for group engagement, feedback, and interaction through live online polling, surveys, Q&As, quizzes, word clouds, and more. Poll Everywhere is also a fairly flexible tool, and can be used for teaching and learning in face-to-face synchronous, online synchronous (i.e., Zoom), and online asynchronous situations. This post will focus on providing some tips and ideas for using Poll Everywhere in your asynchronous online courses, including instructions for how to embed the activity into a Canvas page.
Continue reading “Using Poll Everywhere in an Asynchronous Online Course”
If you’re going back into the classroom this fall after several terms of remote-only instruction, don’t abandon the LMS (i.e., the Learning Management System) just yet! LMSs like Canvas have a lot to offer for your face-to-face classes. Here are some ideas for how to enhance your F2F course using the LMS and some related online learning tools and strategies.
Before a new term begins, you might be running through a mental list to decide if you’ve put all the pieces in place to get your new online (or remote) class up and running. This Online Course Beginning-of-Term Checklist should cover the essentials, and offer some helpful links and tips for completing these tasks in Canvas.
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An update coming to Canvas on Feb. 20th should be of interest to anybody involved in courses that use mathematical or chemical expressions, equations, and formulae. The update will enable MathJax, a JavaScript display engine that works in all modern browsers and was designed with the goal of creating a single, comprehensive, math-on-the-web platform. Continue reading “Writing Mathematical Expressions in Canvas Using LaTeX”
DEU often uses platforms like WordPress, Pressbooks and other content management systems for building learning technology functions beyond the capabilities of a standard LMS. We tend to think of the LMS as a central learning hub where students can branch out from to access pockets of content across the world wide web. However, once unleashed into the vast sea of the internet students can, at times, lose focus and be set adrift. It would be nice if we could “wrap” these outside websites, news channels, homework systems etc. inside of Canvas in order to keep students within the walls of the LMS and on task. The Redirect Tool does just that, and we’ll show you how. Continue reading “Redirect Tool App in Canvas”
If you have an online/remote Canvas course, especially one with a lot of text-based content, there are a number of reasons why a student may prefer to export your course to an e-reader to study offline, or even print as much of the course content as possible. Some students struggle to read from computer screens for extended periods of time. Others like to take lots of notes or highlight any text-based content they are learning from. Others might have poor internet connections, or be planning to travel to areas where they know their connectivity will be limited. Whatever the reason, giving students the option to Export the content from Canvas will improve the accessibility of your course! Continue reading “Exporting and Printing Content from Canvas”
At the start of 2021 Canvas released a new Rich Content Editor (RCE) with a variety of new and updated features. Despite these upgrades the Instructional Design team at DEU has had a number of requests from instructors for some specific ways to enhance the look of their course content pages. The HTML Editor in the RCE allows you to do some basic HTML editing on course pages to add features and functions otherwise not available in the main editor. However, this is not a TRUE HTML editor in that Canvas will, at times, strip out or block any HTML code that it sees as a security risk. If you hit a wall trying to make HTML work in Canvas, that is likely why. A second warning is to perhaps practice in a test course before trying these methods in your live class as you can inadvertently cause errors on your page if you’re not a seasoned HTML’er. That said, you don’t need a background in coding to try out some of these features. A little patience and an adventurous spirit should get you through.
In this post we’ll look at adding some simple code snippets to add to the HTML editor in the Canvas RCE to help add function and create more dynamic web pages in your Canvas course. From Text Boxes, Line Breaks, Wrapping Text to Creating Interactive Buttons, see some of the common items people are adding to their course pages using the HTML editor. Continue reading “Canvas HTML editing”