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Understanding Timer, Availability, and Accommodation Settings for Canvas Classic Quizzes
Setting up Classic Quizzes in Canvas involves some important settings to highlight and understand. This post aims to clarify these settings to allow for the smoothest experience for you and your students. Note: if you’re using Canvas New Quizzes, please go here instead: Canvas – Add accommodations to a New Quiz. 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…
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Reading the Remote Room: Surveying your students
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 (e.g., on Zoom) 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. Canvas has a built-in…
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Making the Most of Synchronous Lectures
Synchronous lectures are likely to seem awkward for the first while, but by following the suggestions below you’ll be making the most of your time together and building a community of learners. Synchronous lectures mean that you and students are “together” using an online platform or tool in real time. When you choose to teach in real time, you are deciding that a schedule will be set, you will teach at that time, and students will attend at that time. Students will need to ensure that their schedules are free and they have the necessary hardware (e.g., computer, mic, webcam) and a fast enough internet connection. The supported tool for…
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Simple Strategies to Elevate your Asynchronous Delivery
By now you are probably familiar with the concept of asynchronous remote learning. If not, asynchronous learning means you and students are not limited by timing. You are deciding that students can engage with the material on their schedule, at times, and places when they may have better bandwidth and other kinds of capacity. As you can imagine, asynchronous learning can be of varying quality; therefore, here are some tips and ideas to keep in mind to help make the most of your asynchronous design. One important way to make the most of your asynchronous learning is to finalize the learning materials (e.g., creation of lecture videos, suggested readings, discussion…
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Leveraging Peer Feedback in an Online Environment
When students take courses in-person, they often find at least one friend in the course with which they discuss the course, the assignments, give feedback to one another, and so on. With the shift to remote delivery, students might have more trouble finding someone to connect with on their own. This post explores how you can introduce peer feedback into your course to ensure that your students have a chance to share their work and receive feedback from peers. In the best cases, they might even form friendships, but another benefit of using peer feedback is that the quality of student work usually increases, which can make your marking much…
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Panopto or Narrated PowerPoint
With regards to the use of Panopto for instructional videos, a frequently asked question is, “why one would use Panopto instead of a narrated PowerPoint file or video?” Instructors who are comfortable with using the “Record Slide Show” feature in PowerPoint are encouraged to continue to use it. However, someone who is new to recording slideshows or who is interested in learning a new way of recording instructional videos should consider using Panopto. Reasons to consider Panopto over PowerPoint: One of the benefits of using Panopto is that it creates streaming video files. This means they can easily be viewed on any web-enabled device. In order to view a narrated…
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Coffee and Icebergs: Analogies, Metaphors, and Stories in Teaching Tough Concepts
[social_share/] [social-bio] Nancy Turner, GMCTE Director, recently came across an intriguing resource on an Australian listserve called the Chemistry Pedagogical Content Knowledge Project. This site had been developed through a large qualitative research project and this specific resource is for Chemistry. She shared it with me, and after exploring it, I was inspired by its contents. It also made me wonder if there were similar resources for other disciplines. This resource is described on the site in this way: Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) encompasses carefully selected analogies, examples, explanations and demonstrations used by a teacher to make a topic comprehensible to students. (ChemPCK) In other words, it contains specific lesson…
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Single-Point Rubrics: Exceeding Expectations
[social_share/] [social-bio] As an Instructional Designer, I often speak on the value of assessment rubrics. There are many reasons why creating a rubric for each assignment, providing students with the rubric, and using the rubric while grading can be advantageous. Many of these reasons are highlighted in the video below, including: You write the same comments on several assignments You decide how to assess after the assignments are handed in You realize after grading a few papers that your students didn’t understand the assignment expectations (Stevens & Levi, 2005) Knowing about these reasons for rubrics, I sat down last fall to create few rubrics for the assignments in an undergraduate…
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Feedback to Improve Teaching
[social_share/] [social-bio] This fall I taught my first for-credit university course. I have plenty of previous teaching experience in the K-12 system and non-credit workshops/courses offered through the GMCTE, but this was the first-time teaching paying university students. I was feeling some apprehension and added pressure. With this pressure in mind (and wanting to provide the best learning experience possible) I put together a formative assessment plan for the course. This plan would allow students to provide me with feedback on my teaching and use of learning activities. Here is a list of some of the items in that plan: Pre-Course Survey: I began with a pre-course survey the last…
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Why You Should Consider Lecture Capture
[social_share/] [social-bio] “Lecture Capture describes technologies instructors can use to record voice and data projector content and make those recordings available digitally” (ICT University of Saskatchewan). At the University of Saskatchewan, many rooms are equipped to allow instructors to easily record their live lectures and distribute these recordings to their students. Now that I’ve defined what lecture capture is, let’s explore why you should consider using it. Research has shown numerous benefits. A study found that, after using lecture capture across a variety of disciplines, class sizes, and teaching styles, students and faculty were both in favor of using lecture recordings. Benefits for students included: being able to review material that was…