Educational Technology
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Improving Accessibility with Canvas’ Rich Content Editor
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba Small formatting changes on Canvas Pages, Assignments, Quizzes and the Syllabus page can make your course more accessible. Using the suggestions below will improve clarity, readability, and navigation for all your students. In the Rich Content Editor (RCE) menu bar, illustrated below: The drop-down menu on the Paragraph option [1] has three levels of heading choices. Using headings, rather than just enlarging the text, helps a screen reader to interpret new sections and provides consistent spacing between materials. Keep headings under 120 characters. Avoid skipping heading levels. Canvas uses Microsoft Immersive Reader for text-to-speech functionality. After inserting an image [2] click on the Accessibility Checker icon located immediately…
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Discussions in Canvas – Asking Good Questions – Part 1
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba Asking questions is one of the most powerful tools we have as instructors. Just like asking good questions in class, promoting discussion with questions that capture students’ attention and stimulate intellectual engagement can be facilitated online, using Canvas Discussions. Crafting questions for a discussion forum depends on the purpose of the discussion, and your learning outcomes. Open-ended questions with multiple possible responses challenge students and can help to deepen the discussion, supported by your facilitation (or your TA’s) in the forum. One way to create open-ended questions with multiple possible responses is by using Bloom’s hierarchy (1956; Anderson & Krathwohl, 2000) of cognitive skills, a framework that…
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Choosing a mix of F2F and remote online? Tips for smoother hybrid approaches
The University has announced a return to campus stating Feb. 7th. With the exception of some specific programs designed to provide hybrid options, instructors are not expected to teach students face to face (F2F) and online at the same time in their F2F course(s). However, you may be trying to provide some extra options for your students in these complicated times, and if you are, here are some tips you may wish to use to help your students avoid pitfalls: Help students hold the details: Review where to find everything in your Canvas course, and remember that half of USask students access Canvas through the app. (see how to video…
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Immersive Reader Enhances Accessibility in Canvas
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba The Immersive Reader option in Canvas helps students access your course materials, whether they have a certain learning or medical disability, use English as an additional language – or could simply benefit from its text-to-speech function. The Immersive Reader button, at the top right-hand of Pages, Assignments, the Course Home Page, and Syllabus page, gives users access to a multitude of functions. Fortunately, the button appears automatically; therefore as an instructor, all you need to do is make students aware of the function and embed any text directly into the Rich Content Editor when composing a page or assignment. What can the Immersive Reader do? Read and…
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Collaboration technical tools
One of the essential goals of the Learning Technology Ecosystem at USask is to allow students to connect to others. While collaboration skills are one of the essential skills most employers describe, the need for collaboration tools is actually more immediate. When students have the opportunity to think through things actively with others, they learn more than they if they only listen to a professor talk about them, and they are more likely to be able to apply what they learn. Best ways to support collaboration Focus on talking to others during the learning, like working on questions or discussing, instead of group projects. When you do group projects, don’t…
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GMCTL to Launch New Open Course on Open in Early February
The University of Saskatchewan is a leader in Canada around open educational resources (e.g. textbooks) and is moving toward wider integration of open pedagogy (students as contributors, not just consumers of knowledge). As part of this, and in the spirit of open educational practices (OEP), on February 1, 2022 we are launching a new open course to assist instructors in learning about all aspects of OEP. Open educational practices are a range of practices based on the idea that collaborating on the creation of and freely sharing knowledge, research, and learning materials benefits all of us. Key aspects of OEP include: Materials are accessible Anyone can create, collaborate on, and…
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USask spaces that flex with the type of learning
Many USask classrooms have been designed with one thing in mind – successful transmission of information from the faculty member to the students. Even as technologies changed over time, that model did not – we just added screens, data projectors for our slideshows, and cameras and microphones to capture a lecture. Current theories of learning tell us that people learn some things well by hearing about them, but they need to pair that with talking to others about it, practicing and getting feedback, and actively doing for most types of learning. We are now designing flexible classrooms that can do each of these types of learning in a sequence, all…
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Turn Pre-Class Readings into Social Learning
When we design courses, we carefully choose readings or videos for students to review before coming to class. We then plan for the fantastic discussions and activities that will occur in class. All too often, when we arrive in class, we quickly realize that most of the students have not engaged with the pre-class materials in any meaningful way. This forces us to shift our plans and leaves us discouraged. Perusall is a tool in the USask Learning Technology Ecosystem that is specifically designed to get students meaningfully engaging with the pre-class materials. It is what is known as a social annotation tool. It transforms pre-class readings and videos into…
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Using Zoom Meetings in Canvas
Zoom is a web conferencing tool available in Canvas. To be enabled, it has to be added to the course navigation menu. Zoom can be used to schedule lectures, group meetings or appointments. Students can join any virtual meeting directly through Canvas and can review any recorded sessions through the Zoom Meetings link. The videos below explain how to use Zoom to schedule meetings and office hours in Canvas. Using Zoom to schedule meetings in Canvas (7.31) Using Zoom to schedule office hours in Canvas (4.05) How students can join a Zoom session in Canvas Once in Canvas students can simply click the Join button, either from the Zoom Meetings…
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Making it Accessible: Turn on live captions in Zoom
When you have certain learning disabilities or you are studying in a language you aren’t fully fluent in, it is easy to miss important details of what your professor says. As an instructor, you can make what you say accessible for all your learners by turning on captions before your Zoom meetings. The button to turn it on is right beside the button for breakout rooms at the bottom of your computer screen in Zoom. Unfortunately, there are currently only English transcripts and you need to deliberately turn them on for each meeting. However, Audio Transcript is added to Zoom recordings using our default settings so no action is required…