Educational Technology
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Canvas Commons Opens New Ways to Share Materials With Colleagues, and Beyond
As part of our move to the Canvas LMS, the U of S gains the use of the Canvas Commons. The Canvas website describe it as: Commons is a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share resources. A digital library full of educational content, Commons allows Canvas users to share learning resources with other users as well as import learning resources into a Canvas course. As an instructor who is a Canvas user at USask, you will be able to find materials in, and share materials to the Canvas Commons. In addition, there are institution-wide documents, such as a U of S Canvas template available 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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Three Ways of Delivering Remote Learning
Making some preliminary decisions about the direction of your remote course can help you focus in face of a sometimes overwhelming number of technological options and educational jargon. Here are three ways of delivering remote learning to contemplate before you go too far down any one path. Prior to locking yourself into a method, you should keep in mind that your students may face some constraints or limitations for synchronous learning (e.g., bandwidth, webcams, a suitable space to participate in the call). Check in with your students about any such restrictions. Will you meet virtually with your students at a scheduled time for teaching and learning? “Synchronous” means you and…
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Teaching Performance-Based Classes Remotely
For those of us who have ever taught courses that require a lot of practicing a skill, this move to remote and online instruction is crushing. It is one thing to record a video of something you’d tell your students and put it up online somewhere for them to access, and another thing to think about a performance based course. When I first taught drama online, I could not see how to do it, as I did not want to lose both the “doing” and the “together” parts of when everyone is learning by themselves at different times. To be honest, I still really prefer teaching drama in a room…
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Tips From Veterans of Remote / Online Teaching
As you prepare to create and teach courses remotely this spring and summer terms, we asked some U of S instructors experienced with this type of teaching to share some quick words of wisdom based on what they learned from their own experiences. Below are their tips related to design, teaching, and assessment for remote / online. Thank you to Jorden Cummings (Psychology), Allison Fairbairn (Music), Hayley Hesseln (Agriculture and Bio Resources), and Karla Panchuk (Geology) for sharing your experiences teaching remote / online courses. Design Keep it as simple as possible. Online learning difficult for many students for diverse reasons, and we cannot assume our students have access to…
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It’s Okay to Keep it Simple
As we all rapidly transition to remote instruction this week due to COVID-19, it is actually better to keep it simple. When a friend sent me a blog post called Please do a bad job of putting your course online, I was initially offended. As I read the post, I realized it offered some really good advice. We aren’t trying to make awesome online courses (that takes too much effort at this stage), and faculty and students are dealing with lots of complications in their lives. We are trying to protect ourselves and others with social distancing while ensuring students don’t lose the credits they are working for. With that…
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Top Hat: How is it being used at the U of S?
The University of Saskatchewan has a continuing commitment to a technology-enhanced learning environment for students and in January 2016 acquired a campus-wide license for the Top Hat student response system. Top Hat is a software-based student response system, incorporating a “bring-your-own-device” solution, that is available at no direct cost to instructors and students. The primary goal of Top Hat is to enhance the teaching and learning experience for both instructors and students by bringing more engagement and interaction into traditional passive lecture-style learning approaches. Who we are We are a research team at the University of Saskatchewan who are interested in student response systems with a specific focus on Top…
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First-time Thoughts on a Student Blog Assignment
[social-bio] By Yin Liu, Associate Professor, Department of English Why I did it In 2016-2017 I taught, for the first time, a full-year (6 credit unit) English course. The course, “History and Future of the Book,” is one of our Foundations courses – that is, it is one of a few 200-level courses required for our majors. As in all of our courses, there is a substantial writing component, usually in the form of essay assignments. I decided to complicate my life further by trying out a type of student assignment also new to me: a student-written course blog. I had been thinking about using a student blog assignment ever since…
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Wikipedia’s Ways of Knowing – Part 2
By John Kleefeld In the first part of this two-part piece, I discussed arborescent (vertical, discrete, hierarchical) and rhizomatic (horizontal, overlapping, interconnected) ways of acquiring and classifying knowledge, as well as the convergence of the arbor and the rhizome in modern knowledge systems. In this part, I discuss how this applies to Wikipedia. Most of us use the Web rhizomatically: we enter a search term in Google or Wikipedia, look at the search results, and follow the links, whether to other Wikipedia pages or other online or offline resources. As I said in the previous post, this lets us explore pathways that interest us most, and may also lead to more engaged…