Instructional Strategies
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Elaborations on Canvas collaborations
The transition to remote learning has been in progress for almost a year now, with many instructors grabbing the Canvas bull by the horns and learning how to use the different Canvas tools to provide their students with the best learning experience possible. With what feels like the whole world working remotely right now, collaborating with peers and colleagues is a necessary skill that we can help students develop and refine. Learning to work collaboratively is important because it not only helps to prepare students for careers but it elegantly highlights that it is often easier to succeed at tasks when working in a team. Canvas gives you the ability…
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Initiating Peer Conversations
It’s been a while since I wrote a conversational blog post – in a pre-pandemic world, more of our content on this site was first-person and took the tone of a friendly colleague. In the pandemic context, our blog quickly became a knowledge base to help you get the help you needed, when you needed it. The dropping temperatures in Saskatchewan are reminding me of last winter, when work felt like a much different place. While most of us aren’t currently walking, biking, skiing to campus, the days are still just as beautiful with the crystalline quality of light and crisp skies. I hope that this post is a moment…
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How Canvas Tools Can Enable Connection
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba This post is part of a series about using Canvas to integrate the eight Learning Technology Ecosystem Principles. You can find more about these principles here; in this post, we look at the seventh principle. Designed to enable connection: Learners exist in accessible networks, and connect to the experiences, concepts, people, and ideas that they need. The importance of connection Research across disciplines – from anthropology, to developmental psychology, to cognitive neuroscience – demonstrates that our sociality is interwoven with our learning processes. Important factors in social pedagogy and in establishing a social learning space include building a sense of belonging and a sense of community, and instructor…
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Creating Discussions in Canvas to Support Student Learning
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba The technical creation of a discussion in Canvas is relatively straightforward and intuitive. What requires deeper initial consideration is how using the discussion tool will support student learning. Here, we look at the necessary planning for setting up purposeful discussions, then the post that follows, we’ll go through the technical aspects of discussion set-up. This is the first post of four in a series on using the Discussions tool in Canvas. Why use discussions? Substantial research over the past 20 years indicates discussion forums can be places where high quality discussions take place, to rival the quality of in-class discussions and include contributions from all students. As…
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How Canvas supports student control and ownership of learning
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba 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…
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How Canvas supports students remixing and / or creating
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…
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Active and social learning in Canvas
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…
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The “What if…?”s of Live Zoom Sessions
Interested in using Zoom for online, synchronous learning? Here are some basic ‘what-ifs’ to consider before you start using Zoom. What if a student refuses to mute themselves? To start, tell students that you will have specific times during your live session where they will be able to speak and that they should wait to be prompted, or wait for other cues, to unmute themselves. Set the tone from the beginning of the session that there are appropriate times to share and other times to not. If this is repeatedly a concern, you can use the Host Tools (Shield Icon) in the meeting controls to secure the meeting and minimize…
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Remote Breakout Rooms – Facilitating Small Group Discussions and Interactions with Zoom
The move to remote learning has created challenges for actively engaging students in our classes. A simple think-pair-share activity now requires extensive descriptions of who is partnered with whom, how will you communicate, and how much time do you have – not to mention how to use the available technology to complete the activity. The truth is – facilitating learning activities and interactions remotely is different, but with some planning still provides our learners with valuable opportunities to engage, think, create and do – to practice and improve the things you want them to learn. If you are considering delivering any part of your class synchronously – consider actively engaging your…
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Why Open Educational Practices in Our Context?
In the previous post about open educational practices (OEP) at USask, I explained what they are. In this post, we will explore why so many people are already engaging in OEP, and why you should consider integrating these practices into your own teaching and research. Our beliefs make us Open supporters Open allows students to participate in the co-creation and sharing of text on current major issues (BLM / Indigenous lives, the pandemic, climate change, struggling small businesses) in their learning, demonstrating that USask is engaged with addressing major issues shaping the world and giving students relevant career skills they can demonstrate for potential employers. When students create materials to…