Remote Teaching
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Elevate Your Course Projects using Riipen
USask faculty members have been taking advantage of our new partnership with the Riipen project-based learning platform. Riipen provides an all-in-one platform for connecting, communicating, sharing documents, and managing deadlines between stakeholders (instructors, students, and community/industry partners). This post highlights the experiences within two USask courses. Course within College of Agriculture and Bioresources Within the College of Agriculture and Bioresources, faculty member Dr. Sabine Liebenehm, wanted her upper-year Agricultural Economics students to be able to complete a business analysis on a real company and provide a report and an executive presentation. She worked with Riipen to onboard two local companies and connect them to the groups of students within the…
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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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Just the Right Amount of Workload
In the story of Goldilocks, the main character tries bowls of porridge that are too hot and too cold. Finally, Goldilocks settles on a porridge that is just the right temperature. Figuring out the right, or adequate, amount of work for students is a Goldilocks opportunity – tweaking and adjusting to find the right mix, amount, consistency, and taste. The video below summarizes how we can reflect and plan for an appropriate amount of student workload. We were inspired by conversations in the College of Agriculture and Bioresources. How much work are we asking students to do in the remote context? More/less than in face-to-face, more/less engagement, more/less synchronous, asynchronous,…
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How Canvas’ intuitive interface makes it easy to use
This is the seventh 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 sixth principle. Efficient and easy to use: Learners need to work in a system that is fluid and requires a minimum number of steps in systems that are intuitive and integrated. Efficient and Easy to Use During the search for a new LMS, instructors said ‘ease of use’ was a top principle for choosing technology to support student learning. If a platform is intuitive and easy to navigate, students can focus on their course work…
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Using Canvas New Analytics to see how students are doing in your course.
Having to teach remotely may have left some of us feeling like we are teaching in a vacuum. Without the usual cues that face-to-face teaching provides, it can be difficult to tell whether students are engaging or participating with their course materials. Even if you feel like you have a good sense of how your students are engaging with the course, New Analytics can help confirm these feelings. What is New Analytics? New Analytics is a tool that can track and report student activity within Canvas. Student activity is defined by two data points: Page Views and Participations. The table below shows the difference between the two. How to access New Analytics. You can easily access New Analytics through the course Home Page or from the course navigation menu (if you have set it to…
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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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Posting Feedback and Grades in Canvas
Once students start completing quizzes and assignments in your course, you may start wondering how students access this feedback. You may also be wondering if you need to do anything to release the feedback. You may also be wondering, to be frank, about a lot of things. Grade Posting Policy for an Individual Assignment By default, feedback, comments, and grades in Canvas are automatically shared with students as soon as they are generated. This means that as soon as you grade an individual student’s submission, these details will become visible to them. Students may even receive an email notification about this, depending on their notification settings. If you want to…
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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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Student presentations in Canvas
By David Greaves, ICT Support Services What does a good student presentation look like in an online learning environment? Take a moment to think about it. While you were thinking, you likely made the realization that the learning environment makes a difference. This post will guide you through the technology selection process as you design your student presentation. Let’s start with some assumptions: It is not best to try to recreate a live student presentation in an online learning environment The technologies we choose should allow our students to showcase their learning in the best possible light Students should spend more time learning your course’s actual content than learning new technologies You are using Canvas to host your course (since…
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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…