Remote Teaching
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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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How Does Canvas Make Learning Accessible?
This is the second 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 first principle. Accessible: Learning must be found easily at any time, and all learners and teachers have equitable access, regardless of culture, language, ability, etc. Accessible education gives everyone equal access to content and ensures that all learners have equitable access to course content regardless of their culture, language, age, gender, preferred learning style or ability. Accessible courses remove barriers that may exist for some students and reduce the instructor’s need to make…
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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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Grading Discussions in Canvas
By Roberta Campbell-Chudoba You’ve set up and run your first graded discussion in Canvas – and the volume of posts seems a bit daunting. Now it’s time to assess the individual student contributions against the defined criteria and get results out to them before the next discussion goes up. Here are some tips for grading discussions, using tools in Canvas to assist you. Canvas automatically marks posts as ‘read’ when you scroll down the page (changing the green dot left of the post to white). This function might interfere with keeping track of what you’ve read, and be a time waster if you have to backtrack through posts automatically marked…
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What Does a Well-Designed Canvas Course Look Like?
Just as students appreciate seeing good examples of work before doing their own, instructors designing courses often feel the same way. As Canvas is our adopted learning management system, we want to provide you with some examples through the following two courses. In both cases, student information and data has been removed. ETAD 402 – Multimedia Design and Production This course from Professor Marguerite Koole in the College of Education is a blended course in that it’s a mix of asynchronous and synchronous delivery. ENVS 818 – Introduction to Sustainability This course from Professor Maureen Reed from the School of Environment and Sustainability. This is an example of an asynchronous…
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Small group synchronous discussion or presentations using WebEX
WebEx has a new feature that allows you to automatically or manually sort your students into small groups so they can remotely do the types of small group activities you had them do in your face to face classroom. While they are in groups, you can: send a message to give instructions, to all or some of the rooms or people pop into the rooms to observe invite people back to the main room end all the break out rooms to automatically close them When students return to the main meeting room, they have video off and be muted, but they can change those settings once they are back. The…
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Using Authentic Assessment to Integrate Current Events Into Courses
Authentic assessments are activities, whether for marks or not, that involve students addressing “real-world” problems in a way that reflects activities they might engage in as professionals in the discipline. Authentic assessments can provide several benefits to both students and instructors, including: Enabling students to engage with current issues to increase engagement in learning actively Allowing students to see the role the discipline may play in addressing issues Broadening the audience, which may lead to increased effort and quality Sharing potential solutions outside of the institution is “what the world needs.” Reducing issues around academic integrity When creating such activities for your students, there are a number of things that…
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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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Considerations for Hosting Guest Lecturers Remotely
You may have had guest speakers or guest lecturers into your class before. Typically, they brought their own material, spoke live to your class, and answered any questions before they left. You, as the instructor, were not responsible for recording the talk, storing the files of the talk, sharing the talk for students outside of the classroom, or saving the presentation materials for others. In remote teaching, you will need to consider many of these factors. Will the presenter be live during a Zoom call? What happens if the bandwidth is insufficient for good dialogue with students? If you record the presentation, where will you store the files of the…