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Engaging Students in a Transition to Online Learning
This write up is based on a webinar I provided to my institution today. I am sharing it with the Canvas Community for anyone who would find it useful. My target audience is traditional faculty who are transitioning from brick classrooms to online classes. As faculty across education are rushing to shift from traditional…
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Ready or Not: Tips for Quick Transitioning to Online Course Format
In response to disease epidemics (Covid-19 Coronavirus) many schools are transitioning to online courses, ready or not. Ideally, online courses are thoughtfully produced using multimedia, Universal Design (UDL), backward design, and flipped-classroom approaches, with quality assurance tools like QM Quality Matters Rubric…
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Social Media & FERPA - All Things Considered
When I first began teaching online, I considered using a social media hashtag for class activities and related content. To make it simple and a cohesive conversation, I thought to use the course prefix and number, ie #THE4400. When discussing with a colleague, it was suggested this could potentially violate FERPA. Unsure…
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How do you solicit feedback from students?
The problem: a focus on faculty I run a successful twice-weekly faculty engagement program called Active Teaching Labs that gets instructors sharing how they use (want to use, fail to use, figure out how to be successful in using, etc.) technology in their teaching. Since we're a Canvas campus, just about everything we…
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How do *you* do Faculty Development for Teaching?
How do you do Professional Development of Teaching? With >230 sessions reaching 3400+ educators, the Active Teaching Labs at UW-Madison facilitate teaching & learning development for the price of bagels & coffee. We've honed a one-hour highly-rated, dynamic, and respectful format that consistently draws campus educators…
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Commitment to Learning
As designers and teachers, we are on a relentless quest to present the best quality information for our students in the most effective ways possible. We acknowledge we can always do better and our students deserve this effort! With that in mind, I offer this support to teachers to help each of your students embrace the…
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Could You Be More Specific? Committing to Examples for Major Assignments
Higher ed hosts a bewildering number of professors who 1.) fail to provide examples of completed projects and assignments, 2.) actively avoid examples on the premise of promoting creativity, and 3.) presumably enjoy a comfort zone of non-clarity.Possible Solutions: Rubrics and Examples* Rubrics clarify assignment…
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Search for Meaning: Reading Response Format for Higher Ed
Enjoy this efficient Reading Response formula for encouraging higher-level Bloom’s Synthesis and Evaluation skills in higher ed.Major benefits: * Students invest more effort to glean value from the readings and provide succinct evidence for grading. * Format encourages clarity and expansion for students who write…
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InstructureCon 2020
Greetings, Canvas world! As I am sitting thinking about my proposal for InstructureCon2020, I thought, wouldn't it be a great idea if CanvasAdvocates had space where they can present to other users from a direct end-user perspective! These presentations can stretch from beginner to advanced or even open Q and A panel with…
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Is Online Learning Right for Me? (Student Self-Evaluation)
The rising popularity of online college courses creates new opportunities for completion and success. Unfortunately, more students who sign up for online courses also fail or wash out! Students and instructors alike benefit from clarifying the skills needed to succeed and the mental preparation needed to prime students for…
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Hidden Gems: Access Codes & Force Completion
One of the things that I have learned from taking final exams online is the use of the force completion method. What is Force Completion? At our institution, which uses Blackboard, our business teacher activates the Force Completion feature. What that means is that once the test is launched, we must finish it. We may only…
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Being There: Basic Strategies for Online Teaching Presence in Canvas LMS* Part I
The element that sets successful online courses apart from old-style correspondence courses is: presence. Well-taught, well-designed online courses can allow students to get to know each other and their instructors even better than in traditional lecture classrooms. Interaction is the key. Online course presence may…
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Measuring contract cheating
Measuring contract cheating "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it"* is the inspiration behind this blog post. In this post, I discuss why a way to measure contract cheating is necessary and propose a measurement metric. The motivation behind this (and future) posts is to journal the process of building this…
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Get Notified Right Away About a Course 'Content Link Error'
This CanvasTip actually came from one of my faculty and I thought it was definitely worth sharing. In a user's account Notification preferences, there's an option under Alerts called Content Link Error. I never paid much attention to it but if you hover your mouse over it, it explains this preference will notify an…
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Piloting Quizzes.Next (New Quizzes)
New Quizzes will eventually replace the default Canvas quizzing tool, but in the meantime, there's still a lot of development needed to bring it to feature parity. Here's what led The Wharton School to start using New Quizzes sooner rather than later. Meeting Our Biggest Need One of the largest core courses taken by all…