Present at Can•Innovate 2019 - no travel required!
Fabiola Torres presenting online at Can•Innovate 2018.
Can•Innovate 2019 is scheduled for October 25, 2019, and we're ready to make this year's event bigger and better than last year but we need your help! Can•Innovate, a free, one-day conference supporting faculty and staff at the 114 California Community Colleges that use Canvas (registration is also open to the general public). Last year, more than 1,100 people joined in for a collaborative day of sharing and learning. Participants have the option to attend online from anywhere or on-campus from a group viewing room so mark your calendar today and start preparing your proposal.
The Call for Proposals for Can•Innovate is now open -- here's your chance to reach inside your bag of tricks and share a course design or teaching practice in a brief Lightning Round or a more detailed Share Showcase. All sessions are delivered online so there's no need for travel funding -- or a suitcase! Take a peek at last year's program for a little inspiration.
Kona Jones, Director of Online Learning at Richland Community College will kick off our program with an inspirational presentation, Integrating Compassion into Your Teaching. Kona is responsible for the development of faculty and student technology training materials, provides instructional design support to faculty, oversees the assessment of online courses, and facilitates faculty professional development. Kona loves teaching and is an adjunct instructor of statistics and developmental psychology. Her passion is student success and in 2019 she was awarded Adjunct Faculty of the Year. Kona is also a Canvas Coach and Canvassador, contributing extensively in the online Canvas Community and elsewhere.
Registration will open in September when the full program is announced. If you have any questions about Can•Innovate, let us know!
There is
only one you…and you have lots of students, right? How can you use ConferZoom
throughout your online course to provide the varying levels of personal
attention your students need to synthesize the new concepts they encounter in
your course.
Learning is variable. This means students process information at different rhythms and are better supported when content is provided in more than one modality. Zoom empowers me to meet my students where they are in the learning process… on their unique learning journey through nutrition or health. Throughout my online course, I use ConferZoom to hold klatch work group meetings to meet students and support them no matter where they are in mastering our learning outcomes. In our klatch meetings, I check in with my students. Based on their needs, I can demo a required task or assignment by using a sample of current student’s work (with student permission) or work from a previous term to clarify what they need to do. When we start a new klatch workgroup, I will ask for students to volunteer to share their work. Students often jump at the chance to have their instructor view their work and receive feedback in a supportive atmosphere that allows them to ask for clarification on the spot. Once I have a sample, I share my screen in ConferZoom and we work together as a class to identify potential problems and find creative solutions. The goal is to facilitate student mastery of the assignment’s objectives, while encouraging peer to peer interaction and support (which aligns with the CVC-OEI Online Course Design Rubric, elements A-3 and B-4).
Decide the amount of credit you will assign for attendance.
Identify when you should schedule your workgroup klatch meetings to best support your students throughout the assignments and projects. (I will have a regular day and an alt-klatch day). I schedule my workgroup klatch meetings at critical points to provide scaffolded support for assignments or projects. For example, in my Nutrition class, the first project my students complete is a diet analysis self-assessment project that is comprised of 4 components. A critical stage in the project is the point at which students are required to perform several anthropometric measurements. Students can become discouraged, as many students view any mathematical equation as a daunting task, no matter how useful the information will ultimately be to them. I head this off with a scheduled klatch work-group, I offer 2 meetings on different days and times. Students are required to attend one of the meetings with the calculation worksheet in hand. They are required to have a calculator and scratch sheet of paper ready. Students are informed that we will work as a team in the workgroup klatch to use current and previous student examples and solve each equation together. By the end of the klatch, students have solved all of their anthropometric measurement calculations required for their project.
Send out invitations to your students using the Canvas inbox in the invitation message make sure students know what will be covered and what they need to bring to the work group (worksheet, scratch sheet, rough draft, research topic), and specify any content they will need to review or flipped classroom task they will need to complete before the klatch. If you want students to volunteer to share their work in the klatch, include that request in the invitation. My meetings for the term are posted in unit zero as you can see in this video. I also have the meeting broken down by modules
Send a reminder. An hour before the meeting I send out a reminder message through the Canvas inbox with a recap of the items students need to review or bring to be prepared for our session.
Have your workgroup Klatch! Use ConferZoom’s built-in Record function to ensure you have an archive of your work-group for students who are unable to attend.
Promote the next workgroup klatch. Don’t miss this opportunity to be sure your next meeting is on your students’ calendars and be sure it’s on your Canvas course calendar too.
Include all students. for students who are unavailable to attend, provide the option to view the recording and share 1-2 things they learned. This ensures students aren’t penalized if their schedule does not allow them to be present.
Tips for a successful klatch workgroup in ConferZoom
Once your klatch workgroup is arranged, consider these tips for a successful experience:
Adapt to your students’ needs. Have an idea of the topics you plan to cover and how much time you want to spend on each of them but adjust your plan to support the needs of students who attend. For example, if you plan to cover a topic, but discover the students in attendance don’t need it to be covered or the students want more time with another topic, adjust your plans. Be sensitive to what the class needs and adjust your pace to accommodate the needs of your students. If the class is picking up the concepts quickly, speed up. If they aren’t, slow down.
Encourage participation. Use pauses to encourage students to contribute. Often, when you ask a question and wait silently, a student will reply.
Encourage students to help each other. By setting the tone you will not be the first to jump in with the answer. Instead, when students ask questions, open them to the class whenever possible. These prompts are helpful: “Can anyone help Joe?” or “Does anyone want to try and answer Maria’s question?” This facilitation tactic can foster students’ connections with their peers and also provide you with a clearer picture of who has mastered the objectives. Klatch workgroups help gauge what students understand at particular points in the term.
Use the archive to support learning. Encourage students to set aside time during the week to review the archive as they go to complete any work left unfinished
How are you using ConferZoom to support your students? Let us know by sharing a comment below!
A Closer Look at the Peralta Equity Rubric
Many of you may be familiar with the Online Education Initiative’s Course Design Rubric. (If you’re not and you teach online, you should consider completing the Course Design Academy or the Certificate in Online Teaching & Design by @ONE which both support you to redesign your online course according to the OEI rubric.) In 2017 we, the Peralta Community College Distance Education team, aligned our faculty training with the OEI rubric, but we also wanted to address equity for online learners. When we couldn’t find a rubric to support online course equity, we created the Peralta Equity Rubric to foster an expanded understanding of, and appreciation for, student populations, particularly for disproportionately impacted students. The rubric is structured to foster online learning environments that are inviting, inclusive, and meaningful for all students; additionally, the rubric is designed to support our students’ entire online experience--in distance education courses and also when seeking technical support or student services.
The rubric was developed through exhaustive research about the aspects of online courses that most negatively affect online student persistence and/or success:
Make Technology Easy: Smartphones and Internet access seem so prevalent these days that it’s easy to assume every student has the technology they need to complete an online course successfully. We need to provide viable technology alternatives and support for students who need them.
Value Diversity and Inclusion: To make every student feel welcome and encouraged to contribute, we need to create online courses in which all students “see themselves” and are valued participants.
Improve Images and Representations: Our courses and materials--textbooks, lecture presentations, Canvas content pages, etc.--need to represent our students accurately and avoid stereotypes that can hinder academic and professional success.
Reduce Human Interaction Bias: Based on student names alone, many online teachers reply more often to white male students than to other students (Baker, Dee, Evans & John, 2018). Once we’re aware of this possibility, we can proactively address it.
Make Content Meaningful: Cultural bias can hinder learning in different ways. We can check for this bias as we design and deliver our online courses--from content selection to language choices for exam questions.
Foster Personal Connections With and Among Students: Almost everyone sets up some form of interactivity in an online course, but the next step is to make sure that regular interaction is required as a way to strengthen connections and deepen learning.
Use Universal Design for Learning: Based on a mantra of “teach every student,” UDL principles support providing online learners with flexibility in how they approach learning and showing what they know.
Offer Student Support: Students often need virtual access to help beyond our online courses, including a) general student assistance, b) online academic supports; c) assistance with using technology; d) health and well-being resources; and/or e) resources for students with disabilities.
Social Belonging (coming soon): Online teachers and learners alike should value that all students feel a sense of belonging, and research shows that belonging enhances the online learning experience through increased participation and motivation.
While we’re pleased that we just earned an Online Learning Consortium’s Effective Practices Award, we’re still refining the rubric, so email us with your suggestions! The rubric has a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA) so you are free to adapt or adopt it at your own institution as long as you share your version too. Other next steps involve 1) collecting and sharing examples of what it looks like to address these rubric criteria in an actual online course and 2) creating a library of rubric-related resources to help online teachers, technology help desk staff and student services staff as they support online learners from a distance.
Why Group Assignments Are Worth Your Attention
The newly-released updates to Title
5 regulations for online learning include a specific requirement of regular
effective contact among students.
It’s time to move beyond discussions and embrace the wealth
of benefits collaborative learning experiences provide to students (and
instructors). C’mon, I dare ya!
I've developed a "plug 'n' play" module on using groups that you can include as a resource for your students. It also has a list of all the Canvas Guides for instructors on using groups. Do a search in the Canvas Commons for Group Project resources (the course card is a pile of Labrador puppies).
