How to Handle That Pesky Little Dash in the Canvas Gradebook

Ever been confused by all the options and symbols in the Canvas Gradebook? Well, you’re not alone! In this episode, we’ll zero in on the little dash that shows up in ungraded assignments. Knowing how to deal with it properly will mean you’re headache-free when it’s time to turn in your grades at semester’s end.

Your Home page is a special place in your course. It’s the virtual “first impression” you’re making with students (and remember what Mother said about the importance of first impressions!). In this Byte-sized episode, we’ll look at the many functions of a Home page and offer some examples for you to model.

In April of 2018, Merced College was accepted into OEI’s Consortium, in the Online Equity Cohort. We are very pleased and excited. We have set out to explore innovative approaches to promote equity in our online course designs.

If you have taught for a while, you know that your classes are populated by an array of diverse leaners. You may have a student or two who gets it all right—on the first try, every time. But you very likely have students who don’t pass on their first attempt. “Second chance” opportunities can support them to re-study, review and try again. Every student needs to build skills and competencies; and finish your class feeling enriched, accomplished and ready for the next challenge.

What Is Canvas Mastery Paths?

Use the links below to jump to different topics in the video above.

Canvas Mastery Paths is a feature in Canvas that allows instructors to set criteria for redirecting lower-performing students to supplementary or remedial activities (view the helpful Canvas Guide for Canvas Mastery Paths). Suppose, for example, after a summative assessment such as a unit exam, the instructor finds that some students passed; while others “barely passed” and some failed the exam. Mastery Paths allows instructors to redirect the students to varied levels of remediation. Those who achieve acceptable (“passing”) scores of, let’s say, 70% are not redirected for remediation. those who “barely passed”—e.g., scored between 60% and less than 70%--could be redirected to complete supplementary remediation at a moderate level. Finally, those who did not pass with scores of at least 60% could be redirected for more intensive remediation.

Practical Considerations for Online Remediation

Relevant Substance

The remedial task or activity should be one that re-teaches content and concepts similar and relevant to that in the primary assessment. For example, I teach Child Development for Merced College. If I give my students an exam about how preschoolers develop physically, cognitively and socially; then any remedial tasks should focus on those same developmental domains. It would be off-point to redirect study toward other topics; unless those are somehow foundational to the content that was not mastered on the exam.

Encouraging

Think about it. Your students just bombed on your exam. How enthused would they feel about being redirected to some labor-intensive, time-consuming, tedious and difficult requirement? We can guess they would feel much more encouraged and willing to do a task that refocuses their attention in ways that are relatively quick, engaging and fun.

Immediate Feedback

Canvas Mastery Paths is very versatile. Students could be redirected toward just about any assignment or task. An instructor could, for example, have students write an essay, or create a slide show, to demonstrate that they have reviewed the content and their comprehension is now significantly improved, since the exam. However, any such assignment requires instructor grading, which of course takes time. To facilitate quick feedback, I recommend remedial tasks that can be auto-graded in Canvas, such as quizzes.

Advantages of EdPuzzle

EdPuzzle allows users to upload educational or other videos from virtually any source, such as YouTube, Khan Academy or even teacher-created videos. The free version of EdPuzzle works just fine for this stategy, but there are premium account options too with additional features. Instructors select videos with content appropriate for their current teaching needs and augment these using EdPuzzle tools. With EdPuzzle, instructors can program a video to pause at strategic points, where questions or explanatory audio notes can be inserted. Therefore, when your student views an EdPuzzle video, the playback pauses at strategic points and the student is challenged to answer questions displayed to the screen (and/or listen to your prerecorded comments). Video is a very familiar and popular medium for most students today, which makes it an appropriate learning tool.

These features make EdPuzzle an effective approach for remediation, as well as other teaching methods. Let’s say, for example, that a student scores poorly on an exam. Presumably that student could benefit from a guided, focused re-study and re-assessment experience. An EdPuzzle—which in effect is a video quiz—could be ideal for this purpose.

Want to see how all this works? View my video overview of this teaching practice (also see the quick links embedded at the top of this post to help you navigate the video topics).

Hand in Glove

Therefore, when EdPuzzle is embedded into a Canvas quiz and used as the remedial method in Canvas Mastery Paths, low-scoring students can be automatically redirected to a fun and relatively easy, focused re-study and re-test opportunity, with a chance to recover a portion of the points missed on the recent exam or assessment.

EdPuzzle via Mastery Paths is an equitable strategy that gives your lower-scoring students a “second chance” at success in your course.

If you have any questions about this teaching strategy, please leave a comment below. I would be happy to answer them.

Empowering students is a critical part of education and there is room for improvement in the United States. Students need self-worth, motivation, determination, and persistence to thrive in a course, and often times those traits come out of student empowerment. Giving students the opportunity to shape their education, develop their lessons, and apply it to their own path is essential because it encourages critical thinking, and gives lessons that can be applied outside of the textbook and the classroom, and eventually applied to their career. Being a passionate student about this topic, I have much to share and a few suggestions too.

In 2017, I graduated from College of the Canyons (COC), a California Community College, with associates degrees in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics. After that, I transferred to Cal Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo where I am now majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Entrepreneurship. I have been taking online courses since I was in high school and I was also employed at COC as a member of their Open Educational Resources (OER) program. From these experiences, I have gained a great deal of insight about how to engage and empower students in the online environment.

When students feel valued in a class, they will see it as a meaningful experience. But where do you start with this lofty goal? Start by reflecting on a few questions about your class.

“After the class is over, what can students share with future employers?”
“How might this class affect students’ career paths?”
“Am I making assignments that nurture the learning abilities of the students?”

If you struggle to answer these questions, ask your students. They love to give input and opinions, and just want to feel important to the class. Asking students for input is a great way to empower them!

9 Tips for Empowering Your Online Students

Here are some additional suggestions.

Have your online students:

Create their own prompt for an assignment
- Provide a rubric you will use for grading, and give students the freedom to craft an assignment around the rubric after you have approved the plan.
Create their own test questions
- This is a great way to see if students understand the material and get an idea of what they think is important in the class.
Give input on the course at the beginning and the end.
- Asking for student feedback immediately is a great way to establish a trust and convey that you are here to support your learners. Some suggestions for week one include: What do you expect from this class? What do you hope to learn? .
Teach some of the lessons in the class (using Canvas Groups )
- One of the best classes I took had groups of four students teach the class every day for the last half of the quarter. This was great because each group had to know their material well to teach it.
Find resources for the class
- Students can find great resources, and having additional relevant resources is always a good idea, especially for students who struggle.
Run a socratic seminar
- When students facilitate discussions about topics they are more engaged. Act as the guide of the conversation and requires each student to speak at least once.
Seek out scholarships, competitions, grants, and more.
- For every topic in school, there is always a way to get students more involved. Encouraging them to apply for an opportunity and let them know you believe in them! . If they are successful, they will have something to show off for a lifetime.
Help write materials for future courses
- When students know their assignments are not ‘throw away’, they are usually more willing to invest time in the topic and deliver something that will last. Plus, they may be able to deliver it in a way future students will understand a bit better
Connect with their community
- Local companies are always looking for help. Connecting students with local businesses gives students a chance to understand a career and be considered for a potential employment opportunity.

How do you empowering your online students? Leave a comment below so we can keep this list going!

Join Natalie for her keynote presentation at Can•Innovate, Friday, October 276th - a free, online conference!

The California Community Colleges (CVC) - Online Education Initiative (OEI) provides support services to address equity and achievement gaps in the online learning environment experienced by students from marginalized communities. Aligned with Chancellor Oakley’s Vision for Success to fully close equity gaps within the CCC system, these ongoing efforts include applying an equity lens to surface institutional and systemic barriers, implementing an Equity Framework to address disparate impact and increase our students’ sense of belonging, and providing colleges with innovative tools, technology, and professional development in the areas of instruction and student services.

The CVC-OEI and the Online Counseling Network (OCN) have designed innovative tools to support high quality Online Counseling Services. Instruction and student services play a pivotal role in student success and providing students with the ability to access online services in real time, truly defines meeting our students where they are. In 2016, Cranium Café powered by ConexED was selected as the meeting and collaboration platform for the Online Counselor’s Network Project. The ConexED platform was designed with student services in mind and ConexED is 100% committed to accessibility, FERPA, HIPAA and Security. The platform allows for various forms of communication (email, chat, video conferencing) all in one tool. The CVC-OEI and the OCN not only introduced this innovative tool to the counseling field but they also made sure, training and resources were provided to those using the online counseling platform. Experienced counselors are invited to participate in professional development courses, where they will learn strategies and techniques for fostering successful online counseling sessions.

Student Equity in Online Counseling

Our students are tomorrow’s leaders and workforce. As educators, equity must be at the center of our daily practice as we assist students with meeting their educational, personal, and professional goals. Many of our students enroll in online courses and/or use online support services in the matriculation process. Counselors are key to this process. In classrooms and counseling sessions, they identify students’ strengths, skills, and knowledge, and provide guidance towards selecting appropriate educational and career paths. However, to address disparities, close achievement gaps, and meet the needs of each student, it is important for counselors to provide welcoming and supportive environments that are based upon equity principles and culturally responsive teaching and learning practices. Participating in flex-day breakout sessions, conferences, and campus-wide cultural events are great starts, but equity requires ongoing professional development, and a supportive community that provides networking opportunities and resources. There must also be a personal willingness and commitment to know our students and the communities they come from, to be more deeply engaged in the work to transform our classrooms, the delivery of student services, and our online colleges.

How Do You Do Equity?

In The Next Equity Challenge, Dr. Estala Bensimon refers to higher education faculty members as ‘first-generation equity practitioners’ who must recognize and concede that their practices are failing to create success for too many students. They need to see that their implicit biases about race and ethnicity often prevent them from viewing students who are not like themselves as college material (Bensimon, 2016). Having an awareness around institutional and systemic barriers to online learning is key to eliminating achievement gaps. This includes challenges such as implicit bias, microaggressions, and stereotype threat. USC Center for Urban Education (CUE) offers equity-minded indicators and other valuable resources. Equity-minded counselors help students to build on their strengths. They create welcoming environments that develop a sense of identity with and belonging to our institutions, and educational experiences to match their goals. Because equity is not about fairness, rather it it is about creating inclusive supportive learning environments that help our students find their voice and fulfill their potential.

Get Involved

The OEI will be offering professional development opportunities through on-campus workshops, online courses, webinars, and training modules, including a four-week course, Equity & CRTL for Online Counselors, this course will be offered through @ONE, late fall 2018. Along with opportunities for general counselors and mental health clinicians. A six-week Online College Counseling course, a two-week Online Mental Health for non-clinician course and a three-week Online Mental Health for licensed clinicians course.

It may seem a little uncomfortable to give students the opportunity to frequently tell you what they think about your course. But you just might be surprised about what you'd learn and how it can help you improve your online course.

View this 8-minute video to learn how and why Xochitl Tirado from Imperial Valley College collects post-module feedback from her students. At the end of a module in Canvas, Xochitl places a single survey in its own module and makes it a pre-requisite for students to move on to the next module. That way, sending you feedback is their ticket to move forward in the course. Win-win!

Do you wish your students would engage more meaningfully in your online discussions? If so, you might want to reconsider how you are designing your discussion prompts. In this 7-minute video, Stacey Smith from Coastline College, shows how she designs discussion prompts that elicit real life examples from her students. Stacey's end-of-semester surveys show high student satisfaction levels with the discussions and a strong sense of community.

Want to become a Canvas ninja like me <wink, wink>? Here are four fast and furious little Canvas tricks that will leave you gasping for breath as you exclaim, “I did not know that!”

[Tip topics in this episode: Speedgrader comments, viewing Groups area, displaying announcements, undelete]

Know any great best-kept-secret Canvas tricks? Do tell! (And maybe I'll use it in a future "I Did Not Know That" episode.)

Many students are brand new to Canvas or, even if they’ve been using it awhile, just don’t know it very well. You can decrease their floundering and frustration (and make your life easier) by giving students some basic guidance as part of your course design. In this episode, we look at four simple things you can do to keep students from getting sidelined by inexperience with Canvas.

BONUS: I created a "Canvas Tips for Students" cheatsheet you can share with your students. It's currently in a barebones, accessible Word format--I suggest you download and customize it for your class and then add it to a page in your course.

What does it mean to be a “good” citizen? While certainly not a new question, it is one that is experiencing a renaissance in many of our hearts and minds. Especially in the last few years, we have come to realize that our digital space and the way we inhabit it has the power to profoundly impact our analog world. We live so much of our lives on the digital plane that who and how we are in this space arguably begs as much reflection and intention as that of our physical lives.

In other words, there’s a (relatively) new existential angst in town.

My own anxious concern around what exactly it means to be an educator in this brave new world led me to @ONE’s Digital Citizenship course, facilitated by Aloha Sargent & James Glapa Grossklag (read James' and Aloha's thoughts about digital citizenship) Within week one, I realized I was not alone in my concerns & questions; James and Aloha encouraged us to “embrace the chaos” of the unknown and dive head first into an exploration of how we want to participate as citizens in the creation of our digital world --- while simultaneously operating within it.

You Tell Me That it’s Evolution…

Prior to taking this class, I saw digital citizenship as relatively static. I knew the definition involved ethics and how we operate online -- and that there were grave concerns about how all this was playing out in education. Frankly, I was also worried about how people were treating one another digitally and how that was translating offline.

This course challenged me to think about Digital Citizenship specifically in the context of how online education is emerging as a culture and industry. Topics considered in Digital Citizenship come with the realization that as educators, we are assuming a really critical role in learning, teaching, and modeling not only digital literacy but digital citizenry well outside our disciplines.

So for four weeks, we discussed, read, and thought about questions concerning digital presence, participatory learning, and ethics. We also explored Open Education and Open Educational Resources. As a result, my definition of digital citizenship has evolved considerably.

You Say You Got a Real Solution…

One of the most practical gifts of this course was the modeling of Participatory Learning - a way of teaching online that puts the learner at the center of their own learning as creator & curator; it allows for the learner to become part of the online community’s conversation in an immediate and contributory way. I’ve always been uneasy with the call and response that education - and online education in particular- could easily become, but #CCCDigCiz quickly dispelled that as we focused on ways to facilitate students developing content and creating our shared digital landscape. Harnessing the power of social media and learning to teach outside the LMS were introduced, and I quickly began to see just how far “beyond the classroom” we could take our students on this digital plane. Helping students learn to navigate the curation, evaluation, and creation rather than simply digest and respond to a prompt is an essential 21st skill set that is addressed by this course.

We were asked to think about and develop participatory and/or non-disposable assignments that addressed these skills and that we could use within our respective disciplines.

Another valuable and unexpected take away from Digital Citizenship was exposure to material sourced from Open Educational Resources, or OER. While involved in critical & ethical discussions around Open Education, we were guided to explore resources & materials that were freely available to all. What I love about OER is that many things can be adapted to suit one's needs and individual course goals; how often over the years have we wished this or that textbook could just be altered a bit and then would be a perfect fit for our needs? Depending on the licensing, OER sometimes allows for just that, which I did not know prior to taking this course.

Adopting Open Educational Resources also addresses issues of equity, and alleviates frustrations of both students and instructors in making sure everyone has the materials -- in other words, using OER levels the playing field. While these resources are somewhat still emergent, the value they offer in access and equity is inarguable.

We all Want to Change the World…

As I finished week four of Digital Citizenship, I realized my definition of Digital Citizenship was becoming more dynamic. Good teaching leads to further inquiry, and weeks later I am still thinking about the concepts we explored and their impact on our digital as well as physical world. I also have pedagogy and materials I can use right now in my course development. In short, I feel my own digital citizenship evolving. Perhaps the best thing about Digital Citizenship is that it forces an ongoing reflection and practice -- and one that is anything but static.

As with most evolutionary mediums, learning to teach with - and within - technology is a bit like building a plane while flying it, and the topics covered in Digital Citizenship are an important chapter in this emerging flight manual.

Attributions:

“An Introduction to Open Educational Resources” by Abbey Elder is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Why remix an Open Educational Resource? by Liam Green-Hughes, licensed under CC BY 2.0 UK: England & Wales License

“Revolution - The Beatles.” VEVO, 20 Oct. 2015

Search Google News for “Facebook scandal” and you’ll get 53,600,000 hits. Well, you will, if you have the same location and browsing history as we do.

Once you learn that an algorithm determines these hits, does that impact what you ask students to research? When you require students to use TurnItIn, do you tell them what happens to their intellectual property? If you require students to use publisher courseware, do you know how publishers use the data they’re gathering? If so, then you’re asking questions that are at the core of the new @ONE course, Digital Citizenship. Admittedly, questions are more plentiful than answers.

Digital Presence

Being part of the digital world is not necessarily a bad thing. I’ve now learned … there is this beautiful space of creativity, collaboration, and empowerment – and I’d like to be part of that space!
-Ramela Abbamontian, Los Angeles Pierce College

Acknowledging the unique abilities and dispositions of our 21st century learners, we begin the course by exploring strategies for modeling digital presence and providing opportunities for students to create content and connect with a global audience. Examples of this “participatory learning” include:

Using social media to build upon classroom learning and allow students to create content in authentic environments
Using Twitter to develop a professional learning network
Incorporating “non-disposable” assignments that allow students to share their work with wider audiences

Digital Ethics

Pariser's talk about Internet filter bubbles and Tufekci’s talk about digital dystopias were alarming wake-up calls to the salient forces that shape our digital life and influence our behavior.
-Gisela Garcia, University of Memphis

Significant ethical issues impact how we engage with digital platforms, and thus how we teach and learn online

Digital polarization: How are digital platforms driving and profiting from our emotional engagement?
Algorithmic bias: How do the algorithms behind search engines like Google reflect racist, sexist, or other social biases?
Digital redlining: How do tech policies and practices reinforce class and race boundaries?
Data privacy: How is our data tracked and stored on platforms like Facebook, and via educational technologies?

In the face of such daunting issues, what can we actually do? In addition to learning about digital platforms and student privacy, we can also emphasize digital information literacy in our curriculum. A great resource is Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy text, and corresponding short videos on media literacy.

Open Education

The Module discussing the prohibitive costs of textbooks really resonated with me…. The use of OER will give me the opportunity to start closing that equity gap.
-Kristie Camacho, College of the Desert

The most recent Wisconsin Hope Lab report on student hunger and homelessness finds 42% of community colleges students to be food insecure, and 46% housing insecure. In light of this, it’s no surprise that adoptions of Open Educational Resources continue.

The OER section of the course serves as a primer on finding, reviewing, and adopting OERs. Further, we see OERs as a decisive assertion of academic freedom, breaking away from conventional textbook packaging, which inextricably leads to undisclosed data harvesting by publishers.

I'm excited for my students! They'll get to "take the wheel" of learning more and more. -Colleen Harmon, Cuesta College

Expecting our students to "take the wheel" empowers them as learners and recognizes their agency as digital citizens. Combining active learning that many of us practice with the permissions of open licensing points us to the idea of Open Pedagogy. Yes, we can use openly licensed resources with while teaching, but also we can ask students to contribute and share their own knowledge and work within the world.

Examples of Open Pedagogy include:

Adapt or remix OERs with students
Ask students to help write test questions
Teach students how to edit Wikipedia
Construct with students class policies, assignments, rubrics, and calendars

In other words, we can engage our students transparently and humanely as co-learners--we don’t know everything about the topic, let alone about our students.

Further Learning

If you’d like to learn more about how digital citizenship can affect your teaching and learning, register for the next session of the @ONE class, Digital Citizenship, or join the conversation on Twitter at #CCCDigCiz.

When you hear about accessibility, what comes to mind? In community colleges, do we think of accessibility as a core individual value, a fundamental aspect of how we enact our roles as educators? We take pride in being the people’s college, democracy’s college. We can more closely approach this ideal if we embrace accessibility as a core component of what we do individually.

Be honest, though. When you hear about accessibility, odds are that you think of legal requirements: format your syllabus with styles, add alt text to images, caption your videos.

Of course, this view of accessibility focuses on designing our classes so that all students can learn, including those with disabilities. If you take the @ONE course, Creating Accessible Course Content, you’ll learn that accessibility “refers to the ability of everyone, regardless of disability or special needs, to access, use, and benefit from everything in their environment.”

Sure, accessibility is important because it’s the law and because of the numbers: in US higher education, the percentage of students who report having a disability is 11%. In the California Community Colleges, just under 5% of the student population registers with disability services.

However, accessibility is more than a set of legal requirements and statistics. Accessible means something that is easily reachable, approachable, or understandable, something that affords access.

Community colleges pride themselves on being open access institutions, with no admissions requirements. Mission statements refer to serving “all who can benefit,” or “our entire community,” or “learners everywhere.” By design, we provide access to the top 100%.

We also find access used by research institutions, for example to describe Open Access publishing. Open Access describes the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Many leading institutions choose Open Access to share research with the public, for example, the University of California and Harvard University.

Online educators talk about learning anytime, anywhere. If you walk the halls of the Online Teaching Conference, or browse the forums of an introduction to online teaching class, you’ll hear people proclaim that online classes might be the only way for some people to access higher education. It’s a joy to discover that you’re teaching someone who would never have been in your physical classroom – a single parent who works the night shift, or an active duty service member. In this way, we expand access to our teaching beyond the walls of our campuses, by design.

Nevertheless, I’ve seen exclusion, if not by design, then by omission. I’ve been a part of more than one conference planning session that goes like this: “We should have sessions about accessibility,” one person offers. “Of course we should, but nobody ever comes to those sessions.” In different venues, I’ve heard it said that a college doesn’t intend to discriminate against those with disabilities—but why doesn’t anyone tell the college how to achieve this mysterious state of accessibility? Also, I know social justice crusaders who connect virtually with fellow crusaders, but who choose a communication tool that excludes those with visual or hearing impairments.

Turning back to our own choices as educators, how do we intentionally make accessibility a default choice? The next time you attend a discussion of student equity or guided pathways, recall that Title 5 tells us one of the groups that must be a focus of our student equity efforts is the disabled. Have we invited everyone to the table? When we discuss equity, diversity, and inclusion, do we choose to see, let alone include, the 5% of our students who identify as disabled?

When we talk about accessibility, we’re talking about more than regulations and statistics. We’re talking about our choices to exclude or include, to deny or provide access, to divide or unify. We can come closer to our shared ideal of open access education by design.

Resources

Pay for captioning with the DECT grant.
US Section 508 and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 provide specific criteria by which Information Technology accessibility is determined.
For CCC specific guidelines, see the 2011 Chancellor’s Office publication on Distance Education Accessibility Guidelines.
Training and support are available from the High Tech Center Training Unit and the CCC Accessibility Center.
Find more resources in the blog post Drinking From the Fire Hose… Or Making it Real: In Support of Accessibility in Online Education.
On Twitter, look for #a11y.