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.
Designing an online course can seem like a very daunting task. But, if you break your task down into smaller bits that are more manageable, you will find it much easier. I find that using some basic Project Management strategies can really help you get through the process. In online courses there is more front-end work and planning compared to a traditional face-to-face course. The plan you create should have three major components; define your project, break it down, and estimate your time. Applying this process will simplify your task, and help you produce a well-constructed “back bone” for your course.
The 8 1/2 minute video below provides you with a visual tour of the three steps summarized in this post.
On paper or a spreadsheet, start by defining your project. Consider these questions:
I like to start this process by making a spreadsheet divided into weeks with the start and end dates clearly defining each “bucket” or module. Within those modules I first determine if there are any special events that I need to be aware of. For example, Thanksgiving week is always a week where many people travel, so I try to assign very little work that week and plan around it. I also label finals week to ensure I am not assigning work that week. This will depend on your campus standard practice: if there isn’t work in a traditional face-to-face class that week on campus then I don’t want to include any in my online class either.
Next, I want to really think about what the course outcomes are and how I plan to design a learning experience to ensure my students meet them. For most of us, we know what we are assessing and what we want to accomplish. Sometimes, additional thought and structuring must be put into assignments to ensure they are appropriate for the online environment. This can be the case for certain types of traditional assignments like term papers, presentations, or projects that need special instruction. If you need support, contact your campus distance education folks or explore the @ONE blog for ideas.
After defining the project, it is important to break it down into manageable parts. Using Canvas for your online class, typically means breaking down the coursework into Modules. I usually create a weekly format that goes from Monday to Sunday. I divide the book chapters to fit within the weeks allotted with one extra “Start Here” module. Remember to check in with your distance education folks as they may have a boiler plate template that you can edit.
Once I have all the above information I move on to my last step, which is budgeting my time to get the project completed. This will largely depend on your familiarity with Canvas, instructional resources available to you, and the technical requirements for your course. Try to double all estimates for your time until you have a better feel for the actual work. Some aspects of any project will take more time and some will take less. I encourage you to spend time searching for and getting to know the distance education resources available at your college, and others like @ONE and the OEI.
All in all, creating an online course will help you examine your role as an educator and reflect on how to take your students through a journey of learning. That process can be daunting and can seem like a large mountain to climb. But, if you pre-plan and think about it with some basic project management tools, it will make the end result better and will allow you to work through the project one piece at a time instead of trying to build a proverbial house without plans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
Here are some additional suggestions.
Have your online students:
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!
Finding the right way to spin a discussion can be an impactful way to increase student engagement in your online class. Don Carlisle, Economics faculty at Cabrillo College and Modesto Junior Colleges, has some nifty discussion strategies for making his course content come to life. In the 8-minute video below, he shows two of his online discussions. One is designed to engage students in self-discovery about their career choice and the other has students discover connections between Economics and the world of love and dating.
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.
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.
Providing content in multimedia formats (video, audio, images, infographics) is a powerful way to engage your students and appeal to multiple learning preferences. Combining your free 3CMedia account (courtesy of the Chancellor’s Office) with Canvas tools makes it super easy to add video and audio content into your courses.
This Byte-sized Canvas episode is a little longer than usual but there’s so much to share with you on the topic, I didn’t want to leave anything out!
[Updated April 2022.]
Hate getting messages from students about broken links in your course? With Canvas’ link validator tool, you can verify what’s working and what’s not before you publish your course each term. It’s a great way to save time now and headaches later. Very nifty!