Choosing an Effective Homepage in Canvas
In this @ONE Canvas Q&A, you will be introduced to the Canvas Homepage feature and identify effective strategies for choosing one that supports the success of your online students.
In this @ONE Canvas Q&A, you will be introduced to the Canvas Homepage feature and identify effective strategies for choosing one that supports the success of your online students.
Imagine moving to another country, where few people speak English, where the culture is completely different. Imagine yourself settling in and deciding to take a local online class. You become an online learner in a new country, in a new language, in a new culture, in a new online space. How do you feel? What will you need to succeed?
This is the perspective of your online English Language Learners: your ELLs. Who are they and what do they need? How can you support them in your online class? One word: Scaffolding.
First, how do you welcome your students? How do you deliver directions? What are the norms for your class? From the start it will be helpful to identify the ELLs in your class and in a 1-on-1 communication to acknowledge the language learning piece of their study. Could you create a special Welcome Letter for your ELLs? Could you create a vocabulary list of terms for navigating the course? Could you pair up ELLs in a break-out group? Identifying the challenges up-front and scaffolding the navigation will bring a sense of ease, opening the channels of communication, and giving students the language to identify confusion in course navigation.
Learning in another language is easier and tends to be more successful when the content area is already familiar. So an ELL with an advanced degree in Chemistry might not be fluent in English for your Science course, but they’ll have sufficient background knowledge in the content to be successful. In contrast, if an ELL has no background in your content area you’ll need to scaffold the discipline itself. For an example, in a Composition class your ELLs may have never learned the norms we use for organizing a paragraph around a topic sentence and sticking to a controlling idea. Some cultures go around and around a topic until they get to the point. Other cultures use long flowing sentences that last a whole paragraph. Acknowledging these differences respectfully and scaffolding the mastery of norms for your discipline within this culture is key.
How many learning modalities do you use when you deliver your instruction? The more you can scaffold your content with video clips, audio clips, infographics, outside links, kinesthetic activities, the more successful your ELLs, and all your students, will be.
Online learning requires effective time management, especially in another language. State this up-front with your ELLs. How can your they plug in to student support services regularly and how might they work this into their weekly schedule so that their learning is consistently scaffolded?
Some of your ELLs might not have the academic background, the personal discipline, the technology access, or the language ability they need to do their best work. How do you prepare for this the first weeks of your class so that all your students have access to effective online learning? How can you scaffold readiness?
Some cultures encourage students to be outspoken and argumentative. Others expect students to be passive and agreeable. How can you nudge students to follow the rules of netiquette and also speak up when they need clarification? And how can you be curious about your ELLs as individuals who bring their cultural background as well as their unique personality and learning style to this online space?
Who is invested in the success of your ELLs? Do you have ESL online tutoring? Online Basic Skills preparation? Is your Equity team plugged in to your online program? Does the EdTech Department collaborate on ELL-friendly course design? Do ELLs have an online campus voice? How can we bring all these voices to a round-table forum so that we design our programs with ELLs in mind, bringing all our campus resources and content area knowledge together in a shared commitment to excellence? How can we build a strong ELL scaffold together?
Now return to your imaginary new country and your imaginary new online course. How do you feel knowing you have been been acknowledged, warmly welcomed and supported in your learning? What else might you need to do your best work?
As a California community college instructor, you are committed to serving the needs of an extremely diverse student population. Many of the students in your online classes are first-generation college students and from underrepresented minority groups. These underserved groups are more likely to work full-time and manage complex family responsibilities while completing their college degrees. Being aware of the complex challenges your students are juggling can be difficult, especially in online classes. But this awareness is essential to your ability to support them.
As you design the "Getting Started" area of your online course, consider including a link to a confidential Student Information Form. This is a practice I have used in my own online classes with great success. The form provides me with data about my students, enabling me to identify those who will benefit most from my high-touch interactions. The concept is simple:
Below is a sample Google Form I have used in my online classes. Feel free to adapt it for your own class! Open the sample form in a new window.
Relationships are key to fostering culturally responsive online teaching practices that support the success of our diverse student population in the California Community College system. This is especially true for Latinx students, whose concept of educación is predicated on such a relationship. Relationships are founded on trust and that can be difficult to establish in an online class, especially when students experience self-doubt about whether they have what it takes to succeed in a college class.
The Wisdom Wall is a practice that helps to reduce student anxiety at the start of an online class and build a foundation of trust upon which meaningful relationships are more likely to develop. Online instructors should take a variety of approaches to ensure students feel welcome at the start of a class and leveraging the power of student voices in this effort is especially powerful. When students hear messages about your class from their peers, they're more likely to be convinced by them. This is why the Wisdom Wall is such a powerful community-building practice. The concept is simple.
Here is an excerpt of one of my past Wisdom Walls (designed with VoiceThread):
Have you used the Wisdom Wall in your online class? Please leave a comment below to share your experiences or tips for modifying this practice. Thanks for sharing.
From the first moment a student accesses your course, the tone is set. Your course homepage, syllabus and other "getting started" materials play key roles in the how your students begin to relate to their experience in your online class. Setting an inviting and supportive tone is especially important in supporting the success of our first-generation college students and other underserved groups, who are more likely to feel self-doubt and exhibit engagement apprehension in academic environments. Including a set of Community Ground Rules in your course syllabus is a great way to communicate that your students will be valued participants in a learning community and articulate what that means.
Below is a set of sample Community Ground Rules I have used in my online classes. They are included in my book, Best Practices for Teaching with Emerging Technologies, and I have shared them in the Public Domain, which means you are free to re-use and adapt them in your own class without permission or attribution. Do you have modifications to share? Please share your ideas in a comment at the bottom of the page!
A community is a group of individuals who work together to support a common goal or interest. In this online class, we work together to support the successful achievement of our learning outcomes. In an effort to ensure our community develops, thrives and sustains throughout our time together, the following ground rules will be in effect at all times.
These Sample Community Ground Rules by Michelle Pacansky-Brock are shared in the Public Domain and may be re-used and adapted without permission or attribution.
In this @ONE Canvas Q&A, you will learn how to use the handy Canvas Scheduler tool to set up convenient appointment slots on your course calendar that students can sign up for in a click! The scheduler is the perfect solution for arranging times to meet with your students and can be configured across multiple courses our just one. It's a huge time saver and makes scheduling time to meet with your students a breeze.
In this @ONE webinar archive,Michelle Pacansky-Brock examines why humanized online learning is critical to closing equity gaps in the California Community College system. Michelle discusses how faculty can cultivate presence, empathy, and awareness to achieve humanized online facilitation.
In this @ONE webinar archive, Fabiola Torres, Ethnic Studies Instructor at Glendale Community College, asks, "We all need a nudge sometimes, right?" Nudges are an important part of supporting the success of our online students. And when you use video to infuse your nudges with your human presence, students are more likely to trust you and less likely to drop your class. Fabiola will demonstrate why it’s important not be perfect, but to be human!
In this @ONE webinar, Anita Crawley, of the CA Online Education Initiative, and Katie Winter, from SmarterServices, examines data from the July 2017 Quest Program Review survey conducted by the RP group. The data indicates that online faculty members are playing a key role in connecting students to the Quest program. Those connections are made prior to the beginning of the term through email and during the early days of the term through a link in their academic courses. Quest materials are being used during the first week of the term as part of an orientation to online learning and throughout the term on an as needed basis. During this first session we will review the Quest resources with an emphasis on how SmarterMeasure results can be used to improve online success and provide Quest assignments that faculty have used.