Equitable Online Course Design: Canvas Mastery Paths and EdPuzzle

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.

Empower Me! An Online Student’s Perspective

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!

9 Tips for Empowering Your Online Students

Here are some additional suggestions.

Have your online students:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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? .
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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
  9. 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!

Student Feedback - That's the Ticket!

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!

Meaningful Discussions That Build Community Too

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. 

The One Thing You’ve Been Missing to Keep Students Focused on Your Content

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.

Before You Add Video to Your Course--Watch This!

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.]

Check Your Links!

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!

Customizing Modules to Guide Student Learning

Ever get the sense students are jumping straight into quizzes and assignments without first taking the time to read or watch your carefully designed content? This Byte-sized session explores an often-overlooked way to use modules to easily guide students along the learning path you want them to follow.

Banning Boring Announcements!

Announcements are an important tool in promoting regular and effective contact in an online course. But if students aren't reading your announcements, the time and effort you put into them is to no avail! In this edition of Byte-sized Canvas, we'll talk about one strategy to make sure your announcements are getting read.

Teaching with OER OpenStax Canvas Course Shells

In this 9-minute video, Dr. Jennifer Carlin-Goldberg from Santa Rosa Junior College shows how she uses Canvas Commons to import sample course shells with free OpenStax textbook content. Jennifer also gives us a tour of her hybrid Statistics class in Canvas and explains how she integrated OpenStax content with her own materials along with shared quizzes and YouTube videos designed to go with the OpenStax textbook.

OpenStax is a nonprofit based at Rice University that creates peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks available in free, digital formats to students and for a low cost in print. Since it launched in 2012, OpenStax has produced 45 textbooks in Math, Science, Social Sciences and Humanities that are free for faculty to use “as is” or to download and modify. Starting in December 2017, Canvas users can use Commons to import OpenStax content that the California Community Colleges Online Education Initiative (OEI) has embedded in Canvas course shells.

The Power of Announcements

Regular and effective contact is such hot topic these days, isn’t it?

Canvas’s Announcements tool not only lets you send out fully customized class messages, but stores your communications in an easy-to-retrieve archive list. Using Announcements also supports quality course design by aligning with a number of OEI Course Design Rubric criteria. It's also a great way to create the connection that keeps students engaged and on track. What's not to love?

Let's explore the power of Announcements (in under 4 minutes!).

Nuances of Online Counseling

Via the Online Counseling Network (OCN), counseling faculty statewide are participating in synchronous online counseling which allows them to replicate a face-to-face (f2f) meeting. Working this way has revealed nuances that counselors need to be aware of. I will share two today.

Eye Contact

The position of your computer camera can impact your eye contact as it can present a nonverbal appearance that you are distracted or uninterested even though you may be staring directly at the student on your computer screen. Camera placement can make a significant difference in how you build rapport online. If you have a camera embedded in your computer monitor, I recommend you adjust your monitor to a position where your camera and eyes are horizontally aligned and level. Positioning your camera in such a manner will present a level of eye contact similar to your f2f counseling appointments. If you have a camera separate from your computer monitor, I recommend you either purchase a stand so that you can place the camera at eye level or buy a camera that you can place on the top of your computer monitor and adjust to your eye level.

Student Engagement

During an online counseling appointment, student participation is an essential component to address student learning outcomes (SLO). For example, many counseling departments include an SLO focusing on applying educational planning so that students can identify course requirements that enable a student to pursue their educational goal/s (e.g., associate degree and transfer requirements). A vital nuance is to allow students the ability to moderate some of the session so they can navigate resources such as your online catalog, key websites (e.g., assist.org), and other vital components that enable students to build a meaningful educational plan that is collaborative and critical to the learning process. As a result, students are increasing their educational cultural capital which contributes to their success and college readiness. Educational cultural capital is student’s mastery or preparedness of the college student role (Aschaffenburg & Maas, p.573, 1997). 2008), so the more educational cultural capital a student has then, the students will gain a more in-depth knowledge of their academic expectations.

One of the aspects as a community college counseling faculty I enjoy is growing my knowledge base and implementing new strategies in my counseling sessions, as this helps me become effective in my approach with students. The more you take time to engage in online synchronous counseling  the more you will implement effective practices that address the nuances of online counseling. Stay tuned for future posts that discuss other nuances when providing synchronous online counseling.

To learn more about Online Counseling check out our webpage.