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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
Video is powerful communication tool for online teaching. Instructors often naturally gravitate towards using video to deliver presentations to their online students, but video can be an effective way to clearly communicate instructions, as well. In the 3-minute video below, Xochitl Tirado, from Imperial College, shows how she uses a screencast (a video recording of her computer's screen) to deliver the instructions for the discussion to her students. The video doesn't replace her written instructions, however. Instead, it augments them and provides students with the choice to read or listen. Xochitl explains how she uses the same instructions in each discussion. Designing a course with consistency like this is an effective way to ensure students gain confidence in their abilities and can focus more exclusively on their contributions, as opposed to how to engage in the discussion.
Not all online courses look the same. That may seem a rather obvious point but it’s one that instructors may not realize regularly presents a barrier to learning for their students.
The Syllabus is over here in one course, and over there in another. The Home page may tell the student how to get started or it may be a Spartan declaration of the instructor’s contact info, the textbook title and nothing more (in some cases, there may be no Home page at all). The discussions in this course are part of the modules, but in that course, they’re accessed through a separate link in the navigation.
The differences aren’t inherently wrong but all this variety can translate to “I’m lost!” for our students.
And when a student is lost, they’re not learning.
There’s a great web usability book entitled, Don’t Make Me Think. Author Steve Krug’s main point is that “when you’re creating a website, your job is to get rid of the question marks.” In other words, make what your web visitor should do so obvious they won’t get distracted by having to think about it (otherwise they’re likely to leave). This principle holds true when creating an online course. Students are more likely to interact with and be successful in a well-designed, intuitive course.
In the 1980s, John Sweller’s research pointed out that extraneous cognitive load (the amount of mental energy expended to deal with non-essential information) can be reduced by good course design. While we don’t want our students to stop thinking entirely ;-), we do want all their thinking powers directed at absorbing our wonderful content, not on figuring out where to find the discussions or how to submit their assignment.
In the spirit of “don’t make me think,” here are five easy-to-implement sign posts that will guide your students to success in your course.
Before publishing your course this coming semester, it’s a great idea to take yourself through it with the eyes of a student who’s unfamiliar with both your topic and with Canvas. Better yet, ask a friend or colleague (or even some Joe off the street) who knows next to nothing about your content to spend 10-15 minutes exploring your course as if it’s their first day of class. Then “interview” them:
I say, “Vive la différence!” when it comes to instructional methods. Variety is the spice of life and, arguably, the essence of a well-rounded education. (It also makes your job more fun!) But save your creativity for your content, not your course structure. It’ll free up your students’ time for learning.
Discussions are an important part of fostering student-student interactions in an online course. After completing the OEI Online Course Review process, Shannon Van Zant, who teaches History at Columbia College, recognized the importance of designing her discussions with clear, consistent instructions. Having the same instructions available to students each week scaffolds their learning and supports them to become confident and independent learners. Shannon, also incorporates images into the prompts of her discussion topics. By integrating images into the textual content of her discussion, she more fully engages the way people learn.
In the 7-minute video below, Shannon shares her experiences with the OEI Online Course Review process and takes us on a tour of her online visual discussions.