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August Canvas Resources and News
From the Georgia Tech Digital Learning Team
Subscribers to this newsletter receive monthly updates including Canvas news, technical support updates, training opportunities, feature spotlights, and more.
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New Faculty Orientation
Each August, the Office of Faculty Professional Development hosts New Faculty Orientation and the Center for Teaching and Learning hosts a Fall Teaching Kickoff event. Additional events for new faculty are hosted by Human Resources and the Office of Information Technology. Please see the full schedule on the Faculty Affairs website for details and registration links. Two Canvas-related events include:
- Fall Teaching Kickoff Workshops - Aug. 16 from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. - Online and In Person
- Canvas and Other Classroom Tools Training Sessions - Aug. 18 through Aug. 20 (Multiple Sessions) - Virtual (Visit the Faculty Affairs website to download the training schedule.)
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Teaching Forward: Creating Inclusive Learning Environments with Technology - Aug. 16
On August 16, the Center for Teaching and Learning will host a series of interactive workshops designed to help instructors get ready for the first day of class.
From 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 16, join Samba Diop (OIT), Rui Hui (CTL), and Rebecca Pope-Ruark (CTL) for Teaching Forward - a workshop focused on what it means to create inclusive learning environments using technology.
Online discussion and collaboration tools as well as the chat feature in videoconferencing platforms have opened up new opportunities for all students to effectively participate in class, so how do we leverage the benefits of learning technologies like these in face-to-face courses? This session will focus on tools integrated into Canvas including Ed Discussion and Annoto and explore options for using these inclusive collaborative technologies in the day-to-day classroom experience.
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Introducing Canvas Panda Pros
Instructure recently launched a new program called Panda Pros, designed to help faculty get consulting sessions for free directly from Canvas experts. Instructure is offering free 25 min. consulting sessions with their learning services team from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. EST every day to help answer instructor questions. Sessions will cover instructional design coaching, course construction guidance, quick course reviews, and answer how-to questions with Canvas and Portfolium products.
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Updates to the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Tool in Canvas
In August 2020, C21U released a new Canvas tool called Key Performance Indicator (KPI). The original KPI tool provides instructors with course-specific weekly snapshots of how students are performing. The purpose of the tool is to help instructors monitor the student learning experience and gain insight into how to enhance learning in future remote and hybrid courses. The initial group of testers made it clear that this tool will continue to remain useful as classes move back to an in-person format.
Today, we’re announcing the release of the newest version of the tool (thanks to the work of Chris Yang in C21U). These new features will be deployed to Georgia Tech’s instance of Canvas on Tuesday, August 10.
- The tool is now real-time. Teachers will see updated weekly averages for student responses in their teacher dashboard as they’re submitted. This will allow teachers to adjust their teaching strategies continuously as the data in the KPI dashboard is refreshed.
- The original tool opened a new window and displayed the dashboard in Tableau, but now the revamped dashboard opens inside Canvas. This results in a more seamless experience for teachers.
- The dashboard only displays the current Canvas course, rather than all courses in which the teacher is enrolled.
- The dashboard uses color-coding and bar widths to display weekly averages at-a-glance – allowing teachers to quickly identify potential trouble spots.
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Instructions for Communicating Course Descriptions to Students
As soon as the Canvas sections are available for a given semester, faculty can provide brief details of course plans to assist students in course selection and planning for the upcoming semester. This course description will then be available to students in OSCAR when they view the individual course entry during the registration period.
OIT has created a helpful guide to answer the following questions:
- What should my course description say?
- How do I provide my course description?
- How do my students access course descriptions?
- How do I enter a course description in cases where several sections are combined in Canvas?
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Upcoming Digital Learning Technology Training Sessions
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Getting Your Canvas Course Ready for a New Semester
- Combine Courses/Sections: Canvas allows instructors to move section enrollments from individual courses and combine them into one course. This feature is helpful for instructors who teach several sections of the same course and only want to manage course data in one location. Click here for more details.
- Communicate: Early communication is vital. To communicate with students prior to the start of the term you will need to adjust both the start and end date for your course and check the box for Students can only participate in the course between these dates.
- Pre-course Survey or other Pre-semester Start Assignments: In order to have students complete a pre-course survey or participate in an assignment prior to the regular term start - you will need to adjust both the start and end date for your course and check the box for Students can only participate in the course between these dates
- We suggest adding May 22, 2021, as the course end date (12 days after the end of the term), afterward, the course will become read-only.
- Draft State: If you would like to work on your course Modules before allowing students access to the materials, you can work in draft state, which makes Modules invisible to students.
- Files: If you are allowing access to Files in the Course Navigation, the default setting for all Files is 'published,' or visible to students. Please check to make sure the files you wish to share with or hide from students are marked as published or unpublished, respectively.
- Course Design and Development: The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) offers assistance with designing and developing a new course, or re-designing an existing course by incorporating technologies to improve learning outcomes in various learning environments. Contact CTL by filling out this short contact form.
- Publish: Remember to publish your course in advance of the course start date.
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2021 - 2022 Teaching with Technology Partnership: Call for Applications
The Teaching with Technology Partnership (TTP) is a Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) initiative that supports and promotes effective and innovative uses of technology to enhance teaching and learning. These partnerships involve collaboration between:
- Faculty Fellows: The Teaching with Technology Faculty Fellows will be the sponsors of projects on which they wish to collaborate with CTL.
- CTL Learning Technology Specialists: CTL will be a creative partner in the projects selected for the TTP program. Each project will be assigned a CTL learning technology specialist, who will be available to meet with the faculty fellows regularly to develop, implement, and assess the projects.
Applications for the 2021 Teaching with Technology Partnership are now open. If you have a project in mind and would like to partner with CTL to work on it, please submit your application by Friday, August 20, 2021.
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