Tool Tips: Setting up a Course

Dr. Sydney Brown Author

01/30/2017 Added

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Learn how an instructor set up a course in Canvas, by Sydney Brown, Assistant Director, Innovative Instructional Design & Courtesy Research/Lecturer, Landscape Architecture Program.

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[00:00:02.741]Hi, my name is Sydney Brown
[00:00:04.819]and I am the Assistant Director
[00:00:06.640]for the Innovative Instructional Design team.
[00:00:09.341]In addition to working across campus
[00:00:11.731]in Instructional Design,
[00:00:13.290]I also teach a course in the College of Architecture
[00:00:16.941]called Design Thinking 110
[00:00:20.749]that primarily has true freshmen
[00:00:23.360]and it introduces our students
[00:00:26.480]to a generalized approach to design,
[00:00:29.971]specifically the design thinking process.
[00:00:32.891]And so this spring, I did it in Canvas
[00:00:37.189]and I was learning Canvas
[00:00:38.589]at the same time I was teaching the class
[00:00:40.501]so in that respect,
[00:00:42.443]it's unlike an experience that many of you will have
[00:00:46.152]and there's a lot of things I would do differently.
[00:00:48.691]There's a few things that I did in Canvas
[00:00:50.891]that I thought worked really well
[00:00:52.771]so I will show some of those things to you now.
[00:00:59.272]All right, so I had a default.
[00:01:01.843]My homepage was just a list of modules.
[00:01:04.460]I thought students would come in
[00:01:06.301]and they would just scroll down to the week
[00:01:08.800]and they could jump right in there.
[00:01:12.550]I also had the syllabus
[00:01:14.661]and one of the cool things about Canvas
[00:01:19.381]is that every time that you add an assignment,
[00:01:22.040]you put a due date.
[00:01:23.689]It lists it here right at the bottom of the syllabus
[00:01:25.941]so your students can always see what's due.
[00:01:29.532]Now in our syllabus,
[00:01:31.462]I put links to some of the main texts that we'd use
[00:01:35.102]but in the fall,
[00:01:36.292]we have a huge teaching team
[00:01:38.193]and so we put the syllabus in a Google Doc
[00:01:40.959]that everybody can access
[00:01:42.652]from all of their different sections
[00:01:44.540]and have it always up to date
[00:01:46.070]so that launches in a new window to a Google Doc.
[00:01:51.550]So go back to the home view and in the listing,
[00:01:57.267]all the classes are very hands on
[00:01:59.771]and we start off with team projects
[00:02:02.902]and so I like how the modules expand and contract
[00:02:06.641]so you can jump around,
[00:02:08.650]but one of the things that ended up working just fabulously
[00:02:14.401]and that's really simple to do in Canvas
[00:02:17.300]is to take a page and create a Wiki
[00:02:19.900]so our students each did an individual project
[00:02:23.622]and then they have to document the project in slides
[00:02:27.039]and then they have to give a very short pitch presentation.
[00:02:30.230]So by using the Wiki,
[00:02:32.969]we were able to have students link to the documents
[00:02:37.268]and we had them use Google Docs again
[00:02:39.768]and so they linked the documents
[00:02:41.849]and this made it really easy for me and my TA to jump in,
[00:02:46.849]take a look at what they had going
[00:02:49.089]and then to give them feedback on that
[00:02:53.420]and I will definitely use this again
[00:02:56.479]and I think what I'll do in the future
[00:02:58.729]so let me show you what it looks like.
[00:03:00.919]So if I wanna go look at the process slide deck,
[00:03:04.159]I would click on it, it opens in a new window
[00:03:06.907]and you could see now that I see this big slide deck
[00:03:11.707]and one of the cool things here is I'm jumping through
[00:03:15.900]and if I see something where I wanna give feedback,
[00:03:19.759]I can now use Google Docs' commenting tool
[00:03:23.788]to give the student feedback
[00:03:27.769]and so that was pretty cool
[00:03:30.689]and I think we'll do that more
[00:03:32.569]because many of the faculty in the College of Architecture
[00:03:35.359]use Google Docs and Collaborative Docs
[00:03:38.260]so our students need to learn that
[00:03:40.819]and since there are so many group projects,
[00:03:43.508]it's a great skill for them to have.
[00:03:45.855]So that's one of the things that went really well.
[00:03:49.337]One of the things that I didn't expect
[00:03:53.319]was that here I thought this was very simple.
[00:03:56.798]Here's the homepage, here's the list of everything.
[00:04:00.392]I found my students constantly going
[00:04:03.018]into pages in different ways
[00:04:07.478]so normally there's this pages link that you can see
[00:04:12.289]and I left it on because I didn't know
[00:04:13.897]how to optimize the links during the term,
[00:04:16.849]I didn't worry about it,
[00:04:18.488]and I saw students going into pages
[00:04:21.369]which is a pretty confusing view of the course elements.
[00:04:27.188]It in no way transmits the complexity
[00:04:30.728]or anything of what they need to do
[00:04:33.587]and so in the future,
[00:04:35.546]I am keeping this one completely turned off to students
[00:04:40.249]in terms of the navigation.
[00:04:42.127]I only want to make links to them
[00:04:45.318]that immediately makes sense to them
[00:04:48.100]and convey what they need to do
[00:04:50.467]so for example here's the assignments page
[00:04:55.857]so that's pretty useful.
[00:04:57.089]It's listed by module and very much looks like
[00:05:00.908]what's on the front page pretty much,
[00:05:02.948]but I still think that some of this is confusing for them
[00:05:06.598]and I would probably disable that
[00:05:09.057]in order to force them to either go to the links
[00:05:11.878]in the syllabus for assignments or go to the home.
[00:05:15.797]I haven't really worked that out yet.
[00:05:19.566]What else did I really like?
[00:05:23.166]I love the announcements
[00:05:24.998]and probably one of the things that I like the most
[00:05:27.497]was that I would make an announcement
[00:05:29.686]and they get notified about that
[00:05:31.697]and it's very easy for them in an announcement
[00:05:36.297]to go in and post a question.
[00:05:39.326]It's just like if you were the person
[00:05:40.885]who made this announcement
[00:05:42.926]and somebody could raise their hand
[00:05:44.732]or hit reply and immediately there it is.
[00:05:49.446]Which brings me pretty much
[00:05:51.185]to one of my favorite aspects of using Canvas this spring
[00:05:56.486]was the ease of communication
[00:05:59.173]so students could use their inbox and send me a message
[00:06:07.366]but most of all,
[00:06:08.596]I like how it ties in with email.
[00:06:11.257]So if a student posted in the discussion board,
[00:06:14.286]I had it set up to send me that email
[00:06:16.577]and I could just hit reply to the email
[00:06:18.468]and it would be updated in the discussion board.
[00:06:21.616]That was hugely helpful in speeding up my workflow.
[00:06:27.428]Another thing that I used heavily
[00:06:29.924]was just being able to make direct links to pages
[00:06:34.756]in all sorts of explanations
[00:06:37.737]and especially the announcements.
[00:06:39.886]When I was talking about an assignment,
[00:06:41.276]I could put a direct link to that assignment
[00:06:43.908]so they could receive it,
[00:06:46.297]they might be reading it online,
[00:06:47.806]they might be reading it on their mobile,
[00:06:49.577]they click on it
[00:06:50.748]and they could go right to that assignment right there.
[00:06:53.257]They don't have to do eight different clicks.
[00:06:59.234]So let me show you in the inbox a little bit.
[00:07:04.515]You can go ahead and choose the course
[00:07:06.675]that you want to restrict things to
[00:07:09.206]and this wasn't immediately apparent to me
[00:07:12.515]so it's very easy in a two-field.
[00:07:15.874]If you want to send messages to a specific group,
[00:07:19.883]this is where you would do that and so in this case,
[00:07:23.324]I know I have a group called the Elucidators
[00:07:26.044]and so it immediately grabs them
[00:07:28.295]and sends them a message
[00:07:30.844]and that took me a while to find
[00:07:32.095]because I thought I'd find it when I looked at their groups,
[00:07:34.706]but this is much better to connecting with them.
[00:07:40.055]You can also easily email people from the grade center
[00:07:43.996]at the top of the column.
[00:07:45.836]But overall, I had a fantastic experience.
[00:07:49.695]It wasn't hard
[00:07:50.924]and I did find out that a huge number of my students
[00:07:55.466]use the mobile access to it
[00:07:58.244]and so what I need to make sure to do this fall and spring
[00:08:02.076]is to test my quizzes on the mobile device
[00:08:06.315]because what my students told me
[00:08:09.218]was that some of the responses were a little too long
[00:08:13.647]and didn't display well
[00:08:15.348]and so I'll do a lot more testing with that in this fall.
[00:08:20.022]So anyway, I hope you enjoyed looking around at the course
[00:08:25.213]and if you have any questions or suggestions,
[00:08:30.163]I'd love to hear them.
[00:08:31.173]Thank you.

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Tool Tips: Setting up a Course

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