Notes from other folks

There were lots of Washington folks at InstructureCon.  Here are some notes from some of them:

• Andy Duckworth at Tacoma CC pulled together the Tweets from the conference at http://storify.com/aduckworth/instructurecon-2012
• Scott Dennis of the State Board has his notes at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qX2cO7HVq4JFchkJZ3RWlbgOlAlX-nz_ollXfYRZKUE/edit 

The fun video from the Keynote has been posted. It sort of captures the vibe of the conference.

Forecast for InstructureCON12 - Cloudy with a chance of AWESOME from Instructure on Vimeo.

Creating mobile friendly classes

Rick Murch-Shafer of Creighton University

Question - can an online course be completed in such a way that it can be completed on only a mobile device.

The presenter clarified that, for the purposes of this talk, mobile computing is tablet computing and, specifically, the iPad. He is not talking about mobile phones and not really android tablets like the nook tablet or Kindle ( he asked how many people in the room had an android tablet with them right now. No one raised their hand. He asked how many had iPads - many people raised their hands. I have a Kindle fire and made a choice to leave it home. If I had brought it, it would have been in addition to my iPad, instead of it)

What can we do in course design to make course more mobile friendly.

Mobile safari browser makes it fine to use the native LMS, even without the app
Readings work well (files). Indeed, mobile device is a better reading experience than desktop
Quizzes
Communications
What doesnt work well
Flash based content (does work on the Kindle fire)
Uploaded media through Kultura (the on the fly recordings) . Alternately, you can use YouTube
Synchronous meetings
submitting assignments (can't save files to iOS so it is not possible to attach files - new canvas iOS app allows uploaded assignments
Google docs - doesn't work well on iPad. Can put files on Google Drive and can upload them to canvas with Polaris Office or Quick Office
New canvas iOS app has Dropbox integration and the ability to email document

1 create in Pages or whatever. Email to self with share feature
2 open the attachment and open in other app - canvas shows up as an options. Choose it and submit the assignment - cool!

Preparing students
Put it in the syllabus/ getting started
What apps do they need to have?
Workflow - have explicit instructions for the students
Standardization and support for faculty ( create some standard language for syllabus saying "this class is mobile friendly"
Clarity on minimum system requirements. Which mobile devices will it work for?

One commenter recommended the puffin browser for viewing flash

Outcomes in Canvas to help with outcomes

John Louviere, Utah State University

The first part of this presentation was about what outcomes are and how they relate

1. Begin with the end in mind. What is the end report that you will be trying to demonstrate?

3. Have a plan - for example, try this 4 step proces. Begin with the end in mind and design the reports beforehand
Design measurable outcomes
Map outcomes with courses
Map outcomes to assessment
Organize outcomes by subaccount
Rubrics - use them to collect outcomes data
Design the rubrics up front
Evaluate Outcomes mastery
Deign assignments and quizzes
Use speedgrader
Reporting
Custom reporting using student competency report (need admin status)

Related info with step by step how to guides (including an editable one) at tinyurl.com/87wnecc.

Canvas community

Matt McGhie from Instructure

The community is on the Instructure website. Can subscribe to either all postings or to individual threads. Can unsubscribe in the same way.
Forums to watch

• -Announcements
• Ask a question (correct answers are tagged). There are Canvas coaches in the forum (Renee Carney from lower Columbia is one of them!)
• Feature requests. You can vote for features you want and the ones with the most votes rises in priority. Make feature requests by explaining the problem you are trying to solve and let the Canvas folks find a Canvas way to solve it (as opposed to saying "I want you to build feature x).
• There are 3 statuses: planned, blank, not planned (not going to put this in Canvas)
• Release notes and screencasts - they do a release every 2 weeks. They post release notes 1 week before the update. They do a screencast showing what the new features can do in about 2 minutes - cool! I'm Definately going to subscribe to this.
• Best practice webinars - typically the second Friday of each month. Taught by coaches and Instructure folks. Recordings are posted there for later viewing.

Canvas community created resources. At the bottom, hard to find, but this is where normal folks can go in and put their cool stuff. (I saw one on using outcomes features).

Share updates with faculty with a "what's new in canvas?" with a link directly to the screencast. Another college uses an email listserv. No one here seems to use the announcements.

Concluding thoughts on Day 1

This was a really good conference day. I gleaned lots of good information and met many interesting people. The 30 minute sessions were very intense - 8 sessions in one day, plus the keynote and a general session - 10 information packed sessions!  Needless to say, most people were feeling pretty overwhelmed by the end of it all.
I'm glad to know the sessions were all recorded and the related session content are in separate Canvas modules in the conference classroom.  I will need to go back and watch several of the sessions that I missed.

Easy to Build, Easy to Maintain, Easy to Update - Building Courses with Canvas

The presenter, Kevin Reeve from Utah State, talked about how using a course template and thinking with reusability in mind, made the course more easy to reuse. His main thing was a course template. ANGEL has templates built in, so they are pretty easy to use. With Canvas, the presenter needed to put his Page template into a Wiki page as to not mess up stuff that automatically appears in other parts of the course.

He has found that students get distracted by the main page stream or stuff in "coming up".  Students may come into the classroom for a reason and then get distracted and don't do what they meant to do.

He created ease of use for students by thoughtfully chunking information together.  By putting the all of a module's content into an assignment, it puts everything the student needs in one place. This is very handy for folks using the mobile app.  This would only really work if you only have one assignment per unit.  However one could put all related course materials and links in the assignment and that would work for multiple assignments.

The presenter emphasized the importance of using descriptive names in the things you create to make the different views more meaningful to the students.

He wonders whether the students still appreciate a downloadable syllabus (I think yes). 

Integrated Communication - the Human Touch

Looked at 4 tools to try and determine which tools helped the students feel more connected to the faculty and to each other.

• announcements.  Canvas announcements are different in that students can respond to them , turning them into a kind of discussion
• discussions 
• chat and whiteboard  really helpful in math (although the whiteboard has to be open in another window).  A good way of doing online office hours.  It sounds like the whiteboard has issues - we have access to Collaborate, which sounds like it would work better. Plus, one can record in Collaborate.

She would remind students of the online office hours and got lots of traffic.

- media inserts - a little film strip in the upper right and you can automatically record audio/video and it will be inserted in the area of the course. Can also use it in speed grader. 

Google plus alias - can code messages as they come into gmail  - she has a blog post in the course that explains how to use this tool to organize mail.

Students polled in 3 classes- top 3 were notifications, conversations, and assignment feedback

Some question as to whether the students knew what the tools were when they were answering the survey.  Students in other classes had slightly different responses.

She had students scan the math homework.  They can use apps on their mobile devices to make PDF documents as an alternative to scanners.

I think this was one of the more useful sessions - practical stuff.  I will definately survey my students on this question of preferred tools. 

Reference - Graham, Charles (2006) models of blended learning in higher education - similar to idea of transactional distance.

How Edison State College Uses Canvas for More than Just Courses

Getting folks in the administrative level involved with Canvas early was an important part of getting full buy in

At their college, they have everyone enrolled in Canvas. 

Student organizations and student government and student life groups use the system.

Met with teams of different users throughout the year and as they do that, more groups are reaching out to them and they are doing less outreach.

The college is using the following tools with groups:

• File sharing
• Collaboration and wikis
• Notifications ( especially important to the non course users since they are not often in the LMS)
• Discussions
• Announcements
• Tracking
• Conferences and chat
• EtherPad for agendas
• Adjunct teaching portfolios - actually all portfolios will eventually move to canvas. Faculty put in their data as assignments and the department head uses the Speed Grader to evaluate the portfolios.
• Great way to gather data and could use it to track to outcomes - with the analytics could be very powerful.

They organize these "courses" into sub accounts.

They don't have the people create the courses on their own, as they prefer to work with staff so they are aware of the great tools and how to use them.

They use the Courses structure instead of groups because there is a limitation of 500  mb on groups and that cannot be changed.  Also, courses can be in a subaccount  structure easily.

Seamlessly Incorporating Learning Outcomes into Online Course Design

Linda Ralston, University of Utah presented this workshop on using Outcomes in Canvas. She spent the first part of the workshop talking about forming Outcomes, which wasn't very interesting to me. I wanted to get to the use of the various Outcomes tools in Canvas.

She uses the outcomes page in Canvas and clearly maps the assignment , quiz questions, rubrics, etc .  Students can run a report to demonstrate where they mastered and did not master the outcomes.  

As with many workshops, the best stuff was at the end and she hurried through just how to make use of the tools she mentioned.

Materials from the presentation are available at Https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/33329

Killing PowerPoint: Effective Online Lectures Using Canvas Tools

Rebekah Grow from Univ of Utah talked about the potential horrors of PowerPoint. In doing so, she shared a very funny YouTube video which does a lovely job of showing what not to do.

The presenter suggested the following tools in Canvas as potential replacements for flat PowerPoint decks-

- pages - you could do around 16 slides per page, use audio tool to narrate

- kaltura media server

- link to existing resources like YouTube

It seems to me like some of these ideas are addressed technically by using Tegrity, though the pedagogical issue of PowerPoint is important to consider.

She has all the info from the session in an open course located at Utah.intructure.com/courses/49573.  This course is linked in the modules pages.

Getting Started With Canvas Session - Part 2

(delayed posting from Wednesday, 6/13) I'm going to use my upcoming Fall American Government class for this part of the getting started session, focusing on actually building a class.

In-line Previewer - when you upload a file, a preview of the file shows up on the screen, so students can see what the file says without having to download and open it.

Drag and Drop - you can just highlight files and drag them into the Canvas files area. You can do this in ANGEL too, but it seems much easier here.

Assignment building - If you create Assignment 1, you can just click on a "plus"symbol and it will automatically create Assignment 2, with the name. This makes it quick and easy to scaffold the course. One will, of course, need to go back and fill in the details. But this simplifies the process of creating the course structure, which should have good implications for course design and navigation.

Observation - a lot of the tools I'm seeing here are things we are used to having in ANGEL. However, the thing that is different here is they are much easier to access and use. It is important to remember, though, that Instructure is a fairly new company (founded in 2008) and there are some things that we are used to in ANGEL that they don't have yet. One thing that has come out is that they don't have the ability to add layers of security in testing, like you can do in ANGEL with the secure browser setting.

What is Instructure? - Canvas is an open source learning management tool.  Anyone can take it and adapt it for their own use, like Moodle.  Instructure is a company who has taken Canvas and customized it and hosts it, provides support, etc, for a fee.  The State is contracting with Instructure to use Canvas as its learning management tool.  We could just take the open version of Canvas and adapt it for our uses as a state and host it ourselves. However, this would involve hiring a team of people and buying a lot of servers.  The eLearning Council determined it was much wiser and more cost effective for us to contract with professionals rather than try to do it ourselves.

On the other hand, if, by some horrible chance, Instructure were to get bought out by some gigantic learning management company that shall not be named, we could stay with Canvas if we chose, and would not be forced to change, as is happening with the ANGEL buyout.

Visualizing data from Canvas

They announced in the keynote that Canvas Analytics would launch today. In this session, Seth Gurell from Utah Valley State has created a fancy workaround to pull out some Analytics about site visits and quiz questions. The nice part, of course, is the visualization, making the data into a visual representation that is interactive.

One can use the paid version of Wolfram Alpha to upload data from Canvas and create scatter plots and histagrams. He showed a demo and the graphics were almost instantly created.

In the session, I sat next to my colleague Sue Galloway from Centralia College. Sue is in the last portion of her doctorate, so is spending lots of time embedded in data. But we both felt that most faculty wouldn't be able to make productive use of this kind of data. We noted that it would be important to partner with institutional researchers at the colleges to understand how to make use of these graphic visualizations.

In the question portion, someone asked the presenter how he made use of the analytics. Interestingly, he had not gotten around to using them yet.

Snapp - a tool that will analyze discussion board data if you can extract it from Canvas.

Piloting and navigating our way to quality courses

This Session, by folks from
Bucks county community college, looked at transitioning to Canvas and making use of Quality Matters in the process.

The session had several good ideas. Including making sure that folks started using Canvas right after getting training. This information could cause us to adjust the way we do our pilot.

They also noted that, in their experience, it was easier to train people who had never used the LMS than to retrain folks used to another system. They were. Moving from Blackboard - I think moving to Canvas from ANGEL will be much easier.

InstructureCon keynote

Josh , the CEO of Instructure gave a very amusing keynote called Cloudy with a chance of Awesome. It talked about the state of the LEarning Management market and the awesomeness of Canvas and Instructure . Some takeaways
* automagically - in cloud computing, there are no tiresome waits for new versions, fixes happen
* there was a great story about research on monkeys that I won't try to type out here in my iPad. It talked about resistance to change.
* tl;dr (too long;didn't read) I'll be using this one.

Collaboration Workshop Part 2

We're starting with the Conference tool, which allows web conferencing. We have access to Blackboard Collaborate, which at first glance, seems much, much more robust. It allows for synchronous collaboration with presentations, desktop sharing, etc. It could be used ideally for virtual office hours. One big downside is that the webinar can't be recorded and viewed at a later time.  The presenter noted that it works for smaller groups with large bandwidth.

Now, we're trying Skype. It's not working very well. In preparation for this session, everyone associated a Skype account with their profile.  When we came in today as a group, it showed everyone as "offline" and there didn't seem to be a way to get online from within Canvas. The moderator seemed to think it was a browser thing - if you are not using the most recent version of the browser, it might not work. Anyway, it's cool that you can do use Skype within Canvas, but given the the other tools, I'm not sure why I would use it.  The presenter started with an explanation of communication intimacy.  Using a tool like Skype is pretty intimate, so one would want to take care in using it.

We're wrapping up with learning scenarious, sharing ways we would use these collabotation tools in our teaching.  One tool we're using is the Collaborations tab which has integrated Google Docs and EtherPad - both of them make it easy to make collaborative documents.  Google Docs is more robust, but folks need a Google account to use it effectively.

The wrap up of the session is also fairly chaotic. I was just observing to my table colleagues that I wish the presentation would be more systematic, presenting the tool, giving examples of how it might be used, identifying the pros and cons and then playing with the tool (or maybe play first then pedagogy).  The way this was presented made it all really confusing. I suppose they assume we are all familiar with the tools, but even so, if the point of the presentation was to explore collaboration, I wish we'd done so more systematically.

Collaboration Workshop

The workshop started very chaotically, but we did get a chance to learn that Canvas facilitates students adding themselves to teams.

We talked about the value of group work and the reality that group work is hard work. Is it worth it? The group in the room was split on the issue.  The presenter noted that successful group work is not appropriate for all activities. 

In creating teams, the moderator emphasized having the "Right People" - know your students before grouping them for a high stakes.  She recommended putting the least productive people in one group to lessen the negative impact.

Build in "play time" for students to get familiar with the technology.  If you don't, the moderator says that students will play with your first assignment. So, craft expectations then give students a fun activity to experiment with the tool.

We played with the Chat tool. In addition to the typical option of text chat, you can video chat or audio chat - fun! The images resize as more people join the chat. The presenter said she had once had 16 people in the video chat.

We did a brief exercise on learning styles and had the class take a survey identifying who learned in which ways. She talked about the importance of having learning activities that honor each learning style, especially for groups. She would work to put like styles together, especially at the beginning of the class, since like groups work better together.

It's time for a break. I've been sitting at a table with folks from Utah Valley University which has used Canvas for over a year. It's been very interesting.

Getting Started With Canvas session - part 1

I'm at the Canvas conference, called InstructureCon. I'm signed up for 2 pre-session workshops.  The first one is called Getting Started with Canvas. The first portion of the 3 hour session is learning about Canvas from the student perspective. Here are some of my favorite features.

·         The Calendar - pulls in info from all of the student's courses or not. Also, you can sync it with Outlook, Google Calendar, etc. Nice!

• Submitting work - there are lots of options for submitting an assignment. Students can upload a file, link to a Google Doc, type in text, etc.

Students can also upload or record media right into Canvas - cool!

The recording feature is throughout Canvas - you can record discussion posts, 



Thoughts about this session - we started from the student perspective.  This was pedagogically a good idea, but practically, everyone in the class was desperate to get started actually creating classes. They had almost no patience for the student experience. I would flip it.

OK - time for a break. More in the next post.