Friday, June 15, 2012

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). 

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