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.