Thank you! These are good suggestions, and we are already doing all of them except the one about putting it at the bottom of the assignment itself. That's a great idea, and we'll put it on the list to implement, though I'm afraid it will meet the same fate as the other reminders, emails, posted notices etc.
The real challenge in online education, especially with lower-level, naive populations, is getting students to read and act on the information we give them, and to internalize what we tell them well enough to use it consistently.
We have an extensive orientation to train students in course mechanics and policies, and seven big assignments that all follow the same general pattern, and we still have students who by the end of the semester are still making the same mistakes every time.
The only parts of the course that students reliably respond to effectively are the ones that they encounter without having to be told about it in a separate message, because a substantial subset of them don't read - they don't read email, they don't read content, they don't read instructions, announcements or reminders. This is the Achilles heel of the push for online education, because it assumes students read, and a lot of them don't.
This is made much more difficult by the fact that in Canvas, students have a lot of ways to access assignments and assessments directly, bypassing the modules and the front page of the course. A lot of them visualize their course primarily on their phones as a 'to do' list, out of context, so all our announcements and reminders that are in the modules or on the front page are bypassed, as is much of the course content and any activity or assignment that isn't graded and therefore isn't on their Canvas to-do list.
We would be greatly helped if Canvas would give us more power to turn off certain functions that are actually hurting or confusing students or that are making course communications much more difficult.
Anne-Marie Bouché, PhD
Associate Professor, Art History
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