Building Relationships with Canvas

[amanda_taintor]

Hi all, 

I am giving a workshop on building relationships with Canvas. I would love to hear what are simple ways you leverage Canvas to create relationships: instructor- students, build student-student relationship, and even student-content relationship. 

Amanda

[awilliams]

This is a great topic. I'm interested to see all the different ways it goes. I'll get it started with a simple and straightforward suggestion we implemented at my institution as a requirement for all online courses. Instructor Introduction 

Most online course design rubrics will have this as a criterion and many courses will have an instructor introduction on the very first page students see or elsewhere in the "welcome" area of the course. An image, or better yet a video, plus a brief personalized message from the instructor is generally included. This helps with humanizing digital learning‌ by creating those connections you are referring to from the start. Here are a few community resources related to custom home pages and there are many online resources regarding the importance of presence and engagement. Don't forget that you can also use the syllabus page as a home if you like the course summary but still want the flexibility of the Rich Content Editor.

How do I use the Course Home Page as an instructor? 

Home Sweet Homepages without Tables 

[amanda_taintor]

Thanks for the additional resources

[darrinj]

I think another way is to offer a Frequently Asked Questions discussion board within a Start Here area. Students can use this board as a no risk way of asking general questions about assignments or instructional materials, and instructors can answer them there. Other students who have the same questions can come into this discussion board and see their answers before they even ask them. This is helpful for students because it provides answers, but it's also useful for teachers because it can cut down on email. Another twist on this that I've heard about is offering to give students points if they correctly answer other students' questions. That's not a bad incentive, and the point amount wouldn't have to be that much.

[dwilson837]

Hi Amanda, as a teacher in a fully online program (Travel Marketing), I have experienced the value of relationships in the online environment, both teacher-student and student-student. 

One particular activity that increases student engagement and promotes relationships is assigning the student as an "expert of the week," where that student provides additional content for their topic of expertise, comes up with discussion questions, and then facilitates the discussion. 

Also, because these are travel classes, I have an "On Location" discussion board where students can talk about where they are traveling, post trip reports, or ask questions about places they want to travel -- and get classmates involved in asking questions and providing additional information.  This is a non-graded discussion forum that extends throughout the course.

Some ways of promoting teacher-student relationships are: holding weekly online office hours using Zoom or some other virtual meeting tool, providing in-depth and personal feedback for discussion participation and other assignments, and making sure to respond in a timely manner to all student questions. 

[laurakgibbs]

What a great discussion! I've been teaching fully online courses since before the LMSes even tried to create a sense of community. And while things have gotten better in LMS world than back in the year 2002 (when I started teaching fully online), I still far prefer to having students create their own blogs so that they have their "own" space instead of trying to use the discussion board space for that purpose. Especially in a fully online class where you don't meet your students in person, letting them create totally personalized blog spaces is very valuable.

This is my first Fall semester being a participant here at the Community, so I'm going to try to document step by step how my student blog network takes shape this semester. That will start on Monday when a few students will probably begin the class (I open it a week early for anyone who wants a head start). So, even though it is not exactly a Canvas-related thing, I will document and share: a great feature about blog content is that it has an RSS feed which means you could also have the student blog network displaying inside Canvas with the content all coming together, while students are actually writing at their own blogs.

Anyway, I'll have more to say about that next week, and thanks to awilliams‌ for letting me know about this discussion. I am a total believer in connected learning. The effort to create those connections among learners is well worth it IMO. 🙂

[gsheets]

The previous commenters have all had good tips and we use most of them now. i would just add using media comments Audio and or video when evaluating student assignments, reports, etc. You can also use the media comments in discussion boards and announcements. Several of our faculty use recorded web conferences for group presentations, that promotes student to student interaction. We are are in a unusual time with technology and students, our students comment about how much they like video feedback as it feels very personal but they are hesitant to use the video system to comment back to the instructor. These are the same students that stay up all night gaming and talking with people all over the world. I think this will tip sometime in the future and video and audio comments and communications will be the norm.

[laurakgibbs]

I promised to try to document my student blog network this semester, and here's what I have so far:

Fall 2017: Story of a Blog Network (1) 

https://community.canvaslms.com/people/laurakgibbs/blog/2017/08/15/fall-2017-story-of-a-blog-network... 

It's "week zero" so this is just the soft launch of my class before official start of semester on Monday, but there are 24 student blogs up and running across my classes. I am really happy with how it is going so far!  🙂