Teaching Effectively in Canvas (Please share ideas & advice!)

[johnmartin]

I'd love to get people's ideas and feedback on this Canvas professional development program that we're working on. We're finding that our faculty are moving to Canvas with some ease, but most are not taking the opportunity to really improve their teaching. We're hoping to spark that in a big way. Thoughts?

Teaching Effectively

With my colleagues, I'm designing a set of four guided face-to-face sessions in May of 2017 to help faculty learn how to teach effectively in Canvas. For us, teaching effectively is aimed at both students and instructors. For students, it is not just basic information transfer — what Chi, (2009) calls passive learning, but more active, constructive, and interactive learning. We're basing it on principles of good learning, and applying them in Canvas. For faculty, it also includes administrative efficiencies. We're integrating Backwards Design with Design Thinking and Universal Design for Learning to give them a unified framework.

Development

STEP 1. Immediate term: Mini-Canvas Camp. Four 120-min workshops in May and June on fundamental TEIC topics: Course Design, Assessment, Social Learning, and Individual Learning. These will be the first four of several (a dozen or more) modules that can be led face-to-face, online, or in a blended format. The aggregation of workshops is designed to be flexible: they can be collected in a “Canvas Camp” institute-type model, an online DIY format, or tailored to the needs of a particular SCID.

STEP 2. Over the next 3-4 months, 1-2 dozen more modules will be built around foundational TEIC topics. The materials will live online and be available to hold as face-to-face or blended workshops, or as DIY online resources. The modular format allows flexibility to be assembled and grouped in ways that directly address campus needs.

Core4: Face-to-Face Sessions (Immediate term)

	Course Design (120 min)	Assessment (120 min)	Social Learning (120 min)	Individual Learning (120 min)
Canvas Tools Addressed	Calendar/Syllabus Outcomes/Rubrics Navigation File Organization & tips Canvas Inbox Assignments	Speedgrader Rubrics Peer review & grading Quizzes Gradebook	Groups Synchronous & Asynchronous Discussions Google & Collaborations Assignments	Embedding Media & Self-paced Modules Quizzes
Teaching & Learning Principles (benefit for student)	Design Thinking Backwards Design Universal Design (flexibility, multiple means, etc.)	Formative & Summative feedback Better understanding of content-specific systems	Collaborative learning Project-based Assignments Scaffolding	Empowering learners Co-Design UDL E-Learning Teaching for learning
Administrative Principles (benefit for instructor)	Reduce student emails Streamline course management	Faster grading Useful feedback for assignment design Cohesive grading systems	Student-provided points of feedback to each other. Peer feedback is often more accepted/valued.	More interesting projects Peer feedback is often more accepted/valued.
POST-SESSION (recruit consultants)	1-hour huddle (individual help)	1-hour huddle (individual help)	1-hour huddle (individual help)	1-hour huddle (individual help)

May Session Dates and Times (9-11am and 1-3pm — includes extra 30 min for settling in, break, etc. Followed by an optional 60-minute Post-session application lab where instructors can get consultant advice directly while working on their courses).

	Monday 15	Tuesday 16	Wednesday 17	Thursday 18	Friday 19
1-3 pm	Course Design	Assessment	Teaching & Learning Symposium	Social Learning	Individual Learning

	Monday 22	Tuesday 23	Wednesday 24	Thursday 25	Friday 26
9-11 am	Social Learning	Course Design	Assessment	Individual Learning	(Review and revise for next week’s sessions)

	Monday 29	Tuesday 30	Wednesday 31	Thursday Jun 01	Friday Jun 02
1-3 pm	Memorial Day	Social Learning	Individual Learning	Course Design	Assessment

Outcomes

Participants will

1. Apply what they have learned in their own Canvas sandbox or course space, including:
   • student-centered navigation practices such as clear and concise Syllabus pages, Calendar-scheduled Assignment pages, and clearly articulated learning objectives
   • peer-to-peer learning and communication venues, such as peer review, group spaces and discussions, and collaborative Google document work
   • distributed learning frameworks, such as outcome-connected rubrics, learning objective-reinforcing quizzes and surveys, and student metacognitive prompts and reflections
   • UDL-inspired assignments that allow for personalized learning options via multiple means of content representation, student engagement, and expression of learning.
2. Work on their own course design, leaving each session with some preliminary course design work finished, and experience accessing and applying paper and online resources that can guide them beyond the session.
3. Engage with a variety of demonstrations and models and evaluate which would be useful in their own course

[laurakgibbs]

Pinging  @keeganlong-whee ‌ for this! So much good stuff here.

And THANK YOU for sharing this,  @johnmartin ‌! I'm not directly involved in fac development, so I don't really have advice except to say that what always speaks to me most as an instructor is hearing what students say about things, so if you have gathered student feedback in response to any of these tools to use as a selling point with the faculty, I know that would work for me! So, I really like where you list "benefit for instructor" and "benefit for student" as rows there in the table, it would also be great to have some blurbs from actual instructors AND actual students where they say something about their experience with X and how they perceived that as beneficial.

I think that's especially important in the "benefit for student" row because the kind of language used there is not really the kind of language students use when they speak about their learning experience, and including real student voices about that would be good, not in the table itself, but somewhere in the workshop materials somehow.

I always find it inspiring to hear what my students are actually saying/thinking about things, and I learn a lot from seeing what terms and phrases really do resonate with them, the vocabulary they use to describe their own experience. Just as an example, I collect all the remarks students make in the end-of-course evaluations about my grading system. 

Anatomy of an Online Course: Grading: What Students Say 

They don't use the language of "assessment" as we do, and in a sense that is what makes their comments really useful. Keeping it real. 🙂

[johnmartin]

Hi laurakgibbs 

One of the three points we ask faculty to address in our Active Teaching Labs (see A Successful Canvas Faculty Development Program) is "what happened?" (did students rebel, was it an administrative nightmare? etc.). So, while we're not directly hearing our students' voices, we're at least asking instructors to relay them to other instructors.

I've been advocating for a big "FEEDBACK" button on the main LMS page, with student submissions and voting on instructors' best practices (with rewards for instructors!), but my voice has not been heard here. Any other ideas on how to get student voices en masse?

[laurakgibbs]

Just speaking for myself, I think that would be a great idea!

I work a lot with my students on feedback practices, including the difficult emotions people feel when both giving and receiving feedback. We all know that feedback is important, and we all know that feedback helps us to improve... but that doesn't make it easy! Working with feedback in this way with the students has helped me a lot too; I am definitely a colearner with them, trying to improve the feedback I give them and also opening myself up to the feedback I get from them (which is not always unicorns and rainbows ha ha).

The fact that universities have only a perfunctory and not-very-useful end-of-semester feedback window for students is not a good sign. If we were serious about feedback, we would solicit more/better feedback from the students. I make sure to do that in my classes, and I know some other instructors too, but it's all very much on our own, nothing official or even expected.

Here are the feedback materials I collect and share with my students; I do that in the context of the growth mindset idea:

Improve!: Exploring Growth Mindset 

And on the spirit of colearning, I'll share this great Freire quote which actually appears in my class announcements today... happy coincidence! 🙂

Online Course Announcements: Tuesday, May 2 

Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers.

[johnmartin]

I love your Growth Mindset Cats! (and Paulo Friere!), laurakgibbs! (Can I borrow some if I credit?)

[laurakgibbs]

Oh, absolutely: there are so many great Freire quote memes and posters that you can find by Googling. I made that one last night for the announcements because it's one of my favorite Freire quotes and I couldn't find a ready-made poster I liked with that particular quote.

And the students really like the cats! Plus, it's a great way to encourage them to make their own memes. Especially for the kinds of classes I teach, meme-making fits in very nicely. 🙂

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @johnmartin  

You are taking the same approach that we took (and have subsequently expanded on) when we first migrated to Canvas five years ago - incorporating course design best practices, UDL and online pedagogy into the Canvas training. We adapted the Quality Matters Rubric as our course design piece, although there are many other design standards out there that are just as good, and based on the same sound principles.When they added content, they learned how to select and create accessible content.

So when our faculty are learning about how to accomplish a build task in Canvas, they are learning how to do it right, why they are doing it, and what teaching/learning advantages it has.When we had to train all our existing faculty, there was a 30 hour base training called "Building Quality Courses in Canvas"., supplemented by some side workshops.

We have subsequently redesigned our main training to 10 hours, because it is now used to onboard new faculty and typically must be done on very short notice, and in a very short time-frame. We supplement this abbreviated training with 8 "Advanced Training" modules, and all still integrate design principles and pedagogy.

I know they did not all apply this learning, but we do what we can within our institutional cultures.

Kelley

[johnmartin]

Holy smokes,  @kmeeusen ! 30 hours?! That's amazing! Even 10 is amazing! We're lucky if we can get 1 in 30 faculty to come to a 1-hour session! Most won't come to any, so we're eventually going to try to turn the four 2-hour sessions into self-paced online modules (if we can make them engaging enough). Maybe we'll add some gamification elements...

[laurakgibbs]

Same problem at research university where I work,  @johnmartin ‌. Time spent on teaching is always time taken away from something else... and everything else is more highly valued than teaching. Alas.

[kmeeusen]

Well,  @johnmartin  , my office partner and I consider it our greatest achievement - we convinced our Instruction Admins, just before starting our migration, that LMS training should be required before faculty could teach using our LMS. Been some push-back along the way, but the VPI at that time was a huge supporter, and since she is now our Prez that support has continued.

Now on to some bigger things - like required accessibility training across the campus. Gaining ground, but slowely.

Kelley

[aalexander]

Thanks for this work, very timely for many of this who are attempting to use this phase of Canvas integration as a gateway to improving teaching practices.  I especially appreciate the flexibility of the model, ie using both f2f and DIY iterations.