Timing Communication with Course Pacing

[AshlyPadgett]

Course Pacing is such an awesome Feature for self-paced courses, and we’re excited about how this can improve the student learning experience, as well as save instructors time! Recently, we’ve had a lot of interest from our Instructors about whether communications can be attached to Course Pacing.

In real-time courses, instructors often use the Delayed Posting feature for setting up Announcements to check-in on their students at certain benchmarks in a quarter. However, for self-paced students who start their coursework at different times, it would be nice to have automatic check-in’s / communication options attached to the Course Pacing schedules. (For instance, regardless of start date, all students could be scheduled to receive a week 1 check-in 7 days after they start the course).

In it’s current form, an instructor could potentially design some graded discussions as check-in/ landmarks (and set those up with Course Pacing), but it would be awesome to have the ability to Pace non-graded options or announcements in the future!

[AllisonHowell]

Wonderful suggestion, @AshlyPadgett! I haven't heard about this communication use case -- it's extremely interesting. Do you have an example of what a communication like that might look like that you can share? 

[AshlyPadgett]

@AllisonHowell yes definitely!! 

I replied to the topic and added a few examples!

I'm including a screenshot here of weekly check-in's through announcements. 

Happy to provide any other context / info if it's helpful, thanks! 

[AshlyPadgett]

Hi @AllisonHowell ,

Thanks so much for reaching out and for your interest in expanding this excellent feature!

One example would be week-to-week check in’s (The following screenshot is actually an example from the CCE self-paced courses that used announcement check-in’s twice a week to ensure self-paced students were completing their work, and re-enforcing community in the online format).

Example 1:

In our courses, we often use Announcements in the same way. For instance, most course instructors usually send out a Welcome Message within the first couple days of the course with text similar to this anonymized example.

Example 2:

Hello [Course Name] students,

Welcome to the [Course Name]!

This course is 100 percent online with no real-time weekly class meetings. All lessons, assignments and other course materials are delivered through Canvas. There will be frequent opportunities to engage with your peers and the instructional team!

Canvas also has many student resource guides and tutorial videos to help you. If you have any questions please contact me at [Instructor’s Contact Info]. Looking forward to a great course together!

[Instructor’s Name]

Example 3:

In case it’s helpful, I’m also adding a screenshot of how I implemented the work-around (which involves using Graded Discussions to time the check-in’s) and then putting those at the top of the Modules and assigning those Graded Discussions due dates within Course Pacing.

This does allow an instructor to send targeted information to self-paced students at specific points in their coursework. However, this work-around isn’t ideal due to the arbitrary grades (which adds additional work for instructors and could potentially confuse some students).

I would love to provide any additional info that would be helpful to the dev team, so please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Thank you so much!

[MaryDuhon3]

I had a similar thought, but I was thinking along the lines of a feature that sends reminders a few days out from homework due dates, per the calendar, via push notification. This could also be extended to exams, midterms, and finals, with alerts farther out from the date. This would be an absolute game changer for people with ADHD for example, who need reminders and structure, but struggle to journal and create schedules.

[ZoeLubitz1]

Hi, I’m Zoe, a Sr PM for Canvas. We are looking for teachers who use Course Pacing in Canvas OR who have thoughts on differentiated instruction and related Canvas features. We would love to talk to you for 30 minutes to learn more from you this week or next. Please reply to this message or email me directly at zoe.lubitz@instructure.com.
Thanks for considering!