It has been a relatively positive pre-teaching week as far as Canvas is concerned. Beyond making the course look attractive, it is about thinking, learning, and the learning with can orchestrate for our students. I have tended to readily design my own learning assets and resources and signpost or upload links, audio and video. More recently, I have recognised that the students on the course are a wonderful instructional design resource. It does need to look good, and it needs to taste good. Here is where my professional learning this week has taken me. Here is what I have learnt. Beyond using dropped capitals.
Importing parts, whole courses or prefabricated templates into Canvas has numerous benefits (coherence, time efficiency and so on). Adding to the imported content is probably what many proud teachers will do, to customise the learning experience for their students. I learnt this week to ensure that any new resources or learning assets are "published" and that they a placed within a "published" modules.
In trying to solve our "glitch" or "instructor error" we used the student view option in "Settings" to decipher our error.
I regularly signpost the Canvas Community pages, first and foremost, the video guides. These are reliably current In plain English. Short. Well paced. My top tip, offer the instructor "a dual screen set-up" to learn on. One screen plays the video and the other hosts their course where they can make the updates. This approach is more than two times better than switching between browser tabs.
There are also a series of very useful student guides.
Instructors recently introduced to Canvas want access to their professional and teaching resources within Canvas, as soon as possible. In my experience, "Zipped folders" are not commonly used. On the plus side, Canvas handles this zipped folders with ease.
Introduced two staff to using "Groups." In these conversations it was through Discussion forums, to encourage (or force) conversations between students be design. Also, to force conversations between students on a blended course, studying at different Campuses.
Still not absolutely confident on the potential benefits or more creative uses of Modules and Sections.
