InstCarn Recap: Day 4 - Unconference

mjennings
Community Contributor

TL;DR

If you have never been to an Unconference, change that! Don't miss this great opportunity to keep the #instcon conversation going.

Session Notes

I must confess that I intended to take notes throughout the Unconference, but as things unfolded I found myself too engaged to take notes. I will do my best to recap my experience.

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I started this morning early, thinking that how nice it would be to walk the path from River Run over to Lakeside Village. It was a pleasant walk and great time to enjoy the morning stillness. As I reached the Mountain House area and had just thought how I was making good progress since I knew this was about the half way point,  I walked up to a bus that had stopped. I waved them off saying I was enjoying my morning walk. Then I thought it would be a good opportunity to make sure I was on the right path and casually asked, "This is the way to Lakeside Village, right?" To my surprise, the bus driver said, "No, you are heading toward River Run if you keep going that way." This was all I needed to hear and I decided quickly to take the offer to ride the shuttle the rest of the way.

Once I got to Keystone Lodge & Spa where the Unconference was being held, I grabbed breakfast and more importantly coffee. As I was enjoying socializing and finishing up my coffee,  @kona ‌ was handing out post-it notes for each of us to write down anything that we wanted to get out of the days activities. Fortunately, I had read What is an Unconference? and Why should YOU attend the InstructureCon 2018 Unconference?, so I came with a plan of the things I wanted to learn more about.

As the post-its were being organized, we had a Keynote presentation given by Deactivated user‌ on "The UX Research Smörgåsbord". This was a fascinating dive into understand what UX Research is and how Instructure uses this to try and determine the most efficient ways for them to design products.

After the Keynote was wrapped up, we were presented with the session breakdown.

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Here is where I went:

Session 1 - Quizzes.Next

I started my session diving into Quizzes.Next which was facilitates by the wonderful  @dlyons ‌. While it was intended to be an open forum, it seemed to quickly turn into a Q&A about when certain features would reach parity with Quizzes Classic or when & how Quizzes Classic would be deprecated. David handled the tension extremely well and was very open and honest about the process.

Session 2 - Ask James

I was really hoping to use this session to just sit back and listen to the other things that people were asking  @James ‌, Master of Canvancements. This session was very loose and I actually found myself sharing some of the cool things my school has done with the open source version of Kennethware 2.0 and a few other helpful snippets of code with mckinneyj

Session 3 - Canvas Features (Wish List)

This session was really cool, and I really tried not to take over the session but there are several features that we have been wanting for a while. Deactivated user, graciously took down all of the suggestions that the group made. I get an F on retaining the features suggested by other :smileycry:.

However many of the ones I pushed forward have feature requests already. Here are the ones I mentioned during the session.

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/6015-make-preview-the-document-the-default-action-for-linked-d... 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1623-account-level-calendar-and-sub-account-level-calendar 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1555-multiple-due-dates-checkpoints-for-discussions 

The other thing I brought up was that in the Canvas for Teacher App, teachers are not able to view & grade Graded Group Discussion posts. 

Hopefully, someone else from the session could comment on some of the other ideas that were mentioned.

After the session ended, I grabbed my boxed lunch, said my goodbyes and headed out to meet my family for a trip to the stables for a horseback riding activity.

I would like to thank  @kona ,  @kenneth_rogers ‌, Deactivated user‌ and everyone else who helped put the Unconfernece together. 

*All of the content here is from my live session notes or straight from my memory. This means that I may miss something or be mistaken in my content. Please feel free to add to, put in context, or correct any mistakes by using the comments below.