Student Resources "Course"

[KristinL]

For the 2016-2017 school year, the high school where I work is looking at the possibility of creating a "mega course" which would house information for Announcements, Technology, Library, Campus Ministry, Guidance, and Student Services. That way, this course could become a one-stop-shop for information. By creatively consolidating, it would hopefully simplify each student's dashboard. Also, each graduation year would be its own section within the course in case grade-specific information needed to be shared or assigned/collected.

Has anyone else done this? If so, what worked well? What do you wish you've done differently?

[KristinL]

 @kona ​, I know you work in Higher Ed (and this is K-12), but I believe I remember you mentioning that Richland had something kind of similar to this. If that's accurate, would you have time to collaborate?

[kona]

Yep, would be happy to collaborate. Overall I think this type of course works pretty well and it's nice that everything is in ONE place. We also give faculty access to this course so that way they can see what the students see and even LINK to it from their courses - ex: if they want to direct students to library resource specific information. And yes, breaking apart the students by section (for us it's by semester, but for you making it by grade) works amazingly well! It's so nice to be able to quickly and easily send them specific information!

[KristinL]

Awesome!! I'll try to connect with you next week. :smileygrin:

[brigid_taylor]

We've just done a similar thing so we could send out assignments to entire an year group as opposed to individual teachers having to upload to each class they have in that year group. The issue is you can't just send announcements to particular sections you can only send to the whole group so in our case it would be every students in Years 7 - 10. If anyone has a way around this we'd love to hear how you did it.

[KristinL]

​ would help significantly, yes! While the idea is not actively moving forward, it is not permanently archived. I hope that it catches the eyes of the development team.

[stephanie_pope]

Hey  @KristinL ​,

We have a Student Resources course that we use to help students become comfortable with Canvas and the online learning world. We offer basic overviews like online proctoring, course module navigation, and student handout/policy materials as well as more thorough content. Our Dean build a badge feature to this course. Students are required to complete badges for specific categories depending on their status i.e. blended and/or full time student. Since our student type varies, we section by term. Announcements are used in this course for technology issues, end of semester alerts, and many others. Tip: Since I help students who submit tickets, I often refer them back to their Student Resource course because everything is explained there. I'd be happy to help answer any other specific question you may have.

Stephanie

[clong]

Neat ideas being shared here! Has anyone posted these courses to the commons?

[stephanie_pope]

Hey Chris,

Currently, we don't use Commons. But I'm happy to share what our course looks like or answer any other questions.

Stephanie

[joseph_allen]

Kristin,

We are building two different versions of this idea.  One is a 'Resource' course for the school where all students and staff are loaded in and groups such as Technology, Library, Counseling, etc who don't typically have a course can post their resources.  We too are dividing the grades into separate sections. So far we have piloted this in just a couple of schools and don't have extensive lessons learned, but I'm hoping it will evolve into something that really works.    They key is that so many of our students 'live' in Canvas, it makes sense to try to put school resources here as well instead of having separate web pages.

The second idea is that we are trying to create a student community that is run by, and for students.  I just wrote a post about this one as I am having a challenge in figuring out the right permissions to give students in order to fully run the course.  I'm hoping someone might have an idea on solving.  The thought is that a select group of students, say 20 of them, would run a course for a school with pages, modules, announcements etc., but it would also make extensive use of groups for sports teams, academic and social clubs and more.  On paper this works, but again having trouble figuring out the right permissions. I can't give the students, 'teacher' permissions as that triggers access to a set of resources via custom java script that we don't want them to have.