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Finals wrapped up in week seventeen bringing the final page view tally to 48,787 for the last full week of the term on the Instructure Canvas platform systemwide. Week eighteen included only a single day of final examinations. Activity clearly peaked with the advent of final examinations. Page views are a metric that functions a proxy for engagement on the platform. The "slump" in engagement seen in weeks twelve and thirteen reflect, in part, the November holiday series. This term the holidays started in the eleventh week and continued into week fifteen. The recover in engagement seen in week sixteen is perhaps no coincidence: holidays negatively impact student engagement during the term.  Daily use also saw a spike on Tuesday of week eighteen - a time when only faculty would have been working on final marking and grades.  Use by day of the week tumbled after final examinations ended. Final examinations did produce a spike in engagement.  Looked across the full term, all camp

The faculty workshop for Instructure Canvas saw training delivered to 17 members of faculty. The following is a report on feedback from this session. Three sessions were delivered, each targeting a specific usage level for Canvas learning management system. 09:00 Level one: residential offline use with no online component for support of purely residential courses 10:00 Level two: blended online use and purely online use where the full features of Canvas are deployed 1:00 Level three: institutional assessment using course learning outcomes from the institutional bank of course learning outcomes in rubrics attached to assignments submitted in Canvas The 9:00 session morphed into the 10:00 session just after 10:00 as attendees in the first session asked questions that were covered in the second session. The session went until just after 12:00, the scheduled lunch break. The design was an overview of the session given using the slides and then hands on, one-on-one assistance in doing the

The student evaluation form included the option for students to comment on their instructor, the course, the course materials, and to make any other comments that they might have. The individual comments are of particular value to the individual instructor. The comments, however, can also reveal broad common themes for the experience of the students as a student body. The following report looks at these broad themes. The author has made a best attempt to categorize comments under broader generic themes.  In the sections evaluating the instructor, course, and course materials, students were asked if there were any changes needed. Varying with the section, forty to forty-eight percent of the students left this item blank. Forty-five to fifty-three percent of the students responded in some form of "no change is needed" often with the attached reason that everything was good. Some students even answered "none". Only six to nine percent of the students responded with sug

Students predominantly in online courses anonymously submitted responses to a survey. Students were instructed to fill out the survey once for each course they were in. 814 surveys were submitted.  The following are broad indicators of areas of relative strength and weakness using a modified form of a t-statistic as a metric.  Instructor evaluation The horizontal access for the chart above is essentially a form of a t-statistic. The value is the number of standard errors for the mean above or below the overall mean for that particular average. Areas of strength are denoted by green bars and extend above positive two standard errors on the right. Areas of relative weakness are denoted by red bars and extend below negative two standard errors on the left.  Course evaluation Course materials evaluation Preferred mode of learning Not all of the surveys had answers to this item Would you want to take online courses next term? Discussion With 814 survey submissions to date, the evaluations a

The surge seen in week sixteen built in week seventeen in terms of page views on the Instructure Canvas platform. Week seventeen consisted of the last three days of classes along with the first two days of final examinations. At the time this report was written, Friday data is not complete but is projected to fall from week sixteen as an increasing number of students complete their final examinations and projects. Although Friday numbers were down week-on-week, the week thus far has seen more page views, a proxy for platform engagement, than week sixteen. Engagement remains at the highest levels since midterm. The strength of the surge can be seen in the first four days of week seventeen. This level of engagement has not been seen on a daily basis since week eight midterms.  With the exception of assignments, instructor driven metrics have leveled off. Assignments continued to see growth in week 17.  Note that assignments also includes quizzes and tests. Assessment Dashboard The outcom

In between rain bands the SC/SS 115 Ethnobotany course returned to a residential field for the first time since fall 2019, pre-pandemic. As I often do, I pre-walked the campus . Due to network issues, I was unable to print a plant list. So put together a list in a spreadsheet  and then scribbled the resulting list by hand onto a sheet of paper. The list tended to use iNaturalist "abbreviations" that I use as an identifier, which made the list rather opaque to a casual observer. Not to mention my writing is illegible anyway.  This term, however, I had already jettisoned using scientific names. The churn in the list has been insane. Plants are changing names during the term. That is the nature of taxonomy, but at this point the only stability is in local names and then using those local names to look up the scientific name of the moment.  The walk began at the Terminalia catappa, headed north, then west to Haruki and finally back east towards the counseling center where the cl