Faculty development day April 12 Canvas training two
Prior to the Instructure Canvas training a link to a slide show was released along with a set of four videos and a handout. The first video was essentially meant in good humor and was inspired by the optimal length of a TikTok video being 9 to 15 seconds. That is the attention span of the TikTok generation. The optimal length for a YouTube educational video is sometimes quoted as six minutes, and TeD talks have an 18 minute upper limit. Each new technology has engendered or catered to an ever shorter attention span - although the 50 minute lecture is now a staple at many institutions, lectures in the past were often far longer.
The original training delivered in December was designed around three levels of use for the Canvas learning management system.
Level one is the use of Canvas as an offline grade book, essentially a spreadsheet grade book, in support of a residential course with assignments and activities all occurring offline and in a class room.
Level two is the use of Canvas as full featured learning management system to deliver residential, blended, and online courses. Assignments, tests, quizzes, discussions delivered in or made available through the learning management system. This includes uploading assignment submissions, online grading, sending and receiving messages via the Inbox, and use of the other features in Canvas.
Level three is the use of course learning outcomes pulled from an existing institutional bank of course learning outcomes and their use in rubrics and question banks to assess learning in the classroom.
A show-of-hands survey at the start of the morning session today indicated that over half of the faculty were either using Canvas as an instructor or were using Canvas as a student in online professional development courses. Fourteen instructors are delivering 24 residential courses at the National campus to 431 students. This does not include National campus instructors with only online courses who may also be using Canvas.
The session included a very diverse range of Canvas skills from instructors trying Canvas for the first time to instructors with Canvas expertise far above and beyond my knowledge set. Thirty-four faculty were present each at a different skill level in Canvas. There was no single training that was going to meet all of the needs in the room, but I was blessed with a room full of experts.
So I suggested that faculty work together to help each other at each table. I have long thought that one of the most important things that happens on a faculty development day is that faculty actually get a chance to talk to each other and build community. Faculty get busy with their own courses during the term and rarely get a chance to build community as a faculty.
I worked at a table with primarily first time users on how materials can be exported from Schoology and imported into Canvas. I am of two minds on this approach.
The first is that building from scratch in Canvas leads to taking fuller advantage of the new capabilities in the platform and helps build a refreshed. The transfer process can create more clean-up work and unexpected issues than starting clean slate in Canvas. There are also capabilities in Canvas that may be overlooked as a result of this process - such as the benefit of setting up and using Canvas Pages in lieu of PDF and Word document attachments to deliver content.
The second is that faculty build up materials, assignments, assessments, and support materials over the course of many years. Rebuilding from scratch is daunting and will be a long process, especially if multiple courses must be moved. If the bulk of the materials come over relatively intact, then the faculty member has a strong start on launching the course in the next term.
Until this workshop I had avoided the export-import process as there had been time to make a gradual transition course by course. Rebuilding from scratch was an optimal approach. There is a tipping point, however, where enough faculty are using Canvas that the students benefit by bringing the remainder of the faculty over to the platform. The student course evaluation survey in December had shown a strong student preference for Canvas over Schoology. Anecdotally, students this term had asked me why weren't all faculty using Canvas.
I also tried to provide assistance elsewhere in the room to the extent that I could, but I know that I missed working with many faculty during the morning. At 11:50 I wrapped up by showing the institutional bank of course learning outcomes that are available for use in rubrics and questions banks.
I showed the interactive dashboards that can display outcome results if faculty use the outcomes pulled from the institutional bank of course learning outcomes.
The development day assessment asked the faculty to rate the following items using a ratings scale based on that seen in the course learning outcomes: optimal, sufficient, suboptimal, no evidence. An explanation of why this scale provides agency to the learner was posted in March 2021.
The presentations were...
The amount of time allotted was...
The coverage of topics was...
My ability to apply what I have learned is...
The refreshments were...
Of note is that the new ratings scale provided a richer insight into the faculty reactions than the more traditional "Strongly Agree" to "Strongly Disagree" Likert scale typically used in these evaluations. Last December faculty strongly agreed with the statements but were not able to modify the qualifiers in the questions posed.
For example, in December the second question was "The amount of time was sufficient" which was dominated by "Strongly Agree" responses. Sufficient is a minimal qualification. By eliminating the qualifier, agency is granted to the faculty member to choose the qualifier: optimal amount of time, sufficient, suboptimal, or no evidence. The result was a split between optimal and sufficient. This is a richer and more informative response.
This rating scale also eliminates the "Neutral" response option, which connotes ambivalence between agreement and disagreement. I suspect there is hesitancy in casting a "negative vote" with a disagree or strongly disagree response. Suboptimal provides a way out of casting a disagreeing response. In the above chart a few faculty noted that the amount of time and coverage was suboptimal.
My own hope is that the new terminology also helped bring pause to the respondents to reframe and rethink the questions. We have all answered so many surveys over the years. There may be an almost reflexive marking of strongly agree for some. Here they are not being asked to agree with a statement, but rather to evaluate the statement.
Faculty were asked the following open answer items.
List two things you liked most about the sessions
Blended online use and purely online use.
Online education certification panel.
The uploaded Youtube videos on Canvas provided by Dana Leeling.
Learning from the Canvas training and sharing with others and the online education certification panel presentations.
different presenters and practical advice
how to setup canvas
The Canvas section is helpful! We were also able to help out each other.
it is hands on; and presenter were helpful
Transferring resources from Schoology to Canvas
So informative and educational especially now we are getting to move to Canvas
Helping others with Level 1 Canvas
Sharing online resource information
How to Transfer course from Schoology to Canvas.
What colleagues are doing in online classes.
Canvas and Online Certification Discussion
Dana's step by step assistance.
Talking with colleagues.
Hands on - schoology to canvas and information shared by the panel
The time allotted for the sessions were okay.
Panel / new stuffs that I can use
Presentation was well carried out, lunch and refreshment was good.
Presenter's helpfulness; adapting to needs of participants
The sharing of tools and resources for online teaching from the panel discussion and the group activity that involved the instructors to migrate courses/materials from Schoology to Canvas were informative and useful. The sessions provided in-depth information for each proposed topic.
Transferring resources from Schoology to Canvas
different presenters and practical advice
List two recommendations for improvement
It would be better to have a one on one training with Dana since faculties have different level of understanding of Canvas.
Need to provide the links shared by the Online education certification group
The Online education certification panel needs time limit for each member to present.
faculty presenting their Canvas courses and what features they use
May we have our faculty workshop planned at least weeks ahead of time?
for those who knows how to navigate canvas should be helping out other instructors who are novice learner
I hope this workshop is a little longer for those of us are somewhat new to using the Canvaws. Hope we will have another workshop again on these topics.
Need to organize the session according to the needs of the population.
How to develop engaging course online.
More demonstration on using teaching tools
Working in computer labs for different session.
I suggest a survey to assess faculty needs and solicit assistance from appropriate individuals
Include topics that would be new to everyone
Next time we use big screens for visuals...
Ensure participants do not talk while presenter(s) are talking; it would have been helpful to have a microphone today.
Needed more time for the third session.
None
faculty presenting their Canvas courses and what features they use
What would you like to see covered in the next faculty development day?
Assessment using CSLOs from the institutional bank in rubrics
More Canvas training
student advising and designing online courses
tracdat
Anything new/practical training related to teaching or online teaching would be helpful.
Something on how rubrics can be developed to rate assessments on canvas.
Using google drive and dogs as resources for canvas courses.
we should go over the higher level how to use canvas and how to make use the outcomes
Not sure
More on how to move from Schoology to Canvas and how to move materials from Schoology to Canvas.
More accessible eLearning teaching tool resources.
Anything
Anything about engaging learners
Embedding videos.
Organize and plan ahead of time
Other new things to improve our methodology of teaching
TracDat and Canvas
Can't think of anything right now. I'm sure topics will result from accreditation visits.
Each program/division or instructor to share accomplishments and challenges of using Canvas.
Not sure
student advising and designing online courses
Other comments
None
N/A
May we have our faculty workshop planned at least weeks ahead of time?
Thank you to the presenters and facilitator. Good food.
none
I do enjoy and learned some of the ways to work with Canvas but I still need more help in setting up my courses. Thank you much to those presenters!
No comments.
Thank you
It was informative and fun.
N/A
I owe a deep debt of thanks to my colleagues for their patience and for all of the expertise shared during the sessions.
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