Where education and technology meet excellence.
For the past year I’ve had the pleasure of participating in a SUNY working group focused on math accessibility. This is a thorny issue, with lots of variables (pun intended).
Two of my colleagues from this group recently presented at the SUNY CPD’s OTTER Institute. This hour-long presentation packed in many details and options for how to layer accessibility considerations into your current practices for sharing math content with students.
Continue reading “Making Math Accessible”The CIT Instructional Design Team offers “Course Review” as a service to faculty who teach online. As with other terms new to Geneseo in the last few years, there is an air of mystery to what a Course Review entails. The review revolves around the Course Readiness Checklist rubric and is a process to support the continuous improvements to the quality and accessibility of courses at Geneseo.
You may have already sought help from CIT’s Instructional Design Team (colloquially referred to as our “Canvas Team”) for assistance. Perhaps you contacted Senior Instructional Support Specialist Alexis Clifton for aid remediating content in your course to make it more accessible for multiple learners, or one of our Instructional Designers, Joe Dolce or Becky Patt to create Pages in your Canvas course, address challenges within a Canvas Assignment, or a myriad of other issues.
While our team of educational specialists is intended to assist you and your students navigate the challenges of digital learning they also serve another purpose that is often overlooked: to assist in the design and implementation of your course’s online presence. Our Instructional Designers are more than happy to meet with you 1:1 at any point in your course design process to help you meet the needs and expectations of our learners. We usually recommend a series of three meetings spaced over an amount of time our faculty may need to implement the options discussed in the most recent meeting, but we are always flexible in adjusting the schedule to your needs and desires, whether that be more or fewer meetings.
Continue reading “Course Reviews at Geneseo”
CIT’s EdTech team just completed the first in a series of Canvas mini-skills courses, “Become the Quizmaster General.” A facilitated session of this professional development course ran the week of January 18th, which included opportunities to connect with the facilitator and other members of the cohort over the course of a week during Intersession.
Continue reading “Canvas Skills Course: Become the Quizmaster General”The Canvas Community is a treasure trove of opportunities to see how faculty and teachers at other institutions are leveraging Canvas for their students. All Geneseo users have access to the Community with their Geneseo username and password. Check out the limited resource list below for an idea of how to get started.
A self-paced course called It’s Due! was recently shared in the Mobile Users Group Hub. This blog post caught our eye, and we recommend the course if you’re interested in exploring “every single type of submission available for students in Canvas”.
To join in, simply Self-Enroll. You will need to share your name, email address, etc. If you would like to explore ways to apply what you learn in your courses at Geneseo with an Instructional Designer, email canvas@geneseo.edu
Prior to the first day of class, post some information about who you are as a person. Create a text-based page with one or more still photos or develop a video to show students something about your life and interests. Reveal your personality throughout the semester by interacting with students in your authentic voice. Darby and Lang (2019). Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Create at least one opportunity for engagement during the online period. For example, you might do this through a live Zoom meeting during your regularly-scheduled teaching time, through one or more icebreaker activities, or through discussion questions in a Canvas discussion forum.
CIT Instructional Designers have prepared an introductory module that can be imported into your Canvas courses. Search for “Engagement Materials” in the Canvas Commons, download the import file from Google Drive, or email canvas@geneseo.edu to request assistance. The module contains page templates, discussion ideas, and other resources to facilitate community building.
More Community Building Ideas
When Geneseo’s Canvas added the accessibility program Blackboard Ally in March 2020, a host of new tools became available for both faculty and students. Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore what new powers you have for making course content both more accessible and more useful.
One new item is Alternative Formats, which gives download options without any extra effort on a faculty member’s part. While it’s primarily intended for student use, it offers clear advantages to faculty, as well. And, as you can see, our Canvas users are already putting it to work.
In a webinar series built around Global Accessibility Awareness Day on May 21st this year, the SUNY Center for Professional Development is hosting a week full of online sessions dedicated to raising awareness and skill levels for accessibility in higher education.
Click here for further details and free registration to any of the multiple sessions.
Continue reading “SUNY Accessibility Week, May 18-22, 2020”Following the Office of the Provost’s announcement of two new incentives for expanding and improving Geneseo’s online instruction in Summer 2020, numerous questions were received by her team as well as CIT. This post offers guidance for faculty interested in pursuing these incentives and answers the question: “What specific requirements must be met to earn the incentives?”.
Continue reading “Summer 2020 Course Design Incentives”
This is the next installment in a sequence of posts designed to take a close look at the way we design our course syllabi. (Revisit the first post, Fonts, here.) Small, incremental improvements to the design elements of a syllabus provide an easy entry point into making Geneseo courses more inclusive, and more accessible.
This time, an exploration of the wild world of color.
Following up to last week’s post, ASSESStivus 2020: Key Takeaway, our focus today is on two of the six Canvas features assisting with retention. Coinciding perfectly with our series on designing an inclusive syllabus, this post highlights Canvas as a syllabus tool in our discussion of contact information and communication.
The syllabus is an introduction of your course to your learners and can be used to set a tone for the class. As such, it is important that your syllabus sets the tone you intend. There is often a propensity to think of the syllabus as a “contract” between professor and the student and include extensive lists of “thou shalt nots” throughout the lengthy document. Thinking of one’s syllabus in such transactional terms can limit our ability to reach our students from the beginning. However, when we think of the syllabus as a communication tool intended to provide our learners the resources necessary to be successful we can begin to identify means by which Canvas can enhance the likelihood that students not only view the material but engage with it.
While Geneseo stands by a requirement of a making a printable version of your syllabus readily available within your course shell, Canvas can be used to add nuance to how you highlight the details. One way of ensuring that learners are familiar with the contents of your syllabus is to make its content a living part of your learners’ everyday experience. Canvas provides a number pathways to do this. Additionally, by leveraging Canvas to highlight expectations laid out in the syllabus, you can increase learner agency over their education while reducing the amount of time you spend revisiting material clearly laid out in the syllabus.
What follows is a brief introduction to how one might leverage some of the staple elements of Canvas to break-out and communicate key elements of one’s syllabus:
Modules essentially create a linear flow of what students should do within a course. Each module can contain files, discussions, assignments, quizzes, and other learning materials; any material you like. Bundling key syllabus related materials into one module can be very impactful. Furthermore, such a module can be set as a prerequisite for the rest of the course ensuring that students do not proceed until they have interacted with this required information and allowing you to track the progress of students through it.
One of Canvas’ most powerful tools are “Pages.” Pages are analogous to wiki or webpages and allow for the embedding of all manner of rich media, text, or links. Individual pages usually consist of relatively small amounts of information pertaining to the same topic. Pages (as well as other materials) of similar topics are usually grouped into Modules. The use of such tools to deliver content within one’s field of expertise may come naturally, but, using these pages to clarify the meta of the course itself is often overlooked. Below are two types of Pages one can add to their course to expand upon material found in the syllabus and provide context for the class:
This is a great place to include the course description from the College Bulletin with an explanation as to how your course will meet that description in less abstract terms. Include links to the materials and resources the course will be using to create an easy reference for students- and yes, this information should already be in your printable syllabus. This page is also a great place to explain how you will be using such materials and tools (including Canvas!) and explain the expectations you have about how students will communicate both with you and their classmates. By providing transparency into your teaching process you can reduce some of your learners’ anxiety; By highlighting it in a bite sized page, independent of your increasingly mammoth syllabus, you can increase the likelihood of students actually reading it.
Life Pro Tip: this is an opportunity to contextualize in real life terms how a learner will benefit from taking this course.
Presumably you are a human. Let your students know that. A short bit of biography can go a long way in establishing a connection with the other (presumably) humans in the class. By explaining to your learners that you will be grading papers in the early morning/late evening because that is when your three year old is most likely to be sleeping, or that if they require office hours after five PM you’ll need to know in advance so arrangements can be made to feed your puppy/elderly dog they are more likely to understand and value odd grade submission times or your desire to hold office hours earlier in the day. Additionally, providing insight into your educational experience- knowing about hard earned certifications in your field as well as your captaining of the fencing squad not only lends credibility to your instruction but humanity to your lessons.
By sharing small insights into your life, both personally and professionally, you can make a connection with your students that will allow you to more easily guide them through the material you are sharing and reduce friction that may come form conflicts of interest. Furthermore, it helps students to make positive assumptions about your decisions. It makes it easier for students to trust you because of the trust you’ve shown them by sharing yourself with them.
Life Pro Tip: the About the Professor page is an excellent place to provide links to contact information and perhaps your Google Calendar where you can establish office hour appointment slots.
Announcements allow instructors to communicate with students about course activities and post interesting course-related topics. Announcements are designed to allow instructors to broadcast information out to all members of a course or to all members of sections within a course. Regular application of announcements can be used to reenforce milestones established in one’s syllabus and can be used to tie information back to learning objectives.
Life Pro Tip: Announcements have a “Delay Posting” option which can be used to schedule posts in advance, allowing you to set reminders and other information well in advance of a time that you might otherwise forget.
Generating all of this communication can (and should!) lead to feedback from learners and the beginning of new conversations. As such, it is important to establish expectations as to both how students are to interact with you (email, text, phone, or other) and when to expect a response. It’s infeasible to expect a professor to be on the clock 24/7, however learners often lead very diverse schedules that likely don’t sync closely with your. By not only clearly informing students as to how you prefer to be contacted, but when you will be responding to such contact you will reduce frustration on their part as well as your own. This management of expectations should be supplemented with some information on the content of communications as well.
Whether communicating with you or their classmates we should always encourage our students to interact with members of the class with respect and the understanding that electronic communications are often limited by their inability to transmit many non-verbal cues. Establishing an understanding in regards to class netiquette should bear in mind a few points that can go along way in keeping communications civil:
Between your syllabus, the correct mindset, and the appropriate application of Canvas tools, hopefully your learners will have the appropriate entrance into your course and feel confident in their interaction with you and the course materials.