Canvas operates on a three-week release cycle through which features are added or updated; feature releases in the production environment take place on the third Saturday of every month. SUNY Geneseo’s EdTech team posts highlights from Canvas’s production release notes, a link to these notes, and other relevant content to our blog a few days before the production release, which usually occurs on Saturdays. Please contact the Canvas Support Team if you have any questions about an upcoming production release.
Continue reading “Canvas Release Notes Highlights: February 15, 2020”#TechTipThursday: Interpreting attendance data in Canvas
Canvas includes many features designed to enhance the ease and efficiency with which faculty manage their courses. As their answer to the perennial question of tracking student attendance and participation in a course, Canvas built the “Attendance” tool into course navigation options. Learning how to use Canvas Attendance is not a daunting task. Interpreting the data it provides, however, can be challenging.
Continue reading “#TechTipThursday: Interpreting attendance data in Canvas”#TechTipThursday: Managing A Learner’s “I” Grade
As we approach the end of a semester in higher education, the teaching and learning environment frequently experiences renewed focus on academic achievement. Conversations revolve around the availability of extra credit, final exams or seminar presentations, and the seemingly never-ending hours spent studying or grading in far greater frequency in the latter half of a semester than the former. While these topics may play a role in the lives of many within the teaching and learning environment, there are countless influences on a learner’s ability to complete course requirements. “A temporary grade of ‘I’ (incomplete) may be awarded when a student has been unable to complete a course due to circumstances beyond his, her, or their control” (2018-2019 Undergraduate Bulletin, SUNY Geneseo). Prior to awarding an incomplete, learners and faculty should be aware of institutional policies surrounding the grade and are encouraged to consult SUNY Geneseo’s 2018-2019 Undergraduate Bulletin for more information; this post highlights Canvas-based considerations for faculty when awarding an “I” (incomplete) grade.
Continue reading “#TechTipThursday: Managing A Learner’s “I” Grade”Going Beyond SoFis, Soliciting Meaningful Feedback
Meaningful participation in the student feedback process can be difficult for some educators, making SoFis a bitter pill for any number of reasons. Perhaps students aren’t informed about what meaningful feedback looks like. Often students aren’t vested in the process or in providing serious feedback, sometimes because we don’t take the system seriously enough ourselves. Additionally, given the time of year, even when meaningful issues are raised we do not have the opportunity to course-correct and make impactful changes for those particular students. Given these observations one might think I was building a case for less solicitation of feedback instead of more. However, it is exactly for these reasons that I would suggest offering students an opportunity to provide more informal feedback throughout the semester. Doing so is not only a good, best practice but one of the best, best practices. Consider the added potential to increase the effectiveness of your teaching as well as provide a more positive SoFi experience for you and your students.
Continue reading “Going Beyond SoFis, Soliciting Meaningful Feedback”#TechTipThursday: Locating and Interpreting the Similarity Score for a Turnitin assignment
Turnitin is one of many digital tools available to enhance the teaching and learning environment at SUNY Geneseo. Commonly thought of as a plagiarism-detection utility, Turnitin compares a learner’s submission against documents in its database. Settings for comparison are determined by the professor and can be adjusted for each assignment. Faculty are not required to use this tool but those that opt-in have guidelines governing its implementation in a course.
Continue reading “#TechTipThursday: Locating and Interpreting the Similarity Score for a Turnitin assignment”#TechTipThursday: March and midterm grades
As the old adage suggests, March rolled into 2019 like a lion. Wintry weather can complicate plans at any number of levels, certainly, but it does not factor into our ability to celebrate academic success. Within the higher education environment, March celebrates the mid-point of a semester: midterm assessments of learning (e.g., exams, papers, projects) often followed immediately by spring break. What better time than March to offer learners comprehensive feedback about their progress?
Continue reading “#TechTipThursday: March and midterm grades”#TechTipThursday: Requiring Respondus LockDown Browser
Offering a follow-up to our post discussing academic integrity in the online learning environment, this #TechTipThursday hones in on Respondus LockDown Browser (LDB). Focusing on the technical set-up, this post guides faculty through enabling LDB for an assessment.
Academic Integrity in the Online Testing Environment
As faculty prepare their assessments (called quizzes in Canvas) to be delivered online, we are frequently asked for help with preventing cheating by students. There is no way (in class or online) to guarantee that students aren’t cheating, but there are various ways you can make your quizzes more secure.
Our advice covers three aspects:
- Ensuring students are aware of the College’s Academic Dishonesty Policy
- Creating Canvas quizzes with settings that maximize security
- Utilizing a custom browser (Respondus LockDown) that locks a testing environment within Canvas
3 Keys from CIT | EdTech
SUNY Geneseo’s Canvas support team is excited to share three new opportunities with our user community. We are confident that the colloquialism “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” applies here, too, but we want you be the judge.
? Join us for coffee and conversations about Canvas. Catch a sneak peak of the latest feature releases coming to Canvas. We’ll identify how it impacts your workflow and, bigger picture, members of the Canvas support team will be on-hand to answer questions and discuss design recommendations to maximize efficiencies in your Canvas course management. Teaching faculty and staff who attend will be able to:
Continue reading “3 Keys from CIT | EdTech”