In this series of Teaching Tips we aim to provide helpful information for creating accessible content from the beginning, which will save you a lot of time and effort compared to remediating (revising, correcting, or even re-creating) your course materials later. The best part: you don’t need to be a technical wizard or accessibility specialist to create accessible materials!
This Tip focuses on creating accessible content using Canvas’s own tools. In later Tips we will go into more detail for content created using other software and applications, including documents and media.
Canvas has finally addressed a longstanding shortcoming: the inability to assign pages, modules, and ungraded discussions to specific sections or students. This is particularly helpful for instructors who have multiple sections in one course site, but useful for all kinds of situations where differentiating content will make the student experience more understandable.
If that’s not enough, another helpful new feature: you can now use rich content formatting and even record video and your screen as part of your feedback in SpeedGrader.
The Canvas Discussions Redesign, formerly a Feature Option for adventurous instructors, will be rolled out to all Canvas courses on Jun 12, 2024. In this Teaching Tip, we’ll look at some of the more important changes and new features for instructors.
Did you know Canvas provides an integrated tool for shared annotation of web pages and PDF files, an activity that is often significantly more engaging and pedagogically rich than the traditional discussion forum activities? Learn how the tool works, and how students respond, in this 50-minute session with Dr. Nicole Blair.
Canvas Module Requirements can convey expectations, enforce sequencing, and promote timely participation through allowing you to define requirements students must meet to mark a Module as complete and/or move on in a course. Requirements may include viewing items, marking items complete, submitting assignments, or achieving a minimum score.
A relatively new Canvas feature, the SpeedGrader Comment Library, allows instructors to easily save and re-use responses, routine or otherwise, across their Canvas courses.
Re-use can be a good thing! Because they have a broad overview of their feedback and comments across a course, instructors can feel ambivalent (or worse) about reusing comments and feedback for multiple students. But the reality is, as long as the comment is accurate and aligned with your grading criteria, the comment is new and useful to the individual student.
The UW Office of Information Technology and the UWT Office of Digital Learning are always here to help with your technical and pedagogical questions, respectively, but there are a plethora of resources to help you on your Canvas journey.
Sparking rich discussion can be even more challenging online than in the traditional classroom. In this Teaching Tip Live session, we’ll look at some ideas for prompting and structuring discussions, and even rethinking what discussion means altogether.
In this Teaching Tip Live session we showed you how easy it is to create accessible Canvas Pages that are accessible from the beginning. It isn’t just the right thing to do, enhancing equity and inclusion—and saving time in the future—it’s the law. But we’ll focus on the first part!
In aviation, a preflight checklist is a list of tasks performed by pilots before takeoff. Based on a select few principles of the Hybrid/Online Course Development and Evaluation Rubric (despite the title, the Rubric largely applies to face-to-face classes too) and other best practices, using this checklist can help avoid needless problems before your course lifts off the virtual tarmac!
