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.
Alignment connects a course together from the broadest objectives to the most granular activities. Creating an aligned curriculum facilitates strategic thinking, ensuring—to the extent possible—that everything we and our students do is in service of a particular course’s learning goals.
In this Teaching Tip, you will learn to:
Contrast specific, measurable objectives from non-specific, unmeasurable objectives
Create specific, measurable course objectives
Define “alignment” of course objectives
Create specific, measurable module objectives that are aligned with course objectives
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!
Even in non-pandemic times, providing virtual office hours can be an excellent way to support your students, but they are practically required. A little planning can make them more productive for teachers and learners alike, while increasing opportunities for valuable faculty-student interactions. Oh, and try to avoid using your personal Zoom meeting room for office hours!
A new term commemorates not just the debut of your shiny new syllabus, but initiates the routine chorus of reminding students, “it’s in the syllabus!” These strategies for promoting syllabus engagement might allow you to start singing a whole new tune.
More in the most recent entry in our Tips ‘n Techniques series: Syllabus, Engage!
Canvas’ “New Analytics” system provides more detailed information and reporting on student page view and activities within a course, grade distribution, downloadable reports and a shortcut to contacting students based on their progress. But understanding what analytic data does, and does not, represent is an important consideration. In this Tip we will take a quick look at the basics of New Analytics and some resources to explore further: Using Canvas (New) Analytics
As the end of the quarter draws near, attention to the gradebook naturally increases. Here are a few tips to help make grading more efficient and deal with some of the gradebook’s quirks.
More in the most recent entry in our Tips ‘n Technique series: Canvas Gradebook Tips
As of the date of this Tip’s publication, UW IT plans to roll out Canvas’ New Rich Content Editor on December 28th, with the option to try it out any time before then. This is a good thing: the new editor boasts a number of welcome improvements with few challenging interface changes. In this Tip we will share some major new features and improvements you can expect, as well as the most significant changes to the editing experience you should be aware of.
