Posts

Experience with Canvas

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I have been invited to teach for JWL again in January. They have migrated all of their courses from Blackboard to Canvas. I have heard so many wonderful things about Canvas. It's a great opportunity for me to get a sneak peak view of what makes faculty rave about Canvas. I'll keep updating the below Likes and Dislikes lists as I teach. Likes The Assignments Tab  All assignments are listed by weeks, giving students an overview of what's due when. The beauty of this function is that if I create a new discussion thread. It automatically populates under Assignments and Gradebook. Likewise, if I delete a discussion thread, this assignment is automatically deleted from the Assignments list as well as the gradebook. In D2L, it takes me at least 3 extra clunky steps to achieve the same thing. I also like how easy it is to add a due date for each assignment. Due dates are not built into the master content. Individual faculty can easily add or edit the due date. Of course these ...
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Discussion postings

While I didn't see anything innovative in the design of discussion questions, I did like the fact that students couldn't see others' postings until they made their initial posting. It is appropriate for entry level discussion questions where students might have very similar responses. One observation I made was that some students treated discussion the same as essay questions. They would write 2-3 page long response and submitted it to the discussion board as an attachment. It might be necessary for instructors to provide guidance or instructions around how to interact with each other on the discussion board. The initial response doesn't have to be a thorough and exhaustive answer. 4-5 sentences to capture the essence of your thoughts. Personal experiences and reflections are especially welcome instead of regurgitating the information from the textbook. Students need some handholding on how to interact with each other. Here is one tip: Require students’ responses to...
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Onsite sharing

Students in this course are from 4-5 refugee camps. Each week there's an activity called "Onsite Sharing." Here's an example for week 1: Form pairs—and share important information about your life and experiences (Only share what you are comfortable sharing). Each partner should take notes during the sharing—then each partner will introduce his or her classmate to the whole group at your location. Carefully read the Syllabus for this course. Then share your expectations for this course in small groups. Expectations are knowledge and skills you would like to learn during this course. Challenges are the difficulties that you will need to overcome to succeed in this course. Make a list of expectations and challenges. Using the Assignment tab on the left, post to the Assignment titled Week 1: Onsite Participation by Tuesday. Each week, there's a synchronous component built into the course. Students from the same camp will get together for a fixed amount of time...
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Course navigation

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I taught Bridge to Learning, an orientation course of the Jesuit Wide Learning program from September to October, 2019. This course was hosted on BlackBoard by Georgetown University. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to navigate the course. There was no learning curve for me at all to use the platform as an Instructor. In each blog posting, I'm going to reflect on one aspect of the course. Easy navigation. Each week starts with a student checklist pdf document. Each section below that starts with an action verb: Read -- Reading materials View -- watch a video or presentation Engage -- Onsite sharing Discuss - Online discussion questions Reflect -- Journal reflection (only visible to the instructor) I found this to be a more effective design than most of the Regis' courses. Content chunking breaks each week's content into manageable pieces. Students are less likely to be lost in a sea of information.
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