Smeal Academy Newsletter

Spring 2022 Connections Newsletter 1 –  Ready or Not, Here We Go!!

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique challenges of teaching and learning during the Fall 2021 semester. Between now and the end of the Fall 2021 semester, we will be sending periodic emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.
This week, we are sharing some beginning-of-the-semester tips and pointers to get your semester off to a great start.

Welcome Back! We hope you had some downtime before the launch of the new semester.
We know that members of the Smeal community – faculty, staff, and students alike – are juggling a lot at the start of this semester. It’s great to be back and we are still navigating all the regular semester challenges along with COVID-19 changes. The following are some resources and reminders to get the semester off on your best foot.

Productivity Tips

• Use Available Tech Tools. Get to know the tools available to us at Penn State. Schedule a meeting with someone from the eLDIG team or check out Penn State’s Ed Tech Advisor to learn more about available tools to enhance your teaching and learning.
• Compose Ahead and Delay Posting of Canvas Announcements. Instructors are carrying an increasingly heavy workload and balancing all the new intricacies of teaching can feel overwhelming. When possible, consider composing your regular course tips and announcements ahead of time using Canvas announcements and delaying posting so that they are ready when you need them.
• Explore suggested teaching strategies in residential courses for temporary instructor or student absence in order to be prepared (as much as possible) with contingency plans. Note: This is a resource Felisa Preciado-Higgins shared with us during a recent Smeal Community meeting.
• Schedule Grading Time On Your Calendar. Just as we schedule meetings and office hours, scheduling time for grading can help ensure that you can reserve time for grading and still have time for work-life balance.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the eLDIG team.

Tech Tips for Teaching with Masks

• Use the Mic. No one thinks they need a microphone. But even in non-masked situations, it’s best to use microphones when they are available. It’s essential when teaching with a mask so people can hear. Just use it – all General Purpose classrooms have them. Checkout the list of Classroom Technology for more information on GPC technology.
• Use Tech Tools to Gauge Emotions and Build Community. Masks make it difficult to see nonverbal cues. You can use tools like Top Hat to generate a word cloud at the beginning of class so students can let you know how they’re feeling. You could have a simple prompt like “Describe your current mood in one word.” It is as important as ever to build connections with our students.
• Model the Correct Way to Wear Masks. Our ability to continue in-person instruction depends on all of us to do our part to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Consider reminding students that this is part of upholding the Smeal Honor Code. To reinforce mask adherence, have students agree (via a Canvas or Top Hat quiz) at the beginning of each class to abide by PSU’s masking requirements completely to receive full participation credit for the day. You can also add a slide at the beginning of each class to remind students how to correctly wear masks. Note the new mask guidelines this semester – check your inbox for a January 11 email from Yvonne Gaudelius, Vice President and Dean for Undergraduate Education and Kathryn Drager, Interim Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Education.

Resource

Check the following resource for more information: Effective ways to teach in person with a mask on (opinion).

Here are some additional Top Hat Teaching Tips for the beginning of the semester.

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

So Much to Grade, So Little Time – Fall 2021 Resilience Newsletter 6

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique challenges of teaching and learning during the Fall 2021 semester. Between now and the end of the Fall 2021 semester, we will be sending periodic emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

A nod to Art Jones for this image:

The eLDIG team knows you are busy right now and possibly just a little stressed, so we will keep things short, providing a couple of key resources and reminders intended to make your life easier.

Preparing Final Grades in Canvas

These helpful resources will help you wrap up the Fall 2021 semester courses and ship the grades away to LionPATH:

• Create a Penn State compatible grading scheme: Refer to this step-by-step video about how to create your grading scheme.
• Prepare final grades for LionPATH: Refer to this step-by-step video about how to finalize your Canvas gradebook.
• Use LionPATH to Pull Final Grade from Canvas
• Manually enter your grades into LionPATH

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the eLDIG team.

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Fall 2021 Resilience – Newsletter 5

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique challenges of teaching and learning during the Fall 2021 semester. Between now and the end of the Fall 2021 semester, we will be sending periodic emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

November is the month of gratitude. Here in eLDIG, we are often grateful to work with amazing staff and faculty to create courses that make a difference to our students.

In our work, we can get tired and stressed. In some ways, in this pandemic era, we have more pressure on us than ever before. Mitigating that stress and pressure can be achieved by practicing gratitude. When someone asks what we are grateful for we think of family, friends, opportunities, etc. Gratitude is something that we accept we should do, but that we rarely talk about how to do. When someone practices gratitude, what do they actually do each day? It is really just about the small things. Someone might:

• Say one small thing they are grateful that happened in their day before a meal
• Keep a gratitude journal
• Include an act of kindness in your life each day
• Look up from your phone or work and notice the beauty in nature each day
• Avoid negative media and movies with destructive content
• Commit to one day a week when you won’t complain about anything
• Say thank you for the little things others do for you, things you normally take for granted.

Conlon C. (nd) 40 Simple Ways To Practice Gratitude, Lifehack

Gratitude in Teaching and Learning

A growing body of groundbreaking research shows that gratitude has the power to heal, energize, and transform lives by enhancing people psychologically, spiritually, physically, and cognitively. Gratitude can impact focus and resilience in class and when experiencing difficulties. Wilson (2016) found that “when students intentionally practice gratitude toward learning, they tended to report better focus during class, while studying, or taking an exam. This increased focus may be linked to a more positive attitude about learning as well as a reduced stress level. Since college academics often produce stress, these findings are worth considering. Energy that might be taken up feeling stressed or anxious may be able to be redirected to focusing on and making sense of new information after a student mindfully chooses a grateful spirit. Another benefit for students who intentionally practice gratitude is experiencing added strength to sustain effort when learning feels challenging. This resilient spirit is rooted in students’ appreciation that challenges can help them grow as learners. Thus, rather than closing down one’s mind when faced with challenges, a student with a grateful spirit may view those challenges as an opportunity to learn.” (p. 9)

With this in mind, we can be role models and consider embedding gratitude practices into the classroom. A study by Howels (2014) found that when teachers embed this practice it has positive impacts in areas of relationship between teachers and students. Thereby increasing student wellbeing and a positive atmosphere. Some gratitude activities you could try in the classroom include:

• Model gratitude yourself
• Start the day with positive affirmation
• Have students make a social media post about something they are grateful they learned in class that day
• Thank a student when they make an excellent observation of the materials in class
• Provide opportunities for students to show gratitude to peers in their class
• Ask students to complete one act of kindness in their day, and to tell you how that went
• Celebrate students’ growth and achievement in class
• Encourage student independence
• Ask a student to describe why and how they expressed gratitude
• Have students reflect on the past, express gratitude and recognize their changes over time

With our own gratitude practice at the heart of our pedagogy, we create the right environment for gratitude to flourish.

Howells, K. (2014). An exploration of the role of gratitude in enhancing teacher–student relationships. Teaching and Teacher Education, 42, 58-67.
Howells, K. (2004). The role of gratitude in higher education. Research and Development in Higher Education, 27(2), 164-173.
Wilson, J. T. (2016). Brightening the mind: The impact of practicing gratitude on focus and resilience in learning. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(4), 1-13.

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Fall 2021 Resilience – Newsletter 4

Video has become more and more a part of our lives, from visiting family in distant places to education and entertainment. In this newsletter, we’ll take a look at how student learning can benefit from this powerful medium. We’ll look at survey data and best practices to help hone your video skills and we’ll also review Penn State tools available to help craft your instruction.

Once videos are recorded in Zoom, they’re automatically sent to Kaltura–Penn State’s Media Management Platform. Many of you are already aware of this because after you finish recording a lecture through Zoom, you receive an email from Kaltura saying that a recording is available to view on their platform.

After accessing a video directly on Kaltura’s site, you can edit many aspects of the video, such as the title, description, and length. You also can share the recording through a URL link or embed the video directly into your Canvas course(s). We’ll go over how to do all of this and more in our live session on October 15th at 9:00.

Helpful Links Related to Educational Video Strategies:

• Zoom Recording Tips and Tricks from Smeal’s RIIT Group
• How to avoid death By PowerPoint | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholmSalon – (20-minute video)
• NCBI: Practices to maximize student learning from educational videos
• Smeal Academy Video Tech Tips
• Nine ways to Reduce Congnitive Load in Multimedia Leaning

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Fall 2021 Resilience – Newsletter 3

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique challenges of teaching and learning during the Fall 2021 semester. Between now and the end of the Fall 2021 semester, we will be sending weekly emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

This week, we share resources that can help you with student motivation.

During COVID we used more video than ever before. Students can find the use of video helpful, especially for second language students and students with disabilities.  This week, we will be talking a bit about the use of video in the Smeal Academy Sessions. Check out the list below for more information.

We all know it is important to motivate our learners and ensure the continuity of the motivation during the semester’s instruction. ARCS is an instructional model developed by John Keller and focuses on motivation.

There are four components of the ARCS model and stands for Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction.

1. Attention: This refers to the learners’ interests. It is critical to get and hold the learners’ interests and attention. Some ideas for capturing student attention include:
   • Using video to allow for hearing the content again.
   • Providing real-world, related, and specific examples about content.
   • Using humor.
   • Going against learners’ past experience or providing an opposite point of view.
   • Using hands-on and role-playing activities.
   • Including brainstorming and critical thinking activities.
2. Relevance: The learning process should show the usefulness of the content so that learners can bridge the gap between content and the real world. Some ideas for making content relevant to students include:
   • Explaining why and how this content helps the learners today or in the future.
   • Allow learners to choose their own paper topics or other ways to personalize their assignments.
   • Give learners continuity by establishing connections between new information and prior learning.
3. Confidence: This component focuses on developing success expectations that allow learners to be in control of their learning processes. Some ideas for helping to build confidence in students include:
   • Use rubrics and checklists so that they can establish positive expectations and achieve success on your assignments.
   • Give learners’ early, and frequent feedback about their improvements/deficiencies during the course so that they can adjust their performance.
   • Allow learners the opportunity to be successful by providing multiple and varied assessment experiences. Avoid having only a few exams to measure understanding, instead include other assessments to vary the ways students can earn points.
4. Satisfaction: There is a direct relationship between motivation and satisfaction. Learners should be satisfied with what they achieved during the learning process. Some ideas for making the content satisfying to students include:
   • Encourage intrinsic enjoyment of the learning experience so that learners have fun, continue the learning process without expecting reward or another kind of external motivational elements.
   • Extrinsic Rewards: Provide learners with positive feedback, rewards, and reinforcements. Be careful about scheduling reinforcement. It is more effective when you provide reinforcement at non-predictable intervals.
   • Maintain consistent standards and consequences for success. Check that there is consistency between yourself and your TA when sharing grading responsibilities.

References

• Keller, J. M. (1987). Development and use of the ARCS model of instructional design. Journal of instructional development, 10(3), 2-10.
• ARCS Model: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Fall 2021 Resilience – Week 2

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique challenges of teaching and learning during the Fall 2021 semester. Between now and the end of the Fall 2021 semester, we will be sending weekly emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

This week, we are sharing some strategies to support wellness for you and your students.

Pause and Take a Breath…

It is hard to believe that we are already a quarter of the way through the semester! Our lives are a whirlwind of activities, adaptations, and anxieties that cause us to feel anything from exhilaration to exhaustion, and everything in between.
First and foremost, remember to notice and accept whatever it is that you are feeling. That is information you need to respond in a way that best supports your well-being.

A recent blog post on BetterUp’s website outlined seven types of rest, as defined by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, M.D. These include: creative, mental, physical, social, emotional, sensory, and spiritual rest. Often, sleep is not the only “time-out” your brain and body need in order to recover from the constant pressures of daily life. You may be excited to learn that a wide variety of activities can give your nervous system the break it needs to recover. These ideas, which span all seven types of rest, include:

• Take a walk in nature (creative rest)
• Put your devices aside for a while (mental rest)
• Sleep (physical rest)
• Turn down an invitation and recharge on your own (social rest)
• Write in a journal (emotional rest)
• Meditate or pray (sensory rest)
• Volunteer for something meaningful (spiritual rest)

Finally, take just a moment to pause – relax your shoulder blades down your back body – sit up tall – take a deep breath in – exhale – and savor this moment of being human. Sometimes a little breath can go a long way.

Resource

Cooks-Campbell, A. (2021, August 11). 7 types of rest (because you need more rest in your life). BetterUp.

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Fall 2021 Resilience – Week 1

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique challenges of teaching and learning during the Fall 2021 semester. Between now and the end of the Fall 2021 semester, we will be sending weekly emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

Here’s hoping you had a wonderful Labor Day holiday! This week, we are sharing some back to campus tips and pointers to keep your semester running smoothly.

Return to Campus Is In The Books

We know that members of the Smeal community – faculty, staff, and students alike – are juggling so much at the start of this semester. It’s great to be back and it’s also an adjustment. The following are some resources and reminders to get the semester off on your best foot.

Tech Tips for Teaching with Masks

• Use the Mic. No one thinks they need a microphone. But even in non-masked situations, it’s best to use microphones when they are available. It’s essential when teaching with a mask so people can hear. Typically, people who can’t hear won’t be comfortable speaking up to let us know. eLDIG encourages our community to mic up when teaching and presenting – all General Purpose classrooms have them. For more information on GPC technology, check out the list of Classroom Technology. Contact TLT if you’d like to schedule a consultation to better utilize your classroom technology. Speaking of using a mic, try to make a habit of repeating student questions so everyone can hear them.
• Use Tech Tools to Gauge Emotions and Build Community. Masks make it difficult to see nonverbal cues. You can use tools like Top Hat to generate a word cloud at the beginning of class so students can let you know how they’re feeling. You could have a simple prompt like “Describe your current mood in one word.” It is as important as ever to build connections with our students.
• Model the Correct Way to Wear Masks. Our ability to continue in-person instruction depends on all of us to do our part to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Consider reminding students that this is part of upholding the Smeal Honor Code. To reinforce mask adherence, have students agree (via a Canvas or Top Hat quiz) at the beginning of each class to abide by PSU’s masking requirements completely to receive full participation credit for the day. You can also add a slide at the beginning of each class to remind students how to correctly wear masks.

Resources

Check out the following resources for more information:

• Inside Higher Ed op ed by Jamie Landau: Effective ways to teach in person with a mask on.
• LinkedIn Article by James Martin: I have a loud voice – I don’t need a mic.

Productivity Tips

• Use Available Tech Tools. Get to know the tools available to us at Penn State. Schedule a meeting with someone from the eLDIG team or check out Penn State’s Ed Tech Advisor to learn more about available tools to enhance your teaching and learning.
• Compose Ahead and Delay Posting of Canvas Announcements. Instructors are carrying an increasingly heavy workload and balancing all the new intricacies of teaching can feel overwhelming. When possible, consider composing your regular course tips and announcements ahead of time using Canvas announcements and delaying posting so that they are ready when you need them.
• Schedule Grading Time On Your Calendar. Just as we schedule meetings and office hours, scheduling time for grading can help ensure that you can reserve time for grading and still have time for work-life balance.

Here are some additional tips for the beginning of the semester: Top Hat Teaching Tips.

 

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Summer 2021 Resilience – Week 4

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique teaching challenges of this time. Throughout the summer, we will be sending emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

Last week we discussed reshaping your Fall semester. This week, we share resources that can help you utilize Kaltura for your video storage and sharing needs.

Who Moved My Zoom?

Penn State is urging you to do a “Summer Clean Up” of Zoom storage. This announcement reflects a shift in the University’s video storage and delivery policy away from Zoom and towards Kaltura. Recording in Zoom is still recommended.

Accompanying the request to delete unused recordings from Zoom will be other changes coming this Fall which could change workflows related to sharing video content with students.

To ease the transition from Zoom to Kaltura for video storage and delivery we’ve provided an overview of Kaltura and its integration with Canvas below. We will also be conducting a “Who Moved My Zoom?” Smeal Faculty Academy session in the near future to discuss some of the Fall changes and updated best practices in more detail.

What Is Kaltura?

Kaltura is Penn State’s tool for storing, publishing and streaming media. It’s cloud based and works in conjunction with Zoom and Canvas to help incorporate digital content into coursework easily and seamlessly. The Penn State Web site that hosts Kaltura is named Mediaspace – so you may read articles that mention it.

Why Zoom Video Storage is Transitioning to Kaltura

• Zoom storage is expensive. Penn State needs to reduce our costs.
• Zoom videos are already automatically transferred to Kaltura for storage/delivery.
• Providing captions to videos is easier in Kaltura.
• You can structure your Kaltura videos into Playlists for easy access.
• You can easily integrate your videos and Playlists into Canvas.
• You can view robust viewer analytics on Kaltura videos.

How Zoom and Kaltura Work Together

• Video content recorded in Zoom is automatically stored in Kaltura as well.
• While Kaltura does have a tool to record video, it is not an optimal recording solution. We recommend recording videos using Zoom then using Kaltura to publish, store, and deliver video content through its seamless integration with Canvas.

How to Access Kaltura

• You can go to the Kaltura Web Site.
• You can access it directly at the Mediaspace Web Site.
• You can also view your Kaltura videos from Canvas by clicking the “My Media” option on your Canvas Main Navigation.

How to Locate and Organize Your Kaltura Videos

1. Locate Kaltura Videos
   Once you have logged into Kaltura or opened My Media in Canvas, you can search by keywords in Kaltura’s search functionality, or use search Filters to narrow your results.
2. Organize Kaltura Videos
   Videos can be organized into Playlists (video collections in a list viewable by anyone) and Channels (video collections shared with specific users).
3. Access Kaltura Analytics
   Instructors can view robust Kaltura analytics for both stand-alone videos embedded into course content as well as Course Media Galleries. These analytics can provide useful insights using metrics such as Plays, Minutes Viewed, and Completion Rate, to name a few. This data can be used to improve future content offerings, identify content that is under-utilized by students, and provide a means to hold students accountable for watching required content.
4. Share Your Kaltura Videos in Canvas
   Rich integrations between the Canvas and Kaltura platforms streamline delivering video content to students. These integrations eliminate the need to log into multiple systems to find and deliver videos, reduce the chance of errors caused by copying long links or embed code, and provide the assurance that security, access, and analytics are at optimum levels.Videos can be organized within Canvas using the Course Media Gallery option. Each Canvas course contains a “hidden” Course Media Gallery. It must be activated by the instructor or other course editor within Canvas to be used. Using the Course Media Gallery ensures that analytics will capture individual student activity and that video permissions are set to allow students in your course to view video content.You can also embed individual videos into Canvas pages, announcements, quizzes, etc.

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Summer 2021 Readiness – Week 3

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique teaching challenges of this time. Throughout the summer, we will be sending emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

Last week we discussed the Lessons Learned from the pandemic. This week, we share resources that can help you look to the Fall and how you will reshape your courses to meet the demands of students, and the need to keep them engaged. During your teaching in the last year and a half, you may have started using technologies you never used before.

Collaborative Technologies

You may have used collaborative technologies like discussion boards, slides, notes, polls, whiteboards, collaborative documents, Zoom chat features, and videos as a way of engaging students in constructing their understanding of your content. You may be thinking about your Fall courses and wondering how you can take the best of what you did and mix it with your teaching methods used before the pandemic. Students often want to use their technologies in the classroom, anyway, so why not leverage their tech and put it to work?! Consider having students bring their devices and connect to some of these collaborative technologies while engaged in your face-to-face teaching.

Informal Course Communications

Using Zoom chat and discussion boards or other technologies that capture students’ responses has become a new way for students to connect with you and each other. You may have found in some classes that you were challenged to get students to “unmute” and be engaged. We find that at times students are as unlikely to unmute and share ideas in virtual classrooms as in-person students are to raise their hand in a live lecture. However, the chat stream may have been very busy essentially forming something we call the “backchannel.” This channel permitted you to engage in less formal ways. Students may have felt it was less risky to answer a question in the chat interactions. You can continue to capitalize on this channel in the coming year if it aligns with your course and student needs. When used purposefully and with inclusive and respectful communication, backchannels can offer an important communication mode for students to interact with course content, the instructor, and each other.

Breakout Rooms

During the pandemic, if you wanted to facilitate small groups, you may have turned to using breakout rooms for collaboration between students. You may have used breakout rooms to ask students information about their prior knowledge, to have them work on problems or cases, or to wrap up and identify points of interest or confusion. You can continue to use these tools in your face-to-face learning to garner the benefits of the additional tools that came along with them, like whiteboards, screen sharing, and internet searching. In socially distanced, mixed audiences and fully face-to-face classrooms, a student can put on headphones and get to work together on meaningful activities. You might be surprised to find them doing this even outside the classroom if you leave your digital space open to students.

Come to this week’s Smeal Academy webinar to learn more about ways to reshape your courses this fall.

Resources

Glantz, E., Gamrat, C., Lenze, L., & Bardzell, J. (2021, March 16). Improved Student Engagement in Higher Education’s Next Normal. EDUCAUSE Review.

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources

Summer 2021 – Designing for Students in Multiple Delivery Modes

The goal of the Smeal Academy is to equip everyone with best practices and strategies for teaching, learning, and technology to ensure the Smeal community is prepared to respond to the unique teaching challenges of this time. Throughout the summer, we will be sending emails with practical tips and information, providing live sessions, and holding virtual consultations.

This week, we share resources that can help you consider strategies for teaching courses to a mixed mode of students who will be joining your course both in person and online. A number of our students will not be able to return to campus this Fall due to the Pandemic and have indicated their need to participate remotely through the “Raise Your Hand” initiative in Starfish.

The future is flexible!

Flexibility in delivery modes is probably here to stay. According to the 2021 Chloe 6 Report, 83% of public universities expect to see an increase in undergraduate, online enrollment as a part of the long-term impact of the pandemic (NOTE: Study sample size = 361 schools: 26% Public 2 year; 35% Public 4 year; 35% Private 4 year; 21% For Profit). As we think about how this will affect teaching and learning, consider that we are entering a new normal where students are entering our classes with the experience and likely an expectation or need for some flexibility in participation modes and digital access to resources. The new normal is shaped by our experiences over the last 15 months, so remember that all learners (and instructors) will benefit when we continue some of the best practices we’ve adopted during this time.

Build Community

If we are not intentional about building community in our classes (regardless of delivery mode), students are more likely to:

• Earn lower grades,
• Withdraw from your course or dropout from school altogether, and/or
• Have increased feelings of social isolation (Ali & Smith, 2015).

Though some courses have a “no technology” policy, when you have students who will be participating in your course both in person and from a distance, technology can help connect students both in the classroom and online and level the playing field. Here are a couple of strategies you might consider:

• Use a tool like Top Hat for polling for synchronous and asynchronous participants with the same poll.
• Group students with a mix of in-person and remote participants so they can get to know each other,
• Use social icebreakers,
• Consider merging sections in Canvas to connect students using Canvas tools, and
• Extend conversations beyond the classroom by using tools like Canvas, Top Hat, or Packback discussions. This can help foster reflection, synthesis, and community-building.

Structure Your Course for Success

Have you ever had to go for a test at the hospital, been taken through various hallways and rooms and then tried to follow the signs to the exit, hoping you’d find your way out (and felt relieved when you found your way out)? Sometimes, there aren’t enough signs, and you can become anxious that you might be going the wrong way. Sometimes, you need to ask for help because you feel lost. Just as we don’t like feeling lost in a physical space, it’s important to ensure that students can navigate our course spaces with ease as well.

Imagine what it’s like for a student to enter your Canvas space for the first time. Do they know where to begin and is there an adequate road map that’s easy for them to follow so they know where things are and how the course is organized? There is nothing more frustrating than for students to feel like they are on a scavenger hunt when trying to navigate their way through their courses. Here are three things you can do that will help all of your students find their way in your courses:

• Put your syllabus in the syllabus tab. Though this may seem obvious, not everyone does this.
• Organize your content into modules and use Canvas pages to provide the instructions necessary to understand your expectations/requirements, locate and complete all activities and assignments successfully. Please refer to our Smeal Academy Canvas Space if you’d like some ideas about how to structure your course(s). Do not hesitate to contact eLDIG if you would like to talk about your course needs.
• Use Canvas Announcements to reinforce key tasks and information. Students receive notification of announcements on their dashboards, in the Canvas inbox, in your course Announcements tab and/or “Home” page, and via email (if they have set up forwarding notifications). Canvas announcements can’t be lost or easily overlooked as easily as an email.

Resources

• Ali, A., & Smith, D. (2015). Comparing social isolation effects on students attrition in online versus face-to-face courses in computer literacy. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology, 12, 11-20.
• Columbia CTL (2021). Community building in online and hybrid (hyFlex) courses.
• Garrett, R., Simunich, B., Legon, R., & Fredericksen, E. E. (2021). CHLOE 6: Online Learning Leaders Adapt for a Post-Pandemic World, The Changing Landscape of Online Education, 2021.

Current News

Upcoming Live Sessions

Tips of the Week

Resources