Inspire Blog Tag: Canvas

Best Practices for Announcements in Canvas

Announcements are among the most basic yet effective ways to communicate with students, whether in person or online. In our Ecampus asynchronous online courses, announcements are often the primary way instructors pass on important information to students and can be a formidable tool for fostering instructor presence. They can be used to welcome and orient students, summarize and reiterate key concepts, and remind students about upcoming assignments, projects, and exams. Some instructors send out weekly announcements that reflect on the prior week and provide general feedback on student performance, while others only use announcements for course related logistics such as schedule changes or instructor unavailability. No matter how you use announcements, the following suggestions can help ensure you are leveraging … Best Practices for Announcements in Canvas
by · March 13, 2023

Make Your Canvas Pages Accessible in a Few Simple Steps!

One of the major advantages of digital learning is that we can ensure our materials are accessible to all students. As such, at Ecampus, we are striving – and encouraging others to strive – for universal design, that is, design that anyone can use comfortably regardless of any impairments. In past posts, we have covered various ways of improving accessibility in a course, including how to fix PowerPoint or Word files. Today I’d like to focus on making Canvas pages accessible and making use of the on-page Accessibility Checker available in the Canvas Rich Content Editor. Common Issues Here are the main things you can do to ensure your Canvas pages (including assignments, discussions etc.) are accessible: Find and Fix … Make Your Canvas Pages Accessible in a Few Simple Steps!
by · December 5, 2022

What can we learn from the success of CANVAS LMS?

Oregon State University’s Learning Management System (LMS) migrated to Canvas in 2014-2015. The Canvas migration was based not only on the company’s feature alignment with our learning platform needs but also on the outstanding customer service Canvas Instructure has provided to our LMS user community including students, faculty, instructional designers, and administrators. How Canvas provides customer service offers an example we can model to continue to exceed student expectations. According to Michael Feldstein’s July 8, 2018 report, major players in US LMS market include Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, Bright Space, Sakai, Schoology, and others (Feldstein, 2018). Figure 1: US Primary LMS Systems, July 6th, 2018 (Feldstein, 2018) Of these major players in the LMS field, Canvas is most noticeable with fastest … What can we learn from the success of CANVAS LMS?
by · June 24, 2019

Audio feedback: What does the research say?

First, let’s start by considering the characteristics of effective feedback in general. What comes to mind? Perhaps you hear in your head (in the authentically authoritative voice of a past professor) the words timely, frequent, regular, balanced, specific. Perhaps you recall the feedback sandwich–corrective feedback sandwiched between positive feedback. Perhaps you consider rubrics or ample formative feedback to be critical components of effective feedback. You wouldn’t be wrong. As educators, we understand the main characteristics of effective feedback. But despite this fact, students are often disappointed by the feedback they receive and faculty find the feedback process time consuming, often wondering if the time commitment is worth it. As an instructional designer, I hear from faculty who struggle to get … Audio feedback: What does the research say?
by · April 15, 2019

Create Interactives with H5P (Five Simple Steps)

H5P (HTML5 Package) is a free online tool that allows you to create and upload, download, and share HTML5 interactive content using H5P.org or by installing a H5P plugin on Drupal, Moodle, or WordPress. 5 Steps to use H5P.org
  Go to https://h5p.org Click on “Create free account” [located in top right corner] and create a free H5P user account. Login to your H5P account with your username and password. Navigate to the “Examples & downloads” page and choose one of the H5P Content Types. Use the “clone content” feature to create a new piece of H5P content from one of the examples. Give the cloned content a title and adapt the cloned content to suit your needs. Choose from the … Create Interactives with H5P (Five Simple Steps)
by · December 29, 2017