Monthly Archives: June 2018

Open Source Textbook: How to Give Feedback

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One of the strengths of our Independent Learning program is instructor feedback. While we’re not explaining concepts in a face-to-face classroom, we can clarify and expand upon our students’ understanding of material with the feedback we provide; with assignment resubmissions, students can take our feedback and rework their assignments to 1) show a better understanding of material and 2) earn a higher grade.

The following resource, Improving the Feedback We Give Our Students, offers thoughts for providing more impactful feedback, to further connect with students, to maybe even bring our feedback to a higher level. It’s a pretty quick read and includes specific ideas.
https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/feedback/

Do you have other suggestions on how to really reach students with your four-star feedback? Let us know! We’d love to share your expertise.

H5P Content Creation: Image Hotspots

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H5P offers course designers a wide variety of tools to create content. One of them, the image hotspots, allows you to reveal texts, images and videos over a background image.
https://h5p.org/image-hotspots

To make something like this, you first create a new account. From there, click on “My Account” on the top row of links, and then click the link to “Create New Content.” Select Image Hotspots as the content type, choose a background, click on the image where you’d like to make a hotspot, and then provide additional content to be revealed.

Here’s a sample. It’s a map with important cities of rock music, with brief information and key musicians listed.
https://h5p.org/node/263774

As a disclaimer, the red squiggly spell check line does not appear consistently, so you’ll need to be especially careful for typos, etc.

Beyond including key cities on a map, you could have a painting with information about different objects, or maybe a photograph of a machine with explanations of different parts. How else might you use a tool like this? Let us know – we’d love to see your ideas!

Canvas Sandbox

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As UW-Extension and CEOEL prepare to transition to the Canvas learning management system, we’ll be receiving information and tutorials. But would you like to experiment with your own Canvas course in the meantime? If so, you can request a “Sandbox” course by completing the form here: https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4MYqFyHtdARb8tD

You will be asked for the following information:

Name:
Email Address:
NetID: (This is what you use to log in to myUW and check your pay stubs)
School/College: Select “Other”
Department: Enter Continuing Studies/LAAS
The answer to the question “What is the purpose of the course?” is SANDBOX
Desired Title: Select a title you like
Comments/special instructions: none

While this sandbox course allows us to build a course ourselves, instructional design teams will continue to build our Independent Learning courses. However, this is an opportunity to learn more about what is possible in Canvas, which can be helpful during course design and revision.

IL Canvas Webinar Recap

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Independent Learning recently offered a webinar for our upcoming transition to the Canvas learning management system. That webinar can be viewed here:

https://ce.uwex.edu/dle/webinar-information-schedules

Scroll to the section titled “Recordings” and click on “June 1, 2018: Independent Learning.”

The webinar introduced how to navigate Canvas (view grades, course content, etc), some differences in terminology from d2l Brightspace to Canvas (Canvas has a “Dashboard” instead of “My Home,” “Assignments” instead of “Dropbox,” etc).

There was also an important discussion regarding the migration process from d2l to Canvas:

1) Instructional Designers will export courses from d2l and import them into Canvas, doing a first wave of clean-up; during the transition, items like hyperlinks, discussions, and quizzes might get messy or broken.

2) Instructional Designers will reach out to Instructors/Course Facilitators to help clean up those items above. In some cases, we’ll be making direct fixes – perhaps replacing a quiz question. In other cases, we’ll be providing clarification about course content. Please note: we’ll have three days to complete this. Given the tight time frame, Independent Learning will reach out to Instructors/Course Facilitators in the near future about when we’ll be available to complete this step.

3) A reviewer/editor will then look through each course.

4) After the review, Instructors/Course Facilitators will have one last chance to review the course and sign-off that the course is operational.

Various learning resources about navigating Canvas will be made available in the near future.