Our partners at UW Extension have put together a showcase of instructor media examples. From Instructor Welcomes to Course Guides to Lecturettes to Supporting Content, you can see what our peers have created with the Extension media teams to help generate some ideas on how you might incorporate media with your courses.
https://media.uwex.edu/faculty/faculty-showcase/
Do you have any other examples of using media in your courses? Let us know – we’d love to share your work!
Starting this fall, Wisconsin residents who are incoming or transfer students and whose household adjusted gross income is $56,000 or less will receive free tuition and segregated fees at UW-Madison. UW-Madison students (along with all full-time students in the UW system) can enroll in Independent Learning courses at no additional tuition costs, so low-to-moderate income families have free access to educational opportunities at both UW-Madison and UW’s Independent Learning.
Do you know anyone who might be able to take advantage of these opportunities? You can share more information with them from the link below:
News for our instructors/course facilitators teaching print-based courses: the process for submitting assignments has changed. Directions can be found in this attachment:
New Print-based Course Assignment Process
The new process should be more user-friendly for both faculty and students.
This new process only impacts print-based courses. Students in online courses will
continue submitting assignments in their online course where you’ll continue to grade their work.
Greetings from IL Instructor/Facilitator Rich Freese! I recently had the opportunity to review two courses as they migrate from d2l to Canvas. A few thoughts and observations:
1) Comparing the Canvas course in one tab and the d2l course in another makes for a very efficient way to check course content/layout accuracy. I also found this process was a great way to better understand how to navigate courses in Canvas.
2) If you find something that needs editing, click on the edit button on the top-right of the screen.
3) A very cool Canvas feature: if you’ve included links to youtube videos, you can preview and play them within Canvas. With d2l, links would simply open in YouTube in a new tab.
4) In general, the instructional designers did a great job importing the courses I worked with, and they also noted issues they encountered during the export/import for review. If you have quizzes/exams in your d2l course, that will require some additional reviewing, as the quizzes/exams don’t import/export smoothly.
For more resources about migrating to Canvas, go to:
https://ce.uwex.edu/dle
With Office 365 or Microsoft Outlook, you can create e-mail templates for student correspondence. This can be a helpful time-saver for those e-mails you repeatedly send to students: welcomes, course completion notifications, check-ins, frequently asked questions, etc. Even if you’ve already created sample messages and have them in a document, the time saved from accessing them via e-mail compared to finding the document and copy/pasting will add up.
Downloadable instructions for creating templates are in the link below. Thanks to Ashley Kuehl for writing these instructions!
ADEIL (Association for Distance Education and Independent Learning), an organization for people involved in distance learning, has a LinkedIn page. With its strong relevance to the kind of work we do, it’s a great professional group to join. You’ll find articles and opportunities posted, along with the chance to connect with a wider distance/independent learning community, at this link:
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8521464
Happy New Fiscal Year! As of July 1, there are some updates in recording grades and hours.
1) For instructors teaching in d2l: recording grades in LRMS is no longer necessary. d2l (and, in the near future, Canvas) will be our only grade record for Independent Learning students. When a student has completed a course, please submit their final grade at:
https://goo.gl/forms/eLaMVmtLslL79tCe2
Continued thanks for keeping your students’ grading records up-to-date!
2) It is no longer necessary to submit assignment re-submission information or course revision hours in the google forms. That work is now included in the new monthly pay structure.
We hope that these changes will help you spend more time teaching and less time record-keeping. If you have any questions about these transitions, please feel free to contact Program Director Sarah Korpi: sarah.korpi@wisc.edu
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 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!
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.