Teaching Online During University Closures

Both planned and unplanned events may prevent classes and labs from meeting at their usual time and location. Schedule interruptions can create some difficulties, but they also present us with opportunities for growth, empowerment, and to develop a collective sense of resilience, and community.

This page contains recommendations for leveraging existing campus technology such as Canvas, Zoom, and Kaltura for instructors who need to facilitate their courses online.

The Center for Teaching and Learning is firmly committed to teaching excellence and will strive to support all instructors working to address this matter.

Get Started in Canvas

Your course already has a shell in Canvas. If you haven’t yet used it, it’s waiting for you to add your content and student activities. Once you’ve added materials and activities, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve published the course and that the access dates for the course are correct.

• Accessing Your Canvas Courses
• Copy content from one Canvas course into another course
• Copy a Resource from Another Course
• Import the Canvas Quick Start Template
• Direct Share in Canvas:
  • How do I use Direct Share to copy an assignment to another course?
  • How do I use Direct Share to send an assignment to another instructor?
• Canvas Quick Start:
  • Course Home Page
  • Use the Course Navigation Menu
  • Modules
  • Creating a Page
  • Assignment setup
  • Gradebook
  • Use the accessibility checker in the Rich Content Editor
• Setting course access dates
• Publishing a course

Create and Grade Assignments

Anything that is collected in class on paper can be accepted digitally through an assignment box in Canvas. Typically, assignment boxes in Canvas are for the submission of papers and projects.

Resources for Adding New Assignments:

• Creating an Assignment in Canvas
• Creating a Video Assignment
• Creating a Group or Team Based Assignment

Grading Assignments:

• Grading Assignments Using Speedgrader
• Creating a Rubric
• Using a Rubric to Grade an Assignment

Quizzes and Tests

Most exams that you offer in paper-based formats can be transferred into Canvas. Canvas refers to quizzes and tests interchangeably. Once you have your questions ready to go, Canvas provides options for you to select time limits, number of allowed attempts, and how and when students can view feedback. All of these options can help ensure the academic integrity of your exam.

Resources for Adding New Quizzes:

• Creating a Quiz
• Quiz settings
• Randomizing Questions
• Respondus LockDown Browser
• Respondus Test Question Software

Grading Quizzes:

• Grading Canvas Quizzes with the Speedgrader

Online Discussion

If your course is discussion based, Canvas discussions offer an alternative to continuing those discussions online. Online discussions require clear instructions and guidelines, as well as prompts that encourage back and forth interaction between students.

Resources for Adding a Discussion:

• Discussion Prompts and Instructions (Requires self-enrollment in CTL’s Online Teaching Foundations)
• Creating Discussions in Canvas

Facilitating and Grading Discussions:

• Facilitating Discussions
  • From Purdue University’s Repository for Online Teaching and Learning
• Online Discussion Boards & Rubrics
  • From the University of Illinois’ Center For Online Learning, Research and Service

Providing Videos & Materials on Canvas

If students in your course received information and material primarily through course lectures, look for replacement content that already exists first before creating your own video lectures. When identifying resources to use in your course, preference those that contain accurate closed captioning to ensure accessibility for all students.

1. Types of Online Instructional Videos
2. Preparing Instructional Videos
3. Presenting Instructional Videos in Canvas

Communicating with Students

Continuing regular communication with your students during times of disruption is especially important. In addition to email, you have access to a variety of tools that can make communicating with students easier.

• Canvas Gradebook Communication Tool
• Create a Canvas Announcement
• Communicating through Speedgrader
• Online Office Hours

Teaching Synchronously Online

Synchronous online courses happen in real time and involve a mixture of traditional lecture and online activities. If your course is primarily lecture based, this may be the closest replacement strategy to face to face courses.

With Zoom, a synchronous meeting tool, you can meet, learn and collaborate from anywhere you have access to a mobile device, tablet, or computer and an Internet connection using multi-way audio and video, application sharing, and content display. Zoom sessions are recordable, so instructors can record sessions and those unable to attend the live meeting can playback the session at a later time.

Instructors and students can open live sessions directly from their Canvas courses for classes, virtual office hours, problem-solving sessions and more. Students can view and download recordings from Canvas courses as well.

• Teaching with Zoom FAQs
• Best Practices for Synchronous Online Course Sessions
  • From Boston College

Finding Your Comfort Zone

We believe that the best way to address the loss of class time is to consider your comfort level with using synchronous and asynchronous tools for course content delivery. We strongly recommend that you use technologies and tools with which you are already familiar and comfortable. Learning new technologies is very empowering and can make you a more confident instructor. However, using new approaches usually involves unforeseen and unplanned for complications and set-backs that should be avoided particularly at times when there are time constraints.

The Center for Teaching and Learning offers a wide range of learning opportunities for learning and implementing new instructional approaches or developing skills with the use of instructional software. We have regularly scheduled workshops and “drop-in” learning opportunities. We also offer phone support for Canvas and other tools and individual consultations are available. Please visit the Center for Teaching and Learning‘s event and workshop registration site https://ctl.gosignmeup.com to view our scheduled events and workshop times.