A New Academic Year Begins!

Whew…we’ve learned lots in the last few months and the CET believes you all rocked it! We’re looking forward to the year ahead and the opportunity to start fresh and start to build and strengthen the practices that we all had to learn on the fly. Please note the following as you prepare for the year ahead:

• We post weekly to this blog with news on everything from technology to teaching. Follow by email so that you don’t miss a beat!
• We’ve aligned all Canvas course shells with course start and end dates in Colleague to meet student expectations in terms of course availability at the start and end of each block. Faculty do have access to inbox communications with class rosters in any course that they’ve published so you can send your Syllabus Supplement to your students for the 2020 Fall semester.
• All faculty are encouraged to share the Online Introduction to Canvas enrollment link with their students. This self-paced course is a great introduction to using Canvas as a student and can pave the way for a successful start to the semester. The course is available now. All Strategies for Success 1000 courses will be requiring students to finish the course beginning this Fall.

2020 Fall In-Service Sessions from the CET

• We’ll be introducing the features of Roll Call in Canvas (Attendance Tool) through the scheduled In-Service sessions and look forward to seeing you there via Zoom.
• Using the LTI integration in Canvas for Zoom and Teams is an easy way to schedule your virtual class meetings. Thirty minutes and we'll have you up and running!
• PowerPoint Live is a new tool Microsoft released this summer that allows students to interact with your PowerPoint and view live subtitles.
• Respondus Monitor is available to all faculty and is now compatible with New Quizzes. Monitor is a remote proctoring solution that enables video recording of online exams. Respondus offers free webinar training on Monitor and the LockDown Browser. Look for quick 30-minute sessions during the In-Service for tips on how to use Monitor in your course.

More Resources

• The Exchange is a one-stop-shop containing information and useful guides on topics such as technology usage, course design, and much more!  Detailed information about the syllabus supplement, Roll Call, PowerPoint Live, and Respondus is in this Canvas course.
• Growing with Canvas is a self-paced course demonstrating the basics of using Canvas as a teacher.  LCCC Adjunct Orientation is a self-paced course designed to orient adjunct faculty with the college. Also useful for full time faculty!
• Canvas Support via telephone, chat or report a problem, can be reached by clicking the Help icon in Canvas.  Available 24/7 whenever you need it and staffed by employees of Instructure that know Canvas inside out.   

Tech and Training for LCCC

The CET is available to help you with learning technologies, you can book CET for individual help or you have access to expert training provided by the company themselves. If you would like the CET to host any live webinars in EEC 224, please let us know—we’ve got great space and provide treats!

Canvas and Portfolium

There is a new link located in Canvas under the Help menu for Training Services Portal. Here you can access Canvas and Portfolium training videos and courses created by Instructure. Videos include: “Customizing Canvas Gradebook”, “Using Canvas Speedgrader” and “Portfolium Projects”. A few of the courses are: “Grading and Feedback”, “Getting Started with Assignments and Assessments” and “Portfolium Network: ePortfolios Reinvented”. Note: Portfolium is an Instructure product.

Respondus

LCCC has purchased two Respondus products Respondus 4.0 and the Test Bank Network and Respondus LockDown Browser & Respondus Monitor. To learn more about these products, you can attend webinar training or watch training videos. The link to download Respondus 4.0 is located in the Faculty Resources Site located under the Help menu in Canvas.

YuJa

YuJa is used for lecture capture and video storage. All LCCC employees and students have access to YuJa in myLCCC. For quick start guides and video tutorials see help.yuja.com.

Zoom

For video conferencing, LCCC has purchased Zoom Meetings for use by staff, faculty and students. Zoom provides live training webinars and recorded training videos. When searching for training keep in mind that LCCC has only purchased Zoom Meetings, not Zoom Webinars which is a different product.

Get HELP!

Need help?! Of course! We all do at one time or another. The Center for Excellence in Teaching has many ways to find the answers you need.

The CET has put together a wonderful collection of helpful links that you can access at any time within Canvas. Simply click on the global navigation button titled Help. The menu that appears will have resources for any kind of help you would need within Canvas. You can:

• Call or Chat with Canvas support technicians 24 hours a day!
• Search Canvas Guides for instructions on how to use every feature within Canvas.

Additionally, the Faculty Resources Site link provides custom resources specific to LCCC. Here you’ll find:

• The LCCC Syllabus template
• LCCC Faculty Handbook
  
• Canvas Training Courses for Adjunct Faculty, new Canvas users, and (our favorite) The Exchange, which offers access to current and past CET training opportunities
  
• Forms for:
• Enrollment Requests 
• Master Course Requests
• And More!

Finally, you can also book an appointment with the CET directly from our Book CET link at the top of the page. You choose who to meet with, see available times, set your appointment, and get one-on-one help with any member of the CET exactly when you want!

We’re here for you, so please don’t hesitate to get our help!
cet@lccc.wy.edu | 307.778.4363

Canvas Common Dashboard will be Realized Soon!

As a member of the Wyoming LMS Consortium Wyo Courses 2.0, and on behalf of LCCC, the CET is excited to announce that Phase IV testing has begun for the unified Canvas dashboard! We are joined in the consortium by our partners in higher education, Central Wyoming College, Eastern Wyoming College, Sheridan College, Western Wyoming Community College, and University of Wyoming. Additionally, Wyoming Department of Education, Laramie County School District #1, and Weston County School District #7 are also partners in  this work.

The Goal

The consortium team has been working diligently with Instructure to produce a unified Canvas dashboard. This means that a student enrolled in courses at more than one of the member institutions and/or school districts would be able to log in to Canvas using any of their available credentials and see all their enrollments!

The Testing (Phase IV)

Phase IV testing is focused on the Canvas LTI (external tools) functionality. Our testing will be done from the perspective of both student and faculty, including users who are affiliated only with LCCC and those who have multiple affiliations across the consortium. Testing will take place in our live Canvas environment. Don’t be worried! Tests will only be done using specially created test user accounts and only by the LMS Administrators from each college. Our testing phase will not affect any live user accounts, their ability to see enrollments, or their ability to use Canvas LTIs.

The CET is working closely with the Wyoming LMS Consortium and Instructure during this testing phase and we will continue to provide updates via this blog as we move from one phase to another.
The future of Canvas at LCCC will be unified!

A New Year Begins!

We’re looking forward to the year ahead and the opportunity to collaborate with you as we launch another transformative year at LCCC. Please note the following as you prepare for the year ahead:

• We post weekly to this blog with news on everything from technology to teaching. Follow by email so that you don’t miss a beat!
• We’ve aligned all Canvas course shells with course start and end dates in Colleague in an effort to meet student expectations in terms of course availability at the start and end of each block. Faculty do have access to inbox communications with class rosters in any course that they’ve published. We’ll be introducing new Canvas features through the scheduled In-Service sessions and look forward to seeing you there. Note that remote options are available.
• Respondus Monitor was purchased in July and is available to all faculty. Monitor is a remote proctoring solution that enables video recording of online exams. CET announced this tool in April, and we’re looking forward to supporting your implementation this semester. Respondus offers free webinar training on Monitor and the LockDown Browser as well as the Respondus 4 test generator.
• All faculty are encouraged to share the Online Introduction to Canvas enrollment link with their students. This self-paced course is a great introduction to using Canvas as a student and can pave the way for a successful start to the semester. The course is available now.

All CET members are engaged in Guided Pathways and we look forward to sharing the lift this year in preparation for Fall 2020. Laura is working closely with the Academic Standards Committee on several upgrades in CurrIQunet; Tim is a charter member of the Competencies team; Richard has joined the Essential Student Experiences team; and I continue to co-lead the Excellence in Teaching team beside Ann Shelby. If you'd like to hear more about these activities, or if you'd like to book some time with any of us you can schedule that through our Bookings link.

Our doors are open!

On behalf of Tim, Laura, and Richard,

Kari

Promoting Student-to-Student Interactions in Online Courses

Student-to-Student interactions provide valuable educational activities that engage learners in a deeper processing of information by expressing themselves, sharing ideas, and responding to different perspectives. In face-to-face courses, students have many opportunities to interact with one another both within and outside of the classroom. However, when designing online courses, peer-to-peer communications need to be created and facilitated more purposefully.

Various research studies provide evidence that increased communications and interactions in online courses improves student learning, engagement, and satisfaction. Fostering peer-to-peer contacts helps develop a community of learners that establishes additional support, as well as opportunities to learn from one another and actively construct personal knowledge. By encouraging collaborative communications, students become more involved with their own learning, and are enabled to build expanded connections to new content.

One of the methods to promote student-to-student interactions is through peer review assignments. This activity engages students in exchanging ideas with another classmate and providing constructive feedback to enhance their final product. Assigning group work projects is another effective strategy for involving students in collaborative peer-to-peer communications. Group members need to apply positive interpersonal skills and cooperate with one another to achieve a common goal. Having learners participate in discussion boards is also an effective exercise that requires student-to-student interactions. By contributing to these conversations, students exchange different insights and viewpoints that can improve the learning experience.

Additional resources and information about this topic are available in The Exchange in Canvas, and viewing the Student-to-Student Interactions module.

The Exchange!

Last week the CET launched the first session of The Exchange. The spring series consists of 30-minute sessions designed to get you information about one topic quickly.  If you missed the first session about using password managers presented by Kari Brown-Herbst, you can self-enroll in the Canvas course to find all of the resources.

We look forward to seeing you at the upcoming sessions. Bring your laptop and/or your lunch if you wish, and enjoy a sweet treat provided by the CET.  Sessions start at 12:30 every Thursday through May 9^th in  EEC 224 or via Zoom at http://bit.ly/zoom4exchange (same link for all sessions).

Upcoming sessions:

• 04.04.19 | Instructor Presence with Tim Kochery
• 04.11.19 | Consistent Pages I (The Basics!) with Richard Walsh
• 04.18.19 | Consistent Pages II (Advanced!) with Richard Walsh
• 04.25.19 | Student-to-Student Interactions with Tim Kochery
• 05.02.19 | Digital Forms Save Time! with Laura Sigsbury
• 05.09.19 | What Happened? with Kari Brown-Herbst

Great Professional Development from NISOD!

NISOD (National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development) is a long-standing organization that offers a variety of resources for educators. NISOD originated in 1978 from the American Association of Community Colleges’ annual conference, with a mission to provide best practices and professional development opportunities. LCCC is a NISOD member; request login credentials from CET to access member benefits and content.

On Wednesday October 17, NISOD will be offering a Virtual Conference from 7:00 AM -4:00 PM MDT. The CET will be hosting this series of 50-minute sessions in EEC 224, and we invite you to come join us for either one, or all of these presentations! You can view the descriptions of these session topics from this online schedule of the virtual conference.  

NISOD offers many other resources that provide valuable information for faculty and staff. This includes a series of upcoming webinars, as well as a link to an archive of past webinars. Since LCCC is a NISOD member, all these webinars are free for faculty and staff, but require registration to attend by using their college email address. The next webinar is entitled “Keeping Students Engaged”, which occurs on October 4 at 12:00 PM MDT.

In addition, NISOD provides a number of publications, including various professional papers and weekly Innovation Abstracts. These topics cover a wide range of educational endeavors such as formative assessment strategies, flipped classroom practices, group-work techniques, and student engagement methods. Members can also sign-up for NISODirect, which is a weekly communication that provides news about current abstracts, monthly webinars, and other professional development materials.

Lastly, NISOD is providing the International Conference on Teaching and Leadership Excellence from May 25-28 in Austin, TX and encourages presentation proposals for that event.

Limited Availability Next Week

All CET staff are stepping away from campus next week to take a Canvas deep dive with our Faculty Vanguards. We regret the closed doors you'll see on the CET on these dates:

• Wednesday 02.28.18, CET closing @ 11:00 AM
• Thursday 03.01.18, CET closed all day

Rest assured we'll be monitoring our email (cet@lccc.wy.edu) while we're away and will do all we can to provide assistance remotely.

We'll have ideas to share upon our return; swing by CET to hear about them!

Welcome!

The Center for Excellence in Teaching (CET) invites you to subscribe to this blog and engage in a College conversation about teaching and learning, and technology. Here you'll find articles and ideas that invite you to consider enhancements to your own practices. You'll be encouraged to share your expertise and experiences as they relate to others' questions. You'll see links to current publications, information about opportunities, and a regular sharing of trends in academic technology.

The CET is located in EEC 224. We've developed a fantastic learning space that is flexible and accommodating! Look for us there; look for us here. We're looking forward to learning with you!

Brandon, Laura, Tim, and Kari