November 19 Noon Faculty Forum on Canvas course site design - Come share and hear Canvas adventures

Dear Faculty Colleagues,

During our long stretch of remote teaching, we have tried a number of tools and strategies to continue to teach inspiring and transformational classes. Some of us have recorded our lectures and posted them using AggieVideo, and most of us have depended upon Zoom for synchronous lessons. But no matter what strategies we have used to connect with students or augment our captured lectures, all of us continue to depend upon UC Davis Canvas, our learning management system, to teach effectively at UC Davis.

For the November 19th noon Faculty Forum (via Zoom), we will highlight ways we have taught effectively and innovatively with Canvas. Because these forums are purposefully unstructured, we hope all attendees will come with Canvas tool innovation or discovery stories to share, and we will see where the conversation takes us.

In preparation for this forum, or to reflect on your own teaching, consider answering some of these questions:

• How does the organization of my Canvas site reflect my goals for the class? What design principles do I keep in mind? Do I use Modules? Pages? Files?
• How do my students use Canvas to interact with each other, either in response to an assignment or independently of me?
• How do (or might) ungraded surveys help my students express their hopes or concerns regarding my class? How and how often do I take the pulse of my students, and thus shape lessons or review sessions to target their areas of concern or enthusiasm?
• When teaching synchronously or face to face, do I use slide decks? When and how do I make such slide decks available to my students? To what extent do my strategies concerning posting course content affect attendance and participation in my classes?
• How do I use media? Are the images, audio, and video that I share created by me, adapted from the work of colleagues, or found on the web, thus perhaps taking advantage of my students’ love of topical media, such as memes and New Yorker cartoons?

On Friday, November 19th at noon, UC Davis faculty will gather to tell stories about innovative uses of instructional technologies, with a focus on UC Davis Canvas. Less structured than our DOLCEs (such as the recent DOLCE on assessment), Faculty Forums are conversational, freewheeling, and radically inclusive. Register now, and feel free to drop me a line if you will have a Canvas story to tell so that I can be sure to call on you.

We look forward to seeing you via Zoom at noon on Friday, November 19th!

Best,

Dr. Andy Jones
Academic Associate Director, Academic Technology Services
University of California, Davis

P.S. This will be our final ATS faculty event of 2021! We are cancelling our December 3rd DOLCE; we encourage you instead to attend the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference to be held that day.