Newsletter Archive - Edition 7

eLearning Student Support Sessions

eLearning offers Canvas and Zoom virtual orientation sessions below for Spring 2022 via Zoom. The first part (30 minutes) will focus on navigating Canvas and the second part (30 minutes) will be for Zoom training and practicing. Also, information about ctcLink and Starfish will be presented during the last 30 minutes of each presentation (11-11:30, 3-3:30 and 6-6:30).

Zoom Link for ALL sessions: https://tinyurl.com/SCDSupportDays (For security reasons, please do not share on public websites such as Facebook):

• Tuesday 04/05 @ 10am (Canvas), 10:30am (Zoom), 11am (Starfish)

• Tuesday 04/05 @ 2pm (Canvas), 2:30pm (Zoom), 3pm (Starfish)

• Wednesday 04/06 @ 10am (Canvas), 10:30am (Zoom), 11am (Starfish)

• Wednesday 04/06 @ 2pm (Starfish), 2:30pm (Canvas), 3pm (Zoom)

• Wednesday 04/06 @ 5pm (Canvas), 5:30pm (Zoom), 6pm (Starfish)

Canvas Merge Community Forums

eLearning is currently in the process of merging our three instances of Canvas into one single instance for all three Seattle Colleges to improve the experiences of students, faculty, and staff. eLearning is hosting a series of community forums to share our process, answer questions, and provide a process for addressing specific questions and developing solutions around concerns.

Please join us to learn more on any of the following dates in April:

April 12th 2:00 PM- 3:00 PM

April 13th 1:00 PM- 2:00 PM

April 15th 11:00 AM- 12:00 PM

All forums will be hosted over Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/2069344000?pwd=TFF4UDVTazByQzZCMnZ5NGhucDBmUT09

Course Set-Up

Import content into your course shell

You can import content into your new shell from a previously created course, or a course export package.

When importing content, you can select what content you want to import. You can leave out old announcements and strip out due dates. These options can save you considerable time.

• How do I import content from another Canvas course?

• How do I import a Canvas course export package?

If using the Adjust Beginning and Ending Dates option end up overlapping the due dates for some assignments, add an extra week for the ending date.

Course Settings

Student Options

Make sure that the options for the following are set up the way that you want them. These are global options for the course, and can be found on the Course Settings page, on the Course Details tab, at the bottom, under “more options” How do I change additional options for students in my course?

• Let students attach files to discussions

• Let students create discussion topics

• Let students edit or delete their own discussion posts

• Let students organize their own groups

• Hide totals in student grades summary

• Hide grade distribution graphs from students

• Disable comments on announcements

Course Navigation

Make sure that the course navigation is customized correctly.

• How do I reorder and hide Course Navigation links?

Pages

• Check to see that all pages that should be published are published.

• Test to see if links are still functional.

• Links to outside content may be dead, and content may need to be replaced.

• Links to internal content should be stable, but it is worth checking them.

Modules

• Check that all modules that should be published are published. If a module is unpublished, all the content in the module will be locked and unavailable to students.

• Check that unlock dates, prerequisites and completion requirements are configured correctly.

• It is worth double-checking Modules in Student View—you will be able to clearly tell what is locked down (it will be grayed-out, and you will not be able to click on it), while unpublished modules will be completely invisible.

• Check that external URLs and external tools are still functioning properly.

Assignments

• Make sure that all assignments are published, are in the correct group, and that group weighting, if used, is configured correctly.

• How do I weight the final grade based on Assignment Groups?

• Check that all due dates are correct.

• Update “Available from” and “Available until” dates if you use them. The date change tool does not change these dates when you import content into a new course shell.

• Delete any empty assignment groups that are called “Assignments.” A new, empty group is automatically created when the course shell is created. This empty group can create a confusing view on the Grades page for students.

Announcements

• Delete previous announcements that you do not plan to reuse. Old announcements are imported from previous versions of a course.

• Change the “Delay posting” dates on announcements that you plan to reuse.

• Note that any announcements that you reuse will still have the original date that you composed the announcement as their posting date. This can create confusion for students.

Discussions

Delete any discussions that students from a previous course may have started. Student-initiated discussions become a part of the course and may need to be removed.

Files

Check file availability settings. If you release files based on dates, make sure that the dates are correct.

Groups

Recreate any necessary group sets. Groups do not export/import as part of your course and must be recreated each time. If you have group assignments, those assignments must be associated with the recreated group sets.

Panopto

• If you have integrated Panopto videos into your course, you may need to change the permissions on your videos or move the videos from the Panopto folder for your old course into your new course.

• How do I move videos in Panopto
  Note that it is better to move videos to Panopto than to copy them. Copying will create an updated version of the video, which takes time. Copying will also require you to update all your links in your course. Moving videos will just shift the permissions of the existing video files to the new course.

• If you are recording a new Panopto video, you must “Publish” your Canvas course first before you are able to record a new video.

Publish your course by the first day of the term.

Be sure to publish your course. Otherwise, students will not see your course.

In fact, publishing the course before the first day of the quarter gives the students enough time to get ready with textbooks and so forth. The students will not be able to post or submit until the first day.

Please note that once courses are published, they cannot be unpublished. Although you may add updated content to your course, students will still have access to any content in the course that you have made visible to them

Teaching with Trust

Trust is essential for any relationship but normally is not focused on as the norm for teaching practice. Inherently students must trust faculty without question. Students must trust faculty for fair grading, communication, and trust that they can be vulnerable in the learning process. Trust also goes the other way and faculty need to lead with trust to develop an environment of learning that is productive and positive for all students.

When leading with trust, faculty must rethink more traditional methods of teaching that have always focused on the teacher-student relationship as having the teacher be a strong authority beyond just being a subject matter expert. Online tools have also assisted in enforcing these traditional ideas of teaching and have allowed instructors to have a greater ability to mistrust students. Software for plagiarism checking such as Turnitin, proctoring software like Honorlock, and even Canvas offering student access reports all contribute to the culture of mistrust of students and an assumption of cheating.

This is not to say that students do not cheat and do so for several reasons. Most of the time, based on our experiences, students cheat out of desperation, being underprepared, or simply do not understand how their actions are cheating, as that is a subjective term. However, accusations of cheating are also biased, and students of color are repeatedly more likely to be accused of cheating. An example of racism in these accusations comes from 2016 when a student was accused of plagiarism because she used the word “hence,” and you can read more on the incident in the Inside Higher Ed article, “Hence, This is Racist.” Beyond accusations, software like Honorlock is incredibly biased towards students of color and is exceptionally harmful to many students. For a more expansive discussion see Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education.

We ask Do you Trust your Students? If your answer is no, and you feel you need to establish checks on that trust, we suggest not using plagiarism and proctoring software. Trust starts with finding ways to trust students that do no harm and are not seeking to punish. For test-taking, rather than proctoring software, we suggest in-person tests or having students take tests on camera over Zoom. It is great to be flexible, but if time flexibility comes with the requirement to use proctoring software, then the positive has been outweighed. Time-limited tests on Canvas are also a straightforward way to motivate students to prepare and not cheat when taking tests online. For plagiarism, writing assignments that are unique to the student, have a personal connection, and/or are responding to a specific prompt, make it less likely students can find those materials online, which eliminates the use of plagiarism software. Across all modalities, faculty also need to explain their definition of plagiarism and cheating to students so that they understand the cultural context and the expectations of their instructor.

Automatic Teams in Outlook

Annoyed by Outlook turning on Teams automatically? Joseph Wong of the Teaching and Learning Commons at Seattle Central created these helpful instructions on how to turn off automatically generated Teams links when scheduling in Outlook.

When you send out meeting invitations from MS Office (Outlook Calendar/Teams) and Outlook automatically adds a Teams Meeting link (see image below) at the bottom of your message (whether it is an actual Teams meeting or not), you can turn this feature off. This is useful when you are scheduling a Zoom meeting instead of Teams, avoiding confusion.

1. How to prevent Outlook / Microsoft 365 from automatically adding a Teams Meeting

2. Log in to O365.

3. Click on Outlook.

4. Click on the Gear at the top right.

5. Click View All Outlook Settings at the lower right panel.

6. Click on Calendar on the popped-up window.

7. Select Events and Invitations in the next column.

8. Uncheck the box that says “Add online meetings to all meetings”

9. Close.

Note: This happens when events are created from the online Calendar version of O365.