Using the Canvas quiz tool for frequent, low-stakes formative assessments allows students to get feedback immediately. There are many strategies for using the quiz tool in Canvas for course design and teaching. Instructors can:   create a graded/ungraded knowledge check quiz to highlight important concepts at the end of the module.    deploy a quiz to measure comprehension of assigned readings and media in each module.   have students practice taking an ungraded quiz before having them complete the high-stakes end-of-course exams.  For low-stakes assessments, students are often given multiple attempts with a certain amount of time to submit their answers, which may

Students must feel like they belong in online learning communities David Noffs and I recently presented at the 19th ICQI (International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry) Virtual Conference on the topic of Building an Equitable and Inclusive Online Learning Community. As learning designers in the Distance Learning Department at Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies, we are interested in investigating the mechanics of this phenomenon in order to help educators and other learning designers apply it effectively in their practice.  During our presentation, we shared a document developed at Northwestern’s School of Professional Studies entitled High-Impact Teaching Practices for Online Instruction (2022).

Distance Learning responds to a need As we develop courses with instructors here at SPS (the School of Professional Studies), we often discover that instructors want to try something new as they assess student learning. They are tired of doing just papers or problem sets. Our learning designers created an Assessment Gallery so that instructors can review sample assignments, discussion board posts, and even rubrics created by faculty members as they go through our development process. Our initial strategy when we started building out the gallery, was to view this as an internal tool that we could share with SPS

Research shows that students learn more effectively in online courses when an instructor gives consistent, timely feedback (Ramlall & Ramlall, 2016). Anyone who has developed a course with our DL team has discussed this as part of our process.  We know that our instructors spend time thinking through exactly how they will participate in online discussions and give comments on student work to help students learn the most from the experience of completing their assessments. Feedback flows both ways Feedback should also flow from students to instructors. This post is a simple reminder that it’s a great idea for instructors