Tag: technology

Up Up and Away: How Superheroes Can Save Online Discussions

Back to Krypton… In the late summer of 2017, Jacob Guerra-Martinez a Learning Designer and game-design researcher in Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies, pitched an audacious plan to a part-time faculty member in the School of Professional Studies. He wanted to gamify a discussion board so that graduate students could choose between being heroes or villains while debating and supporting opposing views. His mission was to save students from mundane discussions, and he called this idea Discussion Hero. The previous year, I had developed a course on Learning Environment Design for graduate students in the field of Information, Design


Copying a Canvas Course with Panopto Videos

Use Panopto when You Want to Know More About How Students Watch Videos If you use video in your Canvas course, you might use Panopto to create or host your videos. Panopto videos are capable of showing detailed student interaction data. Get Better Video Analytics By Using Unique Videos Each Time You Teach Panopto video analytics are stored in Panopto forever, which means reusing Panopto videos that contain student discussion comments can be a privacy risk. For this reason, it is helpful to use separate instances of your Panopto videos every time your teach your course. If not, you may


All You Need is an Oven and a Knife

A few holiday seasons ago, I received a great gift – the Pizzazz Rotating Pizza Oven! I came back to work after the holiday singing its praises and immediately began convincing all of my coworkers to purchase one.  My spirits were quickly dampened when one of my coworkers asked, “Does it do the same thing as my oven?” I stared blankly at him as he continued, “all of these different kitchen gadgets…they all do the same thing as an oven or a knife. All you need is an oven and a knife. Everything else just takes up too much room


Student Video Assignments

In our recent blog entry Make It Stick!, we discussed strategies for helping students move newly learned information into long-term memory. Of the strategies discussed, Practice Getting It Out vs. Getting It In stands out as an opportunity not only for students to generate knowledge by teaching concepts to peers that demonstrate their understanding of learned content, but also as a vehicle for creating variety in the types of assignments we design. In a typical course design, faculty will have their students participate in traditional assignments, which can include quizzes, paper writing, and discussions, to demonstrate their knowledge of concepts,


Recording an Interview Over Blue Jeans

When teaching an asynchronous, online course it can be difficult to find a time for a guest speaker to appear in your course. A guest speaker can instead record a presentation or speech on their own and send a recording for use in your online course, or you can host an web conference to help facilitate a recording and capture a conversation between you and your guest. If you choose to facilitate a recording over web conference, read on for recommendations to make the process go as well as possible. However, web conference technology can limit the quality of a