Tag: tips and tricks

Help Your Students Make Better Virtual Presentations

Common activities that occur in many professional and classroom settings, like giving a presentation, don’t always work in a distance learning environment in the ways we would expect. Differences in technology platforms can make the fairly simple process of talking and showing something to a group a difficult task. Fortunately, many students today frequently communicate through digital media and the amount of available options continues to grow. Humans are a species that uniquely use language to imagine and create narratives. Throughout our evolution we have developed ways to share these with each other that traverse time and place. This blog post will cover a


Maximizing Your Synchronous Sessions – Part 1: Technology

Online courses at the School of Professional Studies make use of a limited amount of synchronous sessions – where students and the professor are all online at the same time – to build community and reinforce key course concepts. All faculty are required to host at least one synchronous session per quarter; the majority host between one and four throughout the ten weeks. In this two-part blog post series, I’ll explain how to make the most of synchronous time. This post will focus on technology, while next month’s post will discuss the session agenda. The technology involved in meeting live


Building Roadmaps with Canvas Icons

Are the students in your online class unsure how to approach the week’s tasks? There are many solutions, and I’ve seen everything from built-in LMS features like completion tracking to printable checklists. One particularly elegant addition to an online course is the roadmap. Learning Designer Jessica Mansbach discussed the benefits that roadmaps can afford in her October 2015 blog post How to Keep Students from Getting Lost in Your Course. They are useful to both students and instructors. “[Students] can more easily make sense of how to proceed through the course and how to use the course resources,” she explains,


Offline Access to Course Materials

In December, Canvas announced a new feature to download course materials in EPUB format for viewing as an ebook. The feature is still in beta testing and as of the publish date of this blog post Canvas has not announced a date to move the feature out of beta. The feature will be useful for reading content offline, but does not allow interactions with the course material in the same way the fully online mobile app and browser based Canvas interfaces do. For example, you can navigate a course’s basic structure and read content pages, announcements, assignment instructions, or other static content in


The Importance of Style

What is style? For most people, “writing style” refers to the way a particular author writes–short sentences, flowery adjectives, or a conversational tone. Readers could never mistake Shakespeare for Hemingway or J.K. Rowling for C.S. Lewis. For editors, however, writing style means “the rules or guidelines a publisher observes to ensure clear, consistent presentation.” (APA Style Guide, p. 87) Style encompasses things like citation formatting, grammar, punctuation, numbers, spelling, abbreviations, and so on. While many people associate style guides with publications like journal articles or books, style is just as important when writing online, and especially in course sites. Why