What Students Are Saying

A survey was sent out to College of Business and College of Engineering students, during the last week of face-to-face classes, asking them what challenges they anticipated in shifting to remote learning. These are some of their comments:

All the small pieces that go into remote learning and turning things in and staying focused. ~ Being in a studious environment. My household has young children and a baby. ~ Condensing the new information from professors into an understandable routine. ~ Harder to learn in an environment that is not a classroom and continuing to learn from professors that aren't very helpful at explaining things. ~ I am not good at learning through the online format- which is why I choose not to take online classes. I am worried my grades will suffer since this is so unusual for me. ~ Our current class format is not well defined, no set schedule, and primarily interaction driven, and group work based. Going online will require clear and pre-determined schedules and assignment expectations, flexibility in times work is completed or lectures are viewed, more individual work, and a better feedback loop in regards to grading requirements and expectations. Navigating library materials for research papers may be limited.

Introduction

*Regarding the dogs: we got Ruby first and named her, in part, after my late grandmother, and also in part after a character from the animated show Steven Universe. When we adopted her sister we knew she had to be Sapphire.

The human mind can only process so much "stuff" at any given time. When you're learning in a new environment, some of your brainpower will get consumed just in the process of sorting through the organization of the course, which then leaves less brainpower to be allocated to actually learning the new content and connecting it to existing mental schemas (this is an incredibly simplified explanation of cognitive load theory, if you're interested in doing a web search to learn more about that). Clear communication can help address this, but we also should be taking steps to ensure that the environment we're creating has as few distractions as possible. To that end, we recommend the following:

Remove Extra Stuff

This is not the time to push students to explore lots of extra materials. Identify what is really critical for the remainder of the semester and emphasize that. If you have extra information that you'd like to share with your students, make sure it's crystal clear that it is optional. This also extends to the materials visible in your Canvas course. Start by winnowing down the links that are visible in your left-hand course navigation!

Organize Content in Modules

Consider the following two ways of explaining to your students what they will be doing in a given week:

This week I'd like you to read through Chapter 7 of your textbook and watch the video lecture that I provided in Pages. There's an article from the New York Times that relates to this week's topic that I've posted in Files. After you've read all that, I'd like you to go to discussions and discuss some of the key topics from the chapter with your classmates. Finally, don't forget to take the quiz in assignments to check your understanding.

Alternatively, you could use modules to present the same information in a structure akin to this:

- Week 3
  - Chapter 7 Reading & Lecture
  - New York Times Article on Chapter 7
  - Chapter 7 Discussion
  - Chapter 7 Quiz

Organizing your content into modules can help your students see what is expected of them at a glance and act as a checklist to make sure they don't miss anything. It also means that there is far less ambiguity regarding where to access those items. Modules can provide a "one-stop-shop" model where everything the student needs on that topic gets pulled together. Plus, if you're organizing all your content into modules you can remove many other items (discussions, assignments, quizzes, pages, files) from your left-hand navigation! All of those pieces that students need to access that week should go into their respective modules.

If you organize your content into modules, it might still be wise to offer additional guidance for your students about what will happen in each module. So, for example, consider adding a section overview page as the first item in each module. On that page, provide a description of what they should be doing for this portion of the course – such as in the paragraph that begins this section.

Keep Formatting Consistent

As you build content for your course in Canvas, one of the fundamental building blocks is the "Page." What you are viewing right now is a page. You can put all kinds of content onto a page (text, images, videos, links, etc.), but without organization a page can quickly become unwieldy and chaotic. Rather than manually adjusting font size, try using the built-in styles to define a header structure to your page:

Change the text style with the dropdown menu

This will help you keep all your header sizes consistent much more easily, and has the added benefit of being much more accessible for users who might be relying on screen readers to navigate the page!

Be Vigilant About Ambiguity

For many of you, this "Keep Teaching" course might represent your first time being a student in any sort of online course. The same will be true for many of the students in your course! Consider where you have confusion navigating through this course content, following along with the materials, or understanding assignment expectations. All of these elements need to be much more intentionally planned in an online learning environment. Feel free to use the discussion board in this module to share some of your considerations on this matter.

Set Your Schedule with Due Dates

One last thing to consider with your course organization is that many students tend to be very task-driven. This leads many to rely on the Canvas To-Do list as their primary entry point into your course. To ensure that students see everything they need to complete, we highly recommend setting Due Dates on all graded student work, and if there's a page they really need to see you should also add that page to the student to-do list (indicated with the checkbox labeled #2 in the image below).

Add page to student to-do list

As a bonus, setting due dates on all your graded work will also populate the Course Summary on the Syllabus, and it will populate the student calendar so they can see at a glance what's coming up!