Just-in-Time Videos

There are a variety of ways to capture and publish just-in-time videos for use in class. Some factors when considering different options are: ease of use, PSU support, time to deploy, editing options, storage options, etc.

Related

Canvas Roster Export for CATME

I just became aware that I’ll need to update our PSU CATME Site.

There are a few videos that need to be either removed or replaced.

I’m more concerned about the next task which is updating our information to assist users with exporting Group membership information from Canvas. I could have sworn that the Canvas Export Grades feature included Group information, but I may be wrong since there is a Canvas Community post that addresses this.

At the bottom of the comments is a post by Lucy Bamwo with a creative workaround:

Currently, there is no way of exporting groups out of Canvas. However, you could set up a group assignment (assign marks to whole group) 0 point, non-submission assignment, place in 0% weighting group and make sure that it has no due date and the grade posting policy is set to manual. You can then score the group with a number in speedgrader and then export the csv from the gradebook. You will then be able to sort them into groups by the group score given.

I didn’t see that information until after I requested Brian Daigle from our Production Team to create a script that would pull the Group information using the Canvas API. I found this information and attempted to apply it to our needs, but didn’t have success. I reached out to Brian because I know he has experience using the Canvas API. In a couple of hours, he had a working Python script that I helped to fine tune to match the input parameters that CATME looks for. While this approach is the most effective solution we have so far, it does require the user to be able to use Python and have the related Canvas module installed.

Instructional Technology Presentation

Brian Daigle and I presented to almost 60 brand new LA’s, TA’s and IST faculty last night. We jointly presented on Canvas and various instructional technologies in two separate presentations. I also gave a presentation on the World Campus Undergraduate Student Population for those in the audience who are new to working with adult learners.

Previously, Amy Garbrick, our director, has been coordinating our office’s participation for these events. I was asked earlier this year to coordinate the IDs supporting this event. There are four of us and we’ve decided to split up and take different semesters. Brian and I covered this FA17 semester with Chris Gamrat providing backup if one of us got sick or was otherwise unable to present. Chris and Ronda Reid will cover the SP18 session and I’ll provide backup. After that it’s Brian and I again, but Ronda will be backup and then Chris and Ronda will present and Brian will provide backup. Then we’ll repeat the pattern.

I had some reflections on the presentation last night that I wanted to make sure I capture for the next time around. These thoughts are not necessarily listed in any particular order.

I will start off with saying that we should use our own devices for a couple of reasons. The first is familiarity. I’m good with Windows 10, but I do not use it every day. Under pressure, these podium machines threw me for a loop a few times. That’s the last thing I want to have to deal with during a presentation. The second reason is that we only have five minutes between sessions and it’s much better to have everything primed and ready to go so that we can do the presentation without wasting valuable time logging in to a new podium computer.

I’d like to see more coordination during the joint presentations if we continue to go that route. I’m not sure we’ll need to next time, but I did want to document this idea. Brian did a fantastic job, but I know we can do better next time as a team if we more clearly workout who’s covering what slides and how the other person can assist. I think we should seriously consider scripting presenter notes for each slide. I’m not suggesting that we read from them or memorize them, but having them in place will inherently lead to a more consistent and smoother presentation. We ask our faculty to do it and I should practice what I preach. Related to the recommendation above about using our own devices, it would be very important that both presenters are absolutely familiar with how all of the resources will be available on the computer being used before any joint presentations. If we decide to do more joint presentations, then I think I’ll recommend that we do a full “dress rehearsal” before the next presentation.

With regards to the presentations themselves, it’s time to have our graphic designers redesign the theme that we’re using. The aspect ratio of the background images are not scaled for 16:9 formats and the typography and other design elements need attention. I would also highly recommend that we move the presentations to Google so that we can collaboratively edit and comment on the work before and after the presentation. It’ll also make it easier to access during and after the presentation by the audience. Some slides are packed with text and we should definitely split that content up to make it more digestible. In general, I think we need to reconsider what we’re covering. There feels like there is too much content or we need to sharpen our focus.

We should consider handouts of the most salient aspects of our presentation. That way the audience has the links and email addresses they need. They can also use it to take additional notes if needed. Lisa mentioned that Amy created a sandbox space where all of the participants were added to that space so that they could actively do things during the presentation. We did create sandbox spaces, but used them for demonstration purposes only. We decided against adding people to our sandbox space partly for logistical reasons, but having gone through that now, I would recommend that we do add participants to the sandboxes and buildout the space to be more robust and follow the flow of the presentations more closely. It could be a mini-course that reflects our content. I think we could use one of the new Canvas Prides for this purpose.

I think we should consider a simple paper-based feedback form that people can fill out in a couple of minutes. It would help us to know what needs they have so that we can keep improving our presentations.

I always try to be as critical and honest with self-assessments as I can be. It doesn’t make sense to do anything else. I have been told that I can be brutal at times, but since this is about my performance, I see no reason to sugar coat things. Having said that, I was very happy to present with Brian. He is an excellent match for our office and last night was just more evidence that he does awesome work here. He was receptive, cool under pressure, and presented very well in front of a new audience.

Canvas Course Restore Testing

BLUF

Everything looks as I would expect it except for the communications-aspect of the 3/12/16 version of the course (see below). Otherwise, the process to restore a course seems accurate from the instructor’s perspective.

Overall, I think this would be a very useful option in a limited number of use cases. It seems like a course restore would be a considerable effort that would require a significant situation to warrant such effort. I’m not sure I can imagine what a situation would be at this time. I would hope that good instructor practices and general practices around data security would severely limit the number of situations this would ever be needed, but I have seen some extraordinary cases in my relatively short time here at Penn State.

Background

On 6/30/17, I received a message from Brian Young that my SP16 section of IST 111S was restored to the previous date of 3/12/16.

This is an account of what differences I am seeing on my end, if any. I have broken my observations into three categories: content, assessment, and communication. Each category may have subcategories as well.

Logging in

I have to do the following to log in. The process does not work in Chrome for some reason. I get a “Page Error” warning in Chrome.

  1. Launch Firefox
  2. Use the following URL – https://psu-restore-tc.instructure.com/login/canvas
  3. Use the following username – kkm11@psu.edu
  4. Use the password that Brian Young sent me 7/3/17 @ 16:40

Communication – partial fail?

Announcements – success?

The announcement I have checked all look good in the 3/12/16 version of the course, just as I would expect it. The comments, links, and media all seem to be fine.

Older announcements did not load, but that’s probably because it’s on a different instance of Canvas. I just keep seeing the “Loading more results” message. The last announcement I could see was from 2/1/16.

UPDATE 8/4/17 15:00 – I was able to access earlier announcements today. I only had to wait a second or so before the list refreshed.

Conversations – unconfirmed, problematic

Nothing showed up when I went into the Inbox when I selected the class from the list of options. I checked each folder, but nothing was restored.

There is a bug in Canvas that exists in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that disallows me from viewing a large number of courses or searching for specific courses from the Inbox. I was not able to confirm or view emails from my current, final version of the course compared to what I should be seeing in the 3/12/16 version of the course.

Discussions – success

The discussions looked as I would expect them to at the time of the restore. While this is not my favorite tool in Canvas, all of the content looks like it should.

Content – success

Referring back to the course changelog, I found the three entries that I needed to check in the restored version of the course. I would expect that none of these comments and subsequent changes, if any, would appear in the restored version of the course given that they were made after the restore date cut-off of 3/12/16.

The changelog itself is not surprisingly exactly as I would expect it would be if I were looking at it 3/12/16.

Interestingly, all of the icons and other styling are “older” – thought I cannot tell if they are accurate and representative of the restore date or just the CSS used on this special instance of Canvas spun up to hold the restored version of the course.

Assessment – success

Assignments

I’ve checked the assignments and they look as I would expect them – unchanged between both versions of the course.

Rubrics

On 4/4/16, I had a an entry in the changelog about an edit I had to make to the rubric for L06: Implications of Technology. Indeed the 3/12/16 version of the course does not have the updated rubric – an excellent indicator of a change that was made after the recovery date that should not appear in the recovered version.

Quizzes

This course does not contain quizzes in the traditional sense. There are two quizzes: an academic integrity quiz and an unpublished student questionnaire (formatted as a quiz). There are also a couple of surveys.

All of them were due before 3/12/16 and do look the same in both versions of the course as expected.

Minor note, SpeedGrader between both versions have different defaults, so I was presented with different initial information, but when I changed the settings, the 3/12/16 version of the course displayed all the information as expected.

The newer course showed a grayed-out name in the SpeedGrader that didn’t appear in the 3/12/16 version of the course. It is not a name I recognize. I assume it was a student that dropped the course early on.

Grades

One minor difference I noticed is that some students do not have an image/avatar next to their name in the 3/12/16 version of the course when there is one in the final version of the course. I cannot tell if the students added their pictures after the restore date however.

Spot checking the grades, all of the numbers look as I would expect it to in the 3/12/16 version of the course.

Closing

Having done some comparison between the 3/12/16 version of the course and the final state, I have some questions about this process. In no particular order:

  • Is this going to be an option for all faculty moving ahead?
  • What constraints will there be if this is offered as an option? How will faculty make requests? How long will a request take? Will there be a limit to these requests?
  • What is the impact of seeing an older version of the course that features “outdated” CSS or other functionality differences between a previous state of Canvas and a current one given the number of updates that Canvas applies in a given year?
  • What roles and considerations does the College Administration have in the procedure of making a restore request? Department heads? Designers? Other support staff?
  • Would a restored version of the course exist separately or could it replace an existing version of the course? What impact would a “forking” of a course have? Are students seeing both versions of the course? Probably not since I needed a separate log-in.
  • It wasn’t clear, but it looked like all of the assets are cloned, is that true? If so, are there storage limitations?
  • Can content be exported from one version to another?

InstructureCon 2017 Day 2 Keynote

The second day of the conference started off with a keynote from Sheena Iyengar who spoke about her research on choice. Choice is foundation of inventing. She mentioned that it is essential to limit our choices to make quality decisions.

She stressed the importance of getting quality ideas since they are essential for identifying our choices. She mentioned that while it is important to ask the people that we work with, they are very good at emotional support and some idea generating, but it is even more important to ask those in our network that we haven’t been in contact for three years. These individuals will give us our best ideas. I thought that was awesome and inspiring to contact some of the folks I’ve worked with in the past, but haven’t spoken with in a while.

We only have so much time each day, so it is essential that we spend time on the decisions that are the most important for us. For example, she shared how successful CEOs spent 50% of their time on decisions that took 9 min or less and 12% of their time on decisions that took over 1 hour. She talked about how this 12% is our value-add and we need to be strategic about what decisions those would be.

I wonder if our office has an opportunity to improve by limiting the decisions that we make as a group. I think we could do even better by identifying individuals to take the lead on decision making in certain areas. This would allow others to build leadership skills and reduce the painful-at-times and less-efficient process of getting buy-in.

InstructureCon 2017 Day 1

Today was spent on registering for the conference and meeting up with people. I tried to join the Developing LTI Tools pre-conference session, but I did not realize that I needed a ticket to enter. They wanted more money.

The keynote was entertaining. Josh Coates seems like a character. He did a great job and talked about the choices we make in life and how it creates a path that can be intentional. As a surprise, he invited Jewel up to the stage for an interview. She was thoughtful, funny, and down-to-earth.

It was raining that evening and it made it kind of a bummer to try and have a dry meal for most of us. A lucky few hundred folks were able to eat in the middle of the tent where it was relatively more sheltered. A lot of folks had to take shelter elsewhere and get wet in the process. Well everyone got wet.

Regardless, I finished up the night excited for the conference. It’s unlike anything I’ve seen having only been to educational conferences before.

Learning Design Summer Camp Breakout Session: Piazza

Glenn Johnson, Tracey, Bruce

Will require some initial testing to see if we can access it outside of a live section. It seems like it will be possible. While links from within the Modules view are possible, those links point to the Piazza “home” page view and not a particular thread. It looks easy enough, but are our faculty ready and interested? Only time will tell. The tool does look promising.

  • Integrated into Canvas
  • Very easy setup
  • Piazza is half-way between a discussion forum and a ticket
  • There are different status indicators that help instructors to identify where they need to put their attention
  • Canvas discussions mark posts/comments as read even though you may not have read through a post, people like to scan through posts before reading through them
  • Piazza provides a timeline to show the history of a conversation
  • Demo of LaTeX: allows for coding equations into the WISYWIG, there is also a button-based interface if people do not know how to code in LaTeX
  • Students can also cut-and-paste code into the text editor to share their work in Piazza
  • Images are also easy to add
  • Piazza is very easy-to-use and doesn’t require training, it just works
  • This can be setup as a wiki where one student can post something, but others can edit, and instructors can also make edits
  • There is an announcement in Canvas that Piazza is now working:Piazza now working properly in Canvas courses
    Users were encountering an error when they tried to access Piazza anywhere in their courses other than through the main course navigation. This issue has been corrected. Piazza can now be accessed in all areas of Canvas.Links that are not working should be deleted and recreated.
  • There generally are not any issues with students editing each other’s work since you can use the revision history bar to view previous versions of the post
  • You do have access to metrics like how quickly does someone respond in addition to some other overall things like how many posts, etc. They are useful from a high-level, but you’re not going to get accurate data all the time; you can find out when students are most active during the day
  • Does the app integrate with the student’s courses in Canvas?
  • May not be not available to other than live courses; may be available to Master Courses
  • Not connected to the gradebook

Wrong Description for my InstructureCon 2017 Presentation!

I’ve sent one of the organizers an urgent message to fix the inaccurate information and to change it to…

Kent Matsueda, Assistant Director of Design, College of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University

This after-action report will provide a briefing of a declassified mission and how it succeeded through the use of a clever peer evaluation tool developed at Penn State University. This LTI tool provides covert team leaders with valuable feedback that can be used to improve the effectiveness of field agents on future missions. There will also be a call to other designers and developers to join our R&D Lab to build a better tool for future use in our agencies and institutions.

Having said that… Vice President is a nice promotion. I wonder when my Dean will get that update 🙂

VoiceThread LTI and Canvas

I believe it was sometime earlier this summer that the University turned on the connection (LTI) between VoiceThread and Canvas. This new connection provided new VoiceThread features in Canvas and easier access to VoiceThread from Canvas. VoiceThread has published some useful information for faculty on how the LTI works.

My initial impressions are that the implementation is somewhat unintuitive, mostly due to VT’s unique UX design approach.

My colleague, Chris Gamrat, soon discovered that the LTI is not compatible with group assignments. The tool is apparently designed for submitting individual work or projects created in VoiceThread. This is a problem for our College because we stress group work heavily, regardless of whether the course is being delivered online or in residence.

My work around still uses the VT LTI, but not the way you normally create an assignment in Canvas.

Please read these directions for creating a VT assignment in Canvas.

I do not use the VoiceThread LTI “Assignment Builder” option to build group assignments (again, because this really isn’t a option).

Screencast: How to build group VoiceThread assignments in Canvas (13:47)

What I do in the class that I support that requires group VT assignments is to:

  1. Use the External Tool to create a link to the VT Home
    1. The assignment cannot be ungraded or you will lose the ability to select the VoiceThread LTI (i.e. Points: 0; Assignment Group: Ungraded; Display Grade as: Complete/Incomplete)
    2. Use the description text box to add basic instructions like “Use area to work in your group to create, edit, and comment on your collaborative VoiceThread.”
    3. Provide instructions on how groups can provide editing access to all memeber of a group (i.e. “For group VoiceThreads, you will need to have someone create a VoiceThread and then grant the other members of your group editing rights to that VoiceThread. How to grant editing access to other individuals in your group – https://voicethread.com/howto/sharing-with-an-individual/”)
  2. From there, students work in groups to create, edit, and comment on their collaborative VT
  3. Once students have finished working on their project, they can submit a share link to a new Canvas Assignment that has been configured as a group assignment
    1. Provide instruction on sharing a VoiceThread URL (i.e. “Useful guide: How to share your VoiceThread – https://voicethread.com/howto/getting-a-share-link-2/”)
    2. Recommended: allow students to submit a document along with their share link (i.e. “The MS PowerPoint document, with transcripts on each slide, that was used to create your VoiceThread” this is useful for accessibility reasons)
    3. Recommended: communicate your grading rubric
    4. Adjust the Canvas Assignment settings (i.e. Points; Submission Type: Website URL, File Uploads; Group Assignment: This is a Group Assignment; Assign: Due [date])
    5. Optional: Creating useful “external” links from the Canvas Modules view
      1. https://voicethread.com/howto/category/creating-web-application/
      2. https://voicethread.com/howto/sharing-with-an-individual/
      3. https://voicethread.com/howto/getting-a-share-link-2/
  4. The faculty can then use the SpeedGrader to grade the submissions as they would most other assignments
    1. Comments and feedback related to assessment will need to be left in the comments field in the right column of the SpeedGrader

Have I forgotten anything? Do you have another way to use the VoiceThread LTI and Group Assignments? Please leave your comments below.

See also my related post “Using VoiceThread” from 9/7/16