Northwestern Canvas Hall of Fame Inducts its Second Cohort at TEACHx
At the TEACHx conference in May, Northwestern IT inducted its second cohort of instructors into the Northwestern Canvas Hall of Fame. A new award, the Canvas Hall of Fame was created in 2022 to honor instructors who go above and beyond to create engaging learning experiences for their students using the Canvas Learning Management System. Nominations come entirely from students and are in one of three categories: Most Innovative Course Site; Best Use of Video; and Excellence in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI)/Accessibility.
Building on last year’s response, 682 individual nominations were received for 442 instructors representing 515 courses from all 12 Northwestern schools. This year’s winning instructors are:
- Aude Raymond, Christiane Rey, and Patricia Scarampi, professors of instruction, Department of French and Italian, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, for Most Innovative Course Site
- Emily Kadens, Edna B. and Ednyfed H. Williams Memorial Professor of Law, Pritzker School of Law, for Best Use of Video
- Annie Wilkinson, SPAN Postdoctoral Fellow (2022-24) in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, for Excellence in DEI/Accessibility
Following their induction, members of the Teaching and Learning Technologies team caught up with the 2023 inductees to ask them about the practices and approaches to their course sites that they’d like to share with the Northwestern teaching community.
Best Use of Video Winner: Emily Kadens
In 2020, Professor Emily Kadens faced the challenge of teaching remotely head-on, and the skills, knowledge, and spirit she brought to that challenge continue to impact her students. Some changes she made in Canvas include the creation of significant amounts of video content to both provide content and guide students through practice assignments.
Her students noticed, with one nominator saying, “She understands perfectly how to use videos asynchronously and how to complement in-person class with all the well-structured Canvas materials.” For her part, Professor Kadens noticed that students were having better debates and discussions in class.
Integrating videos with the feedback features available in Canvas quizzes is one technique contributing to student engagement in her classes. Professor Kadens creates multi-question quizzes with videos interspersed throughout. These videos can add more information on a topic or introduce content for subsequent questions. Additionally, she provides detailed feedback for each question in the quiz, turning these “quizzes” into in-depth practice with immediate feedback for students.
“Now they can think about the topic before class and come back prepared to discuss it,” said Professor Kadens. “This process makes it easier for them to see where they went wrong.”
The videos in Professor Kadens’ class provide excellent content resources for her students. By taking more steps and integrating them into quizzes and other course materials, Professor Kadens embeds them into a course structure that pushes students to be more active in their own and their peers’ learning processes.
Try It Yourself!
Check out the new template in Canvas Commons titled “Quiz with Video – Canvas Hall of Fame.” This template gives you a general outline for creating a quiz with a video for your class.
Interested in improving your video library? Consider these tips from Professor Kadens:
- Create a “Canvas Navigation Video” that introduces your students to your course and allows you to tell them about how to navigate the course and how you want them to approach work in the class.
- If you want to use videos to replace content in class, you have to balance the amount of material you want to cover with a need to keep the videos shorter than 10 minutes. Retain nuance and significant details in your video content by breaking up longer videos into shorter topics.
- Have a growth mindset towards your skills. If you don’t know how to do a specific technical thing or use a new software program, check out the many resources available on YouTube. Some examples of software Professor Kadens has explored include ScreenPal (recording and video editing), Kapwing (encoding subtitles), Nearpod (interactive slide presentation/quizzing tool), and Adobe Character Illustrator (avatar builder and animator).
Most Innovative Course Site: Aude Raymond, Christiane Rey, and Patricia Scarampi
As the three instructors behind this year’s Most Innovative Course Site learned, innovation doesn’t happen overnight. Weinberg professors Patricia Scarampi, Christiane Rey, and Aude Raymond, the co-instructors behind the French 125 sequence, aka Flipped French, started laying the groundwork for what would become today’s course site with an Ed Tech Fellows project back in 2015.
“We started Flipped French because we were dissatisfied with many aspects of the traditional French language instruction textbooks, especially the companion websites used with most of them. They offered lots of exercises, but every student did not need to do them all,” said Professor Scarampi. “We wanted something more tailored, where we could identify each student’s need and assign different homework based on their individual need. We now have it, and it took us almost eight years to complete.”
By receiving grants from the Office of the Provost and Northwestern Libraries, and by working with the Media and Design Studio in Weinberg and the Teaching and Learning Technologies team in Northwestern IT, they were able to achieve their goal with an integrated Canvas site to disseminate the material and a new open educational resource (OER) for the grammar text.
The Flipped French Canvas site in use today facilitates a tailored learning experience for students so that they can study a concept at their own pace before practicing and learning by working through iterative exercises with targeted feedback. Based on the results of their work, they follow customized paths through the material so that those who immediately grasp a concept will move ahead while students who need assistance are identified for instructor follow-up.
As one of the students noted about the course in their nomination, “Rather than learning in class and trying to understand it on our own, we learn on our own and gain a deeper understanding through class activities.”
Try It Yourself!
One of the ways the instructors funded their work was to apply for and receive grant funding to develop open educational resources (OER) for their undergraduate course. Funded by the Office of the Provost and University Libraries, these grants are intended to fund the work involved in finding, creating, using, and sharing OER as replacements for required commercial textbooks. Keep an eye on the page linked above for information about the application process for the 2024 academic year.
The other way the Flipped French instructors found support for creating innovative approaches to the material was to find a community of like-minded instructors. One community they found was the Ed Tech Fellows, which pairs learning engineers from Teaching and Learning Technologies (TLT) with faculty to assist them as they experiment with new technology-based approaches to their teaching. In this program, each faculty member or group of faculty has their own dedicated TLT mentor and receives personalized help. A call for proposals to join the Ed Tech Fellows for the 2024 academic year will be included in an upcoming Canvas Minute newsletter.
Excellence in DEI/Accessibility Winner: Annie Wilkinson
One of the standout aspects of Professor Wilkinson’s winning course was its emphasis on creating a safe and inclusive environment for students, acknowledging the importance of mental health, and normalizing conversations surrounding it. Students appreciated the opportunity to express themselves on these topics, which led to a stronger sense of community and improved well-being within the course.
Additionally, Professor Wilkinson created weekly anonymous surveys to encourage open communication and to collect just-in-time feedback from students. This practice allowed her to better understand student needs and challenges individually and tailor her teaching approach accordingly.
Lastly, Professor Wilkinson incorporated content in multiple modalities (text, videos, and podcasts). This approach was especially appreciated by students, who commented on it in their nomination of the course site: “The course did a great job of including multi-modality content, which allowed for people with varying strengths in acquiring information to learn the content. Also helpful was that the Canvas course was extremely well organized via modules as well as in a downloadable format, which was very helpful.”
Try It Yourself!
Helping students express their challenges and seek support without fear of stigma is a goal of many instructors, but it can be daunting. Professor Wilkinson used several approaches to create a supportive environment. Consider how the following ideas could fit into your courses:
- Creating regular anonymous surveys to collect feedback via an ungraded quiz.
- Accommodating different learning styles by adding course materials in multiple modalities: text, video, and audio, including academic and non-academic materials, and building bridges between academia and the outside world. Need help finding alternate versions of materials? Northwestern Libraries has subject librarians in many fields who can help you do just that!
Thinking about trying to incorporate one of these techniques into an upcoming course and want to discuss the best way to get started? Book time with a Teaching and Learning Technologies learning engineer.