Members

Invitees: Mike Bailey; Tasha Biesinger; Stefanie Buck; Kristina Case; Raffaele De Amicis; Michael Jefferis; Cub Kahn; Randy Ocampo; Robin Pappas; Rene Reitsma; David Rios; Tera Stegner; Karen Watte; Zach Welhouse; Weiwei Zhang

Attendees: Mike Bailey; Tasha Biesinger; Stefanie Buck; Kristina Case; Michael Jefferis; Cub Kahn; Randy Ocampo; Robin Pappas; Rene Reitsma; David Rios; Tera Stegner; Karen Watte; Zach Welhouse; Weiwei Zhang;

Minutes/Notes

Ally Implementation Update

  • Anticipated to be in Canvas course sites in time for spring term
  • Many online resources for students and faculty
  • Institutional and college-level reports show data on accessibility of course content
  • Communication plan underway to faculty, students, academic administrators, student support units
  • Demo – report includes all content, including unpublished sites
    • What are guidelines/recommendations on what to do with accessibility data/reports, and who can provide them?
    • Per Kristina – the institutional report is just for awareness at this point. Up to now we’ve had course-level access only.
    • UIT technical services director (Ally project sponsor) can take to leadership to provide additional resources as needed, once we know extent of issues
    • UDOIT and Canvas are better than Ally at fixing html content. Ally only allows user to fix 4-5 things. It identifies more, but doesn’t give a good way to fix (hoping for improvements to the toolset)
    • Student benefit of Ally is alternative formats they can download on demand
  • Q: Does Ally support alternate formats of publisher content?
    A: No, only for Canvas content
  • Libraries working on some internal documentation for permalinks, best practices on creating accessible scans, etc. – can see about more public-facing resources. Where to best surface these resources? DAS? CTL?
  • Action item: none

Student Representation on the Committee

In January ASOSU requested to post a global Canvas announcement about their upcoming elections

  • Academic Technologies provided our announcement guidelines and declined to post the announcement.
  • It’s an issue that we haven’t had student representation on this advisory committee since 2019
  • Q. Hasn’t there been discussion at faculty senate about student representation in general? Is there a solution in the works?
    A. Per Robin P., other areas of IT governance will need student involvement.
  • Participation needs to be nurtured by and for the students.
  • Mike Bailey will make inquiries of fac senate (long-standing issue)
  • Is paying students a solution? Can be problematic re: collective bargaining and other considerations
  • Action item: Lynn to follow up with ASOSU

Canvas New Analytics: Enable for Students?

  • No ‘home-grown’ dashboards in the works
  • Will likely table this discussion until students have a chance to weigh in
  • Robin P. did a study w/ ASOSU on what data students want to see; could use that to frame the options, for when we discuss. In general they want to see more of their own data. See poster
  • Consider doing a focus group to student input (though we can’t show their own data to them).
  • Should check New Analytics to make sure data is not invalid or misleading.
  • Ask a student representative about what we want to do and see if there’s any reason we shouldn’t move forward (I.e., don’t wait for focus group)
  • Impact if we don’t alert faculty? What communication do they need? Per Karen W., the student data is their own data points – same thing that faculty sees in Canvas.
  • Everything on the NA course grade tab is already in Grades page. Communication tab not terribly useful (only includes Canvas Inbox). Weekly online activity is new information, # of submissions, etc. If faculty has turned off auto calculation, does it show up? We need to test.
  • Will faculty be caught off guard if students ask questions about the data?
  • Action item: none at this time; revisit for fall term 2022

Canvas New Quizzes timeline update

  • The option to use Classic Quizzes has been extended until June 30, 2024
  • Many uni’s concerned that much-needed features won’t be released in New Quizzes until relatively close to the end of Classic Quizzes
  • OSU’s top concern is ability to export item banks. Managing item banks (ability to transfer or adjust permissions as course sites are copied and/or different instructors are assigned to the course) does not appear to be coming any time soon. And could be technically complex.
  • Also need NQ to support the current Canvas content editor, and API support so that 3rd party tools like Kaltura can be used with NQ. And so we can leverage Outcomes
  • Bulk migration tool would be nice
  • Some faculty are using NQ now; OSU’s timeline for major transition is TBD
  • Action item: none
  • Instructure Quizzes Transition Documentation

Peer review course site access

  • The OSU Canvas team is considering using the Observer role and providing a way for instructor to select a Discussion thread and ‘print’ it w/ names obscured (anonymized). This would be useful for faculty who are working with colleagues on peer teaching reviews, and would provide appropriate level of access while protecting FERPA content (mirroring an in-class observation).
  • CTL is working on teaching portfolios/quality teaching framework. Faculty ability to generate evidence/artifacts for teaching portfolio will be helpful

Integrated systems that allow users to be added

Some integrated tools in Canvas allow instructors to add other users to the integrated tool's roster e.g., Top Hat and Gradescope

  • This is a concern because people in non-teaching roles could be added to the platform ‘course’ site where they could access FERPA-protected grades and related information.
  • Best option is to limit users in these platforms to designated Canvas roles, with appropriate permissions (Teacher; TA, etc.)
  • Other uni’s are much more flexible in their interpretation of FERPA; not likely to press vendors for changes
  • Top Hat offers a way to limit users to those with oregonstate.edu email addresses. After the committee meeting we learned that Gradescope will likely be able to accommodate our needs
  • Action item: Academic Technologies to follow up with Top Hat and Gradescope