Members

Invitees: Mike Bailey; Tasha Biesinger; Stefanie Buck; Raffaele De Amicis; Jon Dorbolo; David Goodrum; Lynn Greenough; Michael Jefferis; Cub Kahn; Melanie Kroening; Katherine McAlvage; Randy Ocampo; Robin Pappas; Rene Reitsma;  David Rios; Lyn Riverstone; Karen Watte; Zach Welhouse; Kara Witzke; Weiwei Zhang; 

Attendees: Mike Bailey; Tasha Biesinger; Stefanie Buck;  Raffaele De Amicis; Jon Dorbolo; David Goodrum; Lynn Greenough; Michael Jefferis; Cub Kahn; Randy Ocampo; Robin Pappas; Rene Reitsma; David Rios; Lyn Riverstone; Karen Watte; Zach Wellhouse; Kara Witkze; Weiwei Zhang; 

Minutes/Notes

Qualtrics Integration

  • 3rd party provider (Drieam) has created an integration that means we can create Canvas assignment and connect it to a Qualtrics survey. OSU now has a 3-year license
  • Students can take the survey; students can be granted points (pass from Qualtrics to Canvas)
  • Includes Canvas assignment settings
  • Supports anonymous surveys
  • Qualtrics is a complex environment; integration requires training and practice
  • Q. Looking at data on backend - can data be tracked? E.g. course coordinator looking at multiple courses? A: Yes. All data is ultimately collected/stored in Qualtrics as with any Qualtrics survey.
  • Can set up additional embedded data fields to collect data from Canvas? Yes, it is possible for the Qualtrics survey to be configured to collect data from Canvas automatically (currently three data fields: course code, section codes, and assignment name) or to collect custom data manually entered by the instructor when deploying the survey to a Canvas assignment
  • Q. Can assessments be anonymous - e.g., for exams? A. The Qualtrics survey settings within Canvas can be configured to allow for anonymous survey submissions. If the survey needs to return a score to Canvas, it cannot be set up to be truly anonymous.
  • We’ll look at larger assessment picture (additional integration configuration needed, if OSU decides to leverage this platform for more assessment)

Proctorio Faculty Survey

Academic Technology and Ecampus partnered to survey faculty on their experience with Proctorio in fall 2020.

  • Faculty teaching remotely spent a lot of time reviewing Proctorio gradebook to identify flagged 
  • Ecampus students happy to not have to pay for proctoring
  • Recent discussion not related to survey: While Proctorio meets OSU’s data security standards, students are concerned about the Chrome browser plugin and potential privacy issues. Faculty Senate executive committee has convened a task force to examine proctoring issues and concerns

ReadSpeaker & ReadSpeaker TextAid Updates

  • TextAid link will be added to user Account (students won’t need to ask faculty to add to course module, but they can still do so if they want)
  • ReadSpeaker screen reader tool - updated version can be moved more freely on the screen (no new functionality)
  • DAS coordinators not yet informed about updates - Randy will share with them
  • Will be implemented in Canvas courses at the end of winter term

Update on Course Site Archiving

  • Best option, as discussed at most recent advisory committee meeting: inactivate faculty from ‘archived’ courses. All records preserved; easy to restore faculty access by reactivating enrollment
  • All non-student roles will be inactivated (e.g., TA, Designer, Observer)
  • Next questions: proposed archiving schedule:        
    • Archive 1 x per year - all courses from prior AY
    • Leave 2 full prior years available to faculty in addition to current year
    • Feedback: per OtR, allow min. full year of prior access
    • Once re-activated that enrollment remains in place unless faculty asks to be removed
    • Q. Can Ecampus admins still add people to archived course? A. Yes - because that role is Admin, which is not inactivated
    • Q. If we need to switch to 3 years how hard to adjust? A. It can be done - would require some manual adjustments by Canvas admins
    • Committee feels that current year + 2 prior years is adequate

Student-facing Communications in Canvas

  • OSU’s Canvas team has received increasing requests to post student-facing communication in Canvas (e.g., current syllabus policy; announcements; academic support resources; governance for reviewing/approving communication). But our options are currently limited to global (‘banner’) announcements and course menu links
  • Global announcements should be reserved for technical issues alerts (as approved by this advisory committee in 2018) - if overused it’s easy for people to ignore them
  • Course menu links can be disabled by faculty; the Canvas course menu continues to grow as tools are added
  • OSU Canvas team is looking at possible ways to post content/announcements. Will work with students and faculty to gather input
    • Should Canvas be primarily an academic platform/experience?
    • Appealing to ‘put the message where the people are,’ especially during the stress of remote teaching
    • Canvas team seeking student communication governance - UIT Digital Experience team is also working on this governance
    • Q. Has the academic advising group been involved? A. Not directly, but Academic Success Center was the driver for getting the “Academic Support” course menu link added for winter and spring terms
    • Advisory committee suggests bringing the question to faculty senate for discussion/feedback

Student Response System Evaluation

  • With the Top Hat contract up for renewal in summer 2021 Academic Technology is evaluating OSU’s needs - now and going forward
  • How do SRS’s figure in as teaching changes - synchronous, asynchronous, fully online, hybrid and blended learning
  • What are priorities for connections with course material (i.e., making them interactive)
  • Top Hat provides a free version (no gradebook integration) - all polling question types are supported. Similar to Zoom polling, but more question types

Unizin Data marts & Dashboards

  • Unizin developed a data warehouse called the Unizin Data Platform (UDP) - which contains learning activity data from Canvas and other tools (Kaltura, Top Hat, etc). 
  • Until very recently the UDP has been of very limited value to OSU, partly because of the complexity needed to query the data (Canvas Data and Live Events - OSU does not have any Banner data in the UDP)
  • Unizin staff have recently developed ‘collections’ of data that reduce the complexity for our programmers to access data and create our own visualizations and reports. They allow us to see things like the number of published course sites, last student activity in a course site, tool usage in course sites, student interactions with course content. 
  • Unizin staff have also created dashboards that provide examples of what we at OSU could build with the data collections; the committee briefly previewed a few of the dashboards. 
  • Data mart offers many advantages over Canvas API for accessing and managing data from Canvas. Details about what tools OSU needs in the near term and who would have access to them (tools + data) are TBD. 
  • OSU is evaluating our participation in the Unizin consortium - what is the value for us to invest more time. To this end we are documenting interest and perceived value. Ecampus, College of Public Health and a few other groups are helping with the evaluation to see what it would take for OSU to leverage the UDP in the near term, and to identify level of interest.
  • Q: Are other Unizin schools using these dashboards? A. Not yet - they are very new (as of late Dec. 2020). Other Unizin schools are using UDP data in applications they have developed.
  • Data resides in Unizin’s Google Cloud Platform; Unizin uses Google tools to create dashboards (Data Studio). Tableau. R Studio and other tools can be used to develop tools for reporting and visualizations.
  • The Unizin data marts/dashboards use Canvas Live Events. OSU is not currently collecting or storing live events - it’s only in the UDP. OSU does not download all of the available Canvas Data due to constraints on our data storage capacity

Request for Grade Upload from Canvas to Banner

  • Office of the Registrar has initiated a request to develop a way for OSU faculty to upload final course grades from Canvas to Banner. Faculty have been asking for a more streamlined way to upload final grades from the Canvas gradebook
  • Technical evaluation is under way to identify possible approaches