Members

Attendees: Rebecca Mathern; Shannon Riggs; Tasha Biesinger; Cub Kahn; Tabitha Pitzer; Raven Chakerian; Anne-Marie Deitering; Robin Pappas; John Dorbolo; Alphonso Bradoch; Mike Bailey; Julie Greenwood; David Goodrum; Lindy Foster; Lynn Greenough

Minutes/Notes

Unizin Course Monitor (formerly known as Snapshot)

Rapid evaluation took place on Feb. 1. Robin Pappas working on summary report, based on survey results and general comments during testing. Faculty were interested in using the tool, even though the feature set is still quite limited.

Add Sections

Lindy is working on a way to create and enroll Sections in combined course sites. This will allow instructors to display grades for a given section in the gradebook; message specific sections; differentiate assignments by section. The People page displays which section a student it in; instructors can filter combined-site gradebook by section.

  • We propose a pilot in Spring term (work being done by Lindy with enrollment updates 1x per day in the first 2 weeks; no automated enrollments in the pilot).
    • Assuming the functionality is useful/in-demand, Mark Baldwin can do the development needed to pull data from the Banner extract that creates the sections and enrolls students (level of effort TBD; will likely happen during summer).
    • Tasha and Ecampus can seek out instructors who are willing to pilot. Tasha has already heard strong interested from Chemistry and Biology faculty.
  • This functionality won’t solve all problems (e.g., Ecampus courses being included in Combined sites), but we can confirm if advantages outweigh shortcomings.
  • Need to validate section naming convention
  • Will need to test gradebook import/export, and Turning participant lists and data uploads.
  • Validate what students can see, including enrollments in other sections

USU design tools

Preliminary testing in late February (Melanie; John R.; Tasha B.). These tools were developed by Utah State; hosted by Unizin.

  • May provide efficiencies for Ecampus instructional designers
  • Syllabus tool allows syllabus boiler-plate language to be maintained and updated in a single location so that instructors may easily import the most recent content and policies (e.g., student conduct; acceptable use, etc.). Instructors may then add their course-specific content.

Implement UDOIT in summer term

All testing was good; no FERPA or contractual issues. Current issue authenticating with Heroku (Test hosting environment). Lindy is investigating.

Per Lindy, the OSU Canvas admin team will set up a second environment (vm) for open-source LTI tools (Threadz; UDOIT) to reduce chance of conflicts with events processing 

Student Context Cards

Team decided to wait until the next release cycle at the earliest, perhaps even after Spring term, depending what we hear from other schools who are using it.

New PACE role

  • With permissions that allow API call to get grades for PACE courses so that the PACE instructional designer doesn’t have to do this via token
  • On hold, as Ideal-Logic is working through technical issues related to the way they are using the Canvas Grades API.

Inactive role

Instructure functionality that Lindy is evaluating now. Enabling it will allow instructors to see students who withdrew. Need to validate we don’t include Drops (Registrar and Financial Aid will provide guidance of dates and how this should work). Benefit of using Inactive role is that it gives instructors a way to see last log-in date. Right now this is limited to only a few admins. Allowing instructors access to the information increases efficiency.

  • Technical development is needed to adjust the data we get from Banner, once specifications are finalized.

Term Start Date

Lindy investigated possible benefits of setting Term Start dates to make it easier for instructors to view courses in the Dashboard and in the All Courses list. However, after further testing on Feb. 15 Lindy concluded Term Start Dates will not work for us:

  • Future term courses, even when there is a Term Start Date, still appear automatically in the Dashboard; only students see the course as a future enrollment. Could this change in the future? Maybe; but for now, setting a Term Start Date for courses does NOT solve the problem of future term courses showing up in instructor Dashboards.
  • A little investigation shows that you CANNOT permit students to participate in courses earlier than the Start Date, if there is one. It doesn’t matter if we change the Starts date, and check the box “Users can only participate …”.
  • For instructors, the course in future term with a distant start date still shows up in the All Courses list with current courses (and Past Enrollments appear below that). Students see that course in Future Enrollments whether or not it is published. If the course Starts date is set to an earlier date, and the box checked for “Users can only participate…”, the course appears to the Student in All Courses (but they still can’t participate.

Sortable Names in Canvas

Reminder that we will enable gradebook sortable name before spring term starts (instructor cannot turn off)

With so many activities going on, Lynn drafted a rough schedule of Canvas-related activities.