Members

Invitees: Randy Ocampo; Lindy Foster; Brian Lindsley; Mike Bailey; Tamara Mitchell; Stefanie Buck; Zach Welhouse; Tabitha Pitzer; Robin Pappas; Jon Dorbolo; Alex Gitelman; David Goodrum; Tasha Biesinger;  Lyn Riverstone; Raffaele De Amicis; Rene Reitsma; Karen Watte; Michael Jefferis, Kara Witzke, Weiwei Zhang

Attendees: Randy Ocampo; Lindy Foster; Stefanie Buck; Zach Welhouse; David Goodrum; Tasha Biesinger; Lyn Riverstone; Karen Watte; Michael Jefferis; Lynn Greenough

Minutes/Notes

Welcome new advisory committee members

Zach Welhouse; Randy Ocampo; Lyn Riverstone

Remove original Turnitin LTI integration

  • Original LTI integration for Turnitin (TII) rolled out when OSU migrated to Canvas
  • Faculty and students experiences error and issues with original integration
  • Instructure created “Plagiarism Framework” which improves TII integration. OSU implemented in June 2018. Provides many benefits and few if any issues/errors
  • Based on our testing, if we remove the original LTI integration the links in Canvas to all TII assignments break (future, present and past courses). Instructor cannot access assignment submissions from SpeedGrader
    • BUT a workaround to access assignments, scores, etc. is possible
  • Most faculty are using the new Plagiarism Framework (including all new/redeveloped Ecampus sites). Approx. 69 courses have the original TII assignments – several that were copied from prior terms.
  • The OSU Canvas team can reach out to these faculty, and has already re-named the TII external tool in the in Canvas dropdown list to “Do Not Use – TII”
  • The OSU Canvas team will continue to monitor TII use, support faculty transition to Plagiarism Framework, and will return to this advisory committee in spring term to recommend when to disable to original integration and how they’ll provide support and communication

Unizin update

David Goodrum provided an overview of Unizin and the three primary purposes of the consortium:

  1. shared common delivery platform (Canvas) with a curated core set of tools (whether 3rd party or developed by Unizin): Kaltura; Turnitin; Top Hat. Member schools are not required to use these tools, but the contract terms are favorable and the tools are to standards that ensures schools own our student learning activity data;
  2. Affordable learning content via agreements with publishers for first-day inclusive access that can be ordered and delivered via the Engage e-reader platform (OSU has not yet adopted this but is working with the Beaver Store and other campus entities);
  3. a common data an analysis platform that allows each member institution to securely store/work with their learning activity data. Some Uni’s have developed tools/dashboards to display analytics from the data platform, including Michigan’s MyLA and Iowa’s Elements of Success.

Top Hat update

  • BYOD student response system replaced Turning as OSU’s centrally-supported service
  • Adoption growing since F2018 launch; approx. 12,000 OSU students have Top Hat licenses. Cost is $46 for lifetime license; $25 for one year; $16 for one term
  • Improved gradebook new this fall; Top Hat Test now free for students to use (previously it had been $8.50/term for students).
  • Supports multiple pedagogical approaches to promote active learning and engagement in a variety of courses
  • Fewer staff needed to support TH than previous system
  • Question raised about accessibility of Attendance tool for vision-impaired student who must give phone to classroom assistant in order to enter attendance code. Proposed solution: faculty can easily manually mark student as present in gradebook

Gradescope update

  • Adoption growing significantly since F2018 site license and Canvas integration
  • Faculty and GTA’s grading more efficiently (including large-enrollment public-health course)
  • Savings on Scantron costs, as Gradescope supports bubble-sheet exams at no extra cost.

VoiceThread update

visually-based discussion forum; encourages student engagement with classmates and with faculty. Ecampus pilot from last year extended to this year in ~30 courses.

Sylo

  • Ecampus pilot of syllabus management tool slated for S2020; produced by Leepfrog (OSU is implementing their curriculum management product)
  • Efficient solution needed to allow prospective students to view up-to-date course syllabi
  • Current method is hard to manage; Sylo grants visibility to specific syllabus content based on audience/role
  • Spring pilot limited to Ecampus courses; if successful will expand pilot in more summer courses
  • No current plans for implementation beyond Ecampus

Update on course merge and proposal to end automatically-generated Combined course sites

  • Currently when course sections have an identical instructor pools in Banner, a course site with combined enrollment of all sections is automatically generated
  • This logic has been in place since before 2011. (Note that no change is proposed to programming that generates crosslisted course sites)
  • Effective F2019 faculty have been able to use a custom Course Merge tool in Canvas; this provides more native functionality to manage section-specific grades, assignments and communications than is possible with “C” sites.
  • “C” sites are problematic because they are disrupted if changes are made to instructor enrollments in Banner, and because Ecampus sites are included with on-campus sections.
  • Since implementing Course Merge, faculty are using “C” sites less frequently. Here are F2019 numbers:
    • merged = 259
    • published C = 142
    • unused C = 1232
    • total C = 1374
Pros/cons of discontinuing programmatically combined “C” sites

Pros

  • Instructor enrollments can be entered in Banner accurately without worrying about impacting Canvas courses
  • Faculty will use the Course Merge tool to create replacements for the missing combined courses; this will remove unnecessary Canvas course shells from their list of courses and Canvas dashboard.
  • Faculty will no longer be confused by the existence of the combined course in Canvas
  • Ecampus courses will no longer be automatically combined with on-campus courses.

Cons

  • Any existing current/future term combined courses will be deleted. Any content in them will be difficult to recover.
  • Faculty that regularly use combined courses may be confused by the disappearance of the combined courses.
  • Faculty that want to use a single Canvas course to manage on-campus and Ecampus sections of a course, e.g., internships, will no longer be able to do this without submitting a manual merge request.
Next steps
  • OSU Canvas team will continue to report to advisory committee on usage of “C” sites
  • If advisory committee approves, we can submit a recommendation to the IT Governance Committee (ITGC) to discontinue automated “C” sites, including support and communication plan.
    • ITGC can provide counsel on whether Faculty Senate should also receive recommendation
  • OSU Canvas team will review technical level of effort and complexity to revise and test current programming that does the combining.