Members

Invitees: Alex Axelsson; Alfonso Bradoch; Dianna Fisher; Lindy Foster; Julie Greenwood; Brian Lindsley; Bill Loges; Mike Bailey; Tamara Mitchell; Jane Nichols; Tabitha Pitzer; Shannon Riggs; Derek Whiteside; Jacob Jones; Robin Pappas; Raven Chakerian; Cub Kahn; Jon Dorbolo; David Goodrum; Tasha Biesinger; Nargas Oskui

Attendees: Lindy Foster; Mike Bailey; Tamara Mitchell; Shannon Riggs; Jacob Jones; Cub Kahn; David Goodrum; Tasha Biesinger; Nargas Oskui; Lynn Greenough

Minutes/Notes

Creating Inclusive Community (CIC) training

Programming has been complete to enroll all incoming first year students in the Canvas course (including transfer and grad students)

  • This is a non-credit course, developed by PACE; students must complete quiz at 70% to be considered Complete (note that Canvas does not indicate completion of a course; this requires custom programing)
  • Grade hold is placed until students complete the training, or until the last day of fall term

Committee suggested making the training available so that instructors and others may see the content that students are learning. Erich Pitcher agreed; Link to CIC course

Summer Symposium - September 7 and 8

  • This event is sponsored by Academic Technology with help from Center for Teaching and Learning
  • Registration is full; there is a lot of interest in technology in support of teaching and learning
  • This is the second year of the event. Next year’s plan is TBD

Kaltura - comments in video

Will not be enabled, as proposed this spring

  • Comments are set to be “on” by default, and can be copied from course to course
  • After review by Ecampus and others there’s not a programmatic way we can mass-update courses. So we’ll wait for Kaltura to make comments opt-in by default

Clickers

  • Turning has released an upgrade for instructor software that will make data uploads to Canvas more efficient
  • Turning also released a new way to integrate Canvas courses, but OSU is waiting to adopt it until user interface changes are made so it’s easier to find and select course sites to pair to the Turning cloud
  • A handful of OSU instructors are using the Top Hat student response system
  • Top Hat is a mobile-only product – phone, tablet or laptop, in conjunction with the Top Hat cloud service
  • HHS 231 will using Top Hat this fall; this is a large-enrollment of approx. 1,100 students. The Learn@OregonState task force will work with the instructor to understand all aspects of Top Hat, including any technical support issues
  • Academic Technology will launch a comprehensive audience response needs assessment this spring

Bridge

PACE and Information Services are implementing a new system called Bridge for critical training. Bridge is designed to deliver self-paced trainings; it is an Instructure product, but is a separate system from Canvas.

  • OSU’s HR and Compliance teams have been charged by the Board of Trustees to deliver federally required training to all OSU employees, starting Jan. 1, 2018
  • HR is contracting with PACE to develop and deliver the training
  • OSU receives a very favorable rate on Bridge due to our membership in the Unizin consortium; PACE is adopting Bridge for both the critical training, and for PACE’s paying customers
  • A separate team is evaluating systems (including Bridge) for OSU’s internal training / professional development needs. Timeline for that decision is TBD
  • A system administrator and a product manager will need to be hired to maintain Bridge. Until a system administrator is in place, Lindy Foster will take on the configuration and implementation; estimating until November 2017, but details TBD. This means she won’t have capacity for some investigation of Canvas features and integrations

Term start date

We had investigated implementing a term start date in Canvas course sites last spring. We have not entered one now because until recently students could not access course sites until the term start date (first day of classes)

  • New options in Canvas appear to give us more flexibility on student access if we use term start dates
  • Canvas users would benefit because future courses would be separated from current terms (right now the list of course sites is very hard to navigate)
  • Requires further investigation from our Canvas system administrator (after Bridge implementation work is finished)

Blueprint courses

New Canvas functionality allows an instructor to maintain one ‘parent’ course site, copy it to multiple ‘child’ course sites, and then keep content synched from parent to child sites

  • One chemistry instructor manually updates 50+ lab sites every term because having a single combined site does not work well for variable due dates, Canvas messages, and TA grading.
  • However the Blueprint sites require all of the setup to be done by the Canvas system administrator (we are hoping this will be improved before too much longer)
  • A good test for this tool may be a UHDS student training program. Tasha Biesinger will help them get started. Then we’ll know if there are any glitches or issues that academic instructors may encounter

Canvas Data

Getting closer to having CORE reports of Canvas and Banner data. Reports could be used by instructors, advisors and by program/department administrators.

Peerceptiv

Calibrated peer review tool that can be integrated in Canvas course sites. Ecampus has been using a system produced by UCLA, but it has a cumbersome user interface, and inadequate tech support

  • Ecampus has piloted in Biology course with good results and is investigating enterprise license
  • Seeking additional instructors to pilot it to see if enterprise license is viable; many disciplines could be candidates
  • This tool does not have a top-level Canvas integration, so technical complexity is low because individual instructors can pair it with their own course sites
  • Data security check is already complete and approved; if we proceed, we just need to evaluate accessibility

Canvas cross-listing / Enrolling sections

Canvas offers native cross-listing; instructors may pull enrollments from one or more of their course sites into a single cross-listed site.

  • There are many known issues with the current way that OSU creates cross-listed and combined course sites (more info here: http://bit.ly/cross-listed). The Canvas team proposes enabling the Canvas native tool, while also leaving the custom programming in-place.
  • The primary benefit is that Canvas uses Sections in their cross-listed sites, so instructors can sort & filter the gradebook, assign due dates and manage discussions, communications and TA access by section. This is especially important because Instructure will continue to use Sections to release functionality that benefits large-enrollment courses. If OSU does not have a way to leverage Canvas sections, we will either miss out on the benefits, or will need to take on the work and complexity of creating custom solutions.
  • Shannon raised concerns about campus-based instructors who cross-list courses so that Ecampus students use the same course site, which can result in a degraded experience for the Ecampus students;
  • On the other hand, there’s a known issue of Ecampus sections included in combined (“C”) sites, which means Ecampus students have access to two course sites but have to ignore the C site. The workaround is to add instructors in Banner to the Ecampus section to ‘break’ the combining logic, which adds more complications/issues.
  • Tasha has inquired with Gary Beach of APAA about existing policies on cross-listing; waiting to hear if Janine Trempy has additional info:
  • Jacob Jones indicated he is not aware of polices that would prevent native cross-listing. The Registrar’s office is evaluating a scheduling tool that will programmatically prevent cross-listing based on policies/systematic rules (ETA is approx. two years out)
  • The advisory committee gave approval for piloting native cross-listing in a handful of courses where there are no potential policy violations or Ecampus issues
  • The Canvas team reviewed enrolling sections in spring 2017. A number of issues were identified, and were documented in meeting notes. At that time the benefits did not appear to be significant enough to move forward. We will likely revisit this effort once a full-time Bridge system administrator is in-place

Banner XE Faculty Grade Entry

Jacob Jones reported that a feature request has been made to Ellucian to eliminate CRN and Term in the LMS export file for grade upload to Banner; the feature request is currently in development. Once this is in production, it simplifies the work OSU will need to do on generating a ‘Banner-ready’ final grade export file from Canvas.