Monthly Archives: September 2021

Accessibility in Canvas

Web accessibility. What is it, and why strive for it in our Canvas course sites? Google the term and you’ll be overwhelmed by the range of definitions, but it is easier to wrap your head around if you frame it in terms of the sites: an accessible site is one that anyone can use regardless of what adaptive strategies or assistive technologies they use. And that definition answers both the “what” and the “why” – we create accessible sites so that everyone can use them.

Canvas is just a website. It’s interactive, complex, media-rich, storage-heavy, and data-driven, but it is still just a website. Part of it you don’t control, part of it you do. The part you don’t control does meet accessibility standards and is tested heavily by the developers. Your goal is to make the stuff you do control as accessible as possible.

Perfect accessibility is pretty tough to attain if you are not a web developer and media specialist, but you can get most of the way there in a Canvas site just by making a few critical choices as you build your materials and site. What you are aiming to do is make sure students can:

  • take in the content of you site – in accessibility standards parlance that means it is “perceivable”
  • participate in the activities – the site is “operable”
  • the layout and content makes reasonable sense – it is “understandable”
  • the page works – it is “robust”

We’ve created a guide that should help in the choices you make about content, organization, and navigation within your Canvas sites to meet the accessibility needs of your students. That, plus additional resources, are available in the TLDS’s Faculty Development Community site in Canvas. If you are not currently enrolled in the site, you can self-enroll by using this link.

As always, consult with the TLDS team if you’d like to learn more about course design and development in Canvas.

Happy Online Learning Day!

When you think about active learning spaces, what do you envision?  Robust content, engaging activities, student dialogue, community involvement, creative freedom? What does a learning space look like in 2021?

Active learning spaces do not necessarily constitute physical areas. One of the great lessons of 2020 was that learning can – and will – take shape across diverse delivery modalities. Authentic learning can – and will – continue to flourish in digital environments. Best practices integrated with technological tools, agile frameworks, design integrity, and invested stakeholders hold infinite potential for cultivating the online learning landscape in ways that grow more dynamic and inclusive every day.

Today, September 15, is National Online Learning Day, which makes it the perfect time to expand your perspective on what constitutes learning and to open your mind to the possibilities of where learning occurs.

Flipping the Classroom for COVID and Beyond–Dr. Tara Moore

To accommodate some of the challenges of COVID-19 teaching, I flipped my composition course.  Now, two semesters in, a study of my students’ reactions indicates that COVID-19 might have introduced me to my best teaching self, at least for EN100.

My research indicates that it’s not unusual for a professor’s lecture tangents could eat into active learning time. I can relate!  Now my pithy, pre-recorded videos introduce new material, and we spend class time on deepening activities.

When flipping a class, I learned to make sure every assessment and activity align with the Student Learning Outcomes. I based my approach to the flipped classroom on Talbert’s Flipped Learning and Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design. If you’ve taken the Studio’s Teaching Online course, you have already seen the course design matrix that guided my flipping process.

Fortunately, after all of this effort, my first year students expressed positive feelings about their flipped classroom. Here’s one take on it:

“[It’s] not a bad way of doing things, actually I like it more[.] It makes the work load seem easier. The videos and before class assignments aren’t too long so it usually will get done, and the in class activities are easier [than…] doing it on your own without a professor[‘s] help.”

A small number of students felt that the lure of their personal devices made it hard to focus on video lectures at home. A larger number claimed the opposite, saying that focusing during in-class lectures posed the greater challenge.

Overall, my study found several benefits in the flipped model:

  • greater student agency in learning new materials
  • more time to mentor student writing
  • noticeable student and instructor enjoyment of the course design

My personality fits well with the balance of labor needed to flip a classroom. I prefer front-loading the work of preparing videos, which allows me to focus class time on individual or small-group mentoring.  I can see that not every personality will find flipped learning to be a good fit for their instruction.

I write about the process and my students’ opinions on the design in the upcoming collection Go Online! Reconfiguring Writing Courses for the New Virtual World from Peter Lang.

About the Contributor: Tara Moore teaches writing courses and Young Adult literature at Elizabethtown College.  Her books include Christmas: The Sacred to Santa and Victorian Christmas in Print.