Canvas & Related Product Updates 12/5

Good morning ESU Canvas Community!

Catching back up with some Canvas and related product updates.

PRODUCT RELEASE AND SCREENCAST

• The last Canvas update – released on November 27th – includes updates to Groups, Navigation, Assignments, the Gradebook, and more.
• The upcoming update – scheduled for December 9th – includes updates to Groups, Assignment Groups, and the Gradebook.

VERICITE

• Another reminder that the campus has replaced Turnitin with Vericite for plagiarism detection. The Turnitin license was allowed to expire.

AUTOMATIC SCREEN RECOGNITION (ASR)

• Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has been enabled in Kaltura (My Media/Media Gallery) and Panopto. This provides machine-based captions to be added to videos. However, machine-based algorithms are not always very accurate. The estimate is 70-80% accuracy which is well below many international standards. But, it’s a start. It will help faculty in adding video captions. In addition, the algorithms can ‘learn’ over time and improve their fidelity. To see how to add ASR to videos, check with one of the instructional designers at their Embedded ID sessions, or contact them directly.

NEW PANOPTO LOGIN

• Panopto now has a new, shorter login: https://login.panopto.com

CANVAS TIPS/TRICKS: END OF SEMESTER

• As we approach the end of the semester, remember these tips and tricks: Courses will become Read Only to students (they automatically move into the Past Enrollments bin) on January 13^th, 2018. Faculty courses will move to the Past Enrollments bin and will become Read Only on March 10^th, 2018. If you need courses reactivated for write access, contact Learning Technologies.
• The Spring 2018 term courses trigger “On” January 9^th, 2018 at 12am. The shells are already built, of course, but the 9^th of January is the earliest date you can “publish” a course for student access – without overriding the course settings manually. That’s a full week before the official start of spring courses. To override the automatic process, refer to your course settings > course availability > set the dates > and be sure the date range checkbox is selected.

FUN STATS

• It’s always fun to see some of the Canvas statistics at the close of each term.
• Fall 2017 saw the most number of Canvas course shells ever opened since the product was adopted at ESU: 1,066
• 405 active faculty
• 5,525 active students
• 22,528 Assignments created (1.4M views)
• 10,320 Discussion Topics created (590K views)
• 673,418 quiz views
• 768,557 file views (2.5TB of files uploaded to date)
• 462,677 gradebook views
• You may also be interested in Zoom statistics. In the past month we’ve had 288 Zoom meetings accounting for 58,153 meeting minutes. There were 1,173 participants. Our heaviest users tend to be from Math. One Math faculty accounted for 7,123 meeting minutes in one month.
• Our Kaltura system registered 2,712 media plays last month. There were 906 hours of content viewed and 9,521 player impressions (number of times the player was launched in Canvas).
• Panopto is now up to 8,771 recordings with over 101K student views.

BLOG AND TWITTER FEED

If you want more information about anything you read here, check out our blog at http://emporiastate.blogspot.com/ or follow us on Twitter @esulearningtech.

Robert Gibson, MS, MBA, EdD
Director, Learning Technologies

Vericite

Over the past several months, our team has been phasing out Turnitin and deploying Vericite. Starting this week, we will no longer support or have access to to Turnitin. If you have not used Vericite before, you'll find that it's simple interface makes detecting plagiarism quick and easy, encouraging educators and students to discuss plagiarism without making it the focus of their courses.
A recent video tutorial was created by Instructional Designer, Dr. Anna Catterson. Listen to see how you can implement Vercite in your courses. For additional questions, email us at  acatters@emporia.edu.

Creating Captions with Panopto

Captioning Panopto Video

The captioning option is not available in Canvas at this time.

Go to:  emporia.hosted.panopto.com and sign in with your ESU username/password.

Search for your course folder in the Search box. Click the Edit option next to your video then choose Captions in the upper left. (This works for videos recorded using the current Panopto Recorder).

If your video was recorded using an earlier version of the Panopto Recorder, follow these steps:

• Click Settings next to your video.

• Choose Search in the upper left menu

• In the Speech option, click Process.

 

The process is queued and will finish at a later time.

When the process is finished, follow the steps above for captioning.

1.    Click Edit next to the video and choose Captions.

2.    Click Import Captions and choose Import automatic captions.

The captions are displayed at the left. You will need to edit the captions to correct mistakes. Each individual caption can be edited by clicking the pencil icon next to the caption. The icon appears when you hover the cursor over the caption.

Make your edits to the caption and click Save.

When you are finished, click Publish above the video.

The CC icon will appear in the video toolbar. Click the icon to open the CC toolbar.

~Mark

Virtual Reality Applications

Community,

Over the past year our team has been researching and trying software to develop virtual reality applications. Virtual Reality allows you to see imagery in three dimensions and we feel that it has great potential in the classroom. To prove this, we have been working with Dr. Joyce Thierer, Professor of History. We wanted an opportunity to record a video with a 360 camera and then transform it into a Virtual Reality application that could be used for a class. Dr. Thierer agreed to participate in our research study and invited us to a history performance where she would be performing as Mary Fix, a Kansas woman who was an early settler in the Flinthills. Dr. Thierer was gracious enough to invite us to her ranch for the performance. The weather was perfect and the location was beautifully set in the Flinthills near Emporia, Kansas. Here is a list of equipment that we took with us that day:

• Samsung 360 Gear 2 Camera $250
  Samsung Link
• Tripod $35
  Link to Tripod

We are also utilizing InstaVR for the development of the applications. Andrew Woodberry has been an excellent resource for us and provided a tremendous amount of support for our project. http://www.instavr.co.

Once on scene, we recorded the performance and then downloaded the footage to InstaVR. From there, the editing time took a total of four hours; however, that's mainly because we were new to the software and were working through some of the tutorials while developing. Take a look at the final product!

The work we have done with Virtual Reality has been incredible. We have since created a VR application for the One Button Studio and the MakerLab, also found on our website. We are now partnering with the library to develop an application. Demand and growth continue. At semester end, we will know for sure how this has impacted students retention and their success in the courses they submitted VR applications for.
Our work has gotten some national attention, too. Take a look at these articles recently published:

• Link to Edscoop
• Link to InstVR Customer Success Story

If you have considered a VR application, please send us an email or comment below for more information. One of our Instructional Designers will contact you to make arrangements.

~Anna

7 Things You Should Know About Zoom

7 Things about Zoom

Mark Summey, Instructional Designer

1. Lecture Capture
   Flip your face-to-face classroom or just post your lectures for students to review. Canvas uses several integrations to post your lectures in the course. Panopto, Kaltura (My Media), and Zoom are all integrated to seamlessly provide video for students. Since these applications are not part of the Canvas platform, the video file storage will not count against the file storage limit for your course. You can even set your Zoom recorder to automatically upload to your My Media space. Contact a member of the Learning Technologies team for an introduction to these services.  
2. Screen Capture
   Do you rely on screen capture for instruction? Set up a Zoom meeting (just don’t invite anyone). Record the meeting and select Share Screen. Proceed with the demonstration and provide voice-over. Save the recording to your My Media space and deploy into a Canvas module.
3. Video Conferencing
   Get together with your online students in real time. Connect your face-to-face class with a guest presenter or even another class in another country. Zoom is the conferencing solution that is easy to set up and use. Offering higher definition and better flexibility than Skype, Zoom allows you to communicate with up to 50 participants in one meeting.
4. Video Assignments
   Allow your students to submit Zoom videos to assignments. Music instructors can watch and evaluate an instrumental or vocal performance. Art instructors can review student video creations. Educators can review student teacher examples. The list goes on and on. It’s simple to set your assignments for video submission. The video appears in the SpeedGrader the same as a file submission. 
5.  Assignment Comments
   Want to make your assignment comments a little more personal? Use your computer, tablet, or phone to record comments to your students in the SpeedGrader. 
6.  Announcements
   Make your announcements to the class ‘in person’ if you can’t be in the classroom or if the course is online. Student survey responses consistently indicate that students feel more engaged when instructors use video as a way to communicate with the class, both as a group and personally. Zoom is only one option for video recording. 
7. Grading with Zoom
   Did you know you can use Zoom to do markups and give feedback in SpeedGrader? Students get to hear and see your markups as you critique their submissions. The engagement is almost like a face-to-face meeting. Students get to see and hear exactly what you are talking about as you grade their submissions.

Contact any member of the Learning Technologies team (Anna Catterson, Kristy Duggan, Mark Summey) for more information or a tutorial on any of these Zoom options.