Learning Technologies Update

Good afternoon ESU Canvas Community!

We haven’t sent a Canvas product update for a couple of months – primarily because the updates have been relatively minor. So, we’re catching back up…

PRODUCT RELEASES AND SCREENCASTS

• The latest Canvas update – released on October 7^th – includes updates to rubrics, assignments, Speedgrader, and more: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-12522
• The September 16^th release notes can be found here: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-12328

  

VERICITE

Vericite. We noted 345 users in September, so utilization is definitely on the uptick. Important: We plan to discontinued Turnitin when the license expires in early December. Therefore, you should refrain from any finals assignments that may rely on Turnitin because the license will expire prior to the end-of-term. Some of the advantages of Vericite include:

• Easy to enable a plagiarism check directly from the Canvas Assignment page. (Much more difficult with Turnitin.)
• Reports are non-static. If Student A submits a paper and receives a plagiarized score of 0, and then Student B in a different class submits the same paper, then both reports and plagiarism scores will update to 100 to show that they have been plagiarized.
• Faster submission returns than Turnitin.
• Submissions remain the intellectual property of the student and not the company. Submissions are stored in an institutional index/repository.
• VeriCite searches approximately 3,300 open access journals and millions of papers published by professional organizations.
• VeriCite accepts multiple file formats including .pptx, .html, .docx, .pdf, .txt, .rtf, .ppt, .doc, and .odf

ACCESSIBILITY AND CANVAS

It is VERY important to think about accessibility in your Canvas courses. New changes coming to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act in January 2018 will mandate that course content be made available to all students with equivalency. This means that videos will need to be captioned, PDF, PowerPoint, and Word files will need to be readable using screen readers, and so forth. Being proactive and adjusting your content now may save you the burden of mandatory compliance later. To learn more about creating accessible content, check with one of the instructional designers in Learning Technologies. We also encourage you to visit the Disability Services web site for specific instructions related to creating accessible content: https://www.emporia.edu/disabilityservices/accessible-technology.html  Learning Technologies will soon be rolling out a site dedicated to accessibility and assistive technology as well. (See Tip #2 below for more information on captioning.) Remember that UDOIT (located on the sidebar of every Canvas course) will scan your course and check accessibility problems.

ONE BUTTON STUDIO

If you would like to record a quick video introduction of yourself for an online course, check out the new One Button Studio (OBS) located inside Learning Technologies. One Button Studios originated at Penn State and have multiplied across the globe. ESU is one of only a handful of Kansas universities that have one. You have the privacy of a small studio setting that you control. You simply insert a flash drive > press a large button and begin recording. The button turns on the lights, microphone, and the camera. When finished, press the button again and the recording will stop, the lights, microphone, and camera turn off and you’re on your way. The video is complete and ready for upload to Canvas. You can even combine it with a lightboard for more enhancement. We hosted more than 60 students in September who all recorded in the One Button Studio. If interested, stop by and check it out!

CANVAS TIPS/TRICKS #1: A Student’s Perspective

This blog from a student at Northwestern University provides some excellent Canvas tips: http://canvaspost.northwestern.edu/2017/01/31/a-students-perspective-on-canvas-courses/

 CANVAS TIPS/TRICKS #2: Enabling Automatic Screen Recording (ASR) in Panopto

This tutorial will enumerate the steps involved with adding automatic captioning to a Panopto video. Keep in mind that automatic captions are only about 70% accurate. You will almost certainly need to edit them further to correct words, but it will save you time. https://support.panopto.com/articles/Documentation/ASR-Generated-Captions With the new changes forthcoming in Section 508, captions will need to be at least 85% accurate. Some universities strive for 99% accuracy. BTW, you can upload any video into Panopto and then add the captions. Kaltura (My Media and Media Gallery) will support ASR functionality in the very near future.

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.