Canvas Update

PRODUCT RELEASE NOTES and SCREENCAST

·         The February 17 Canvas update includes enhancements to Assignments, Conversations, the New Gradebook, People, and more.

ACCESSIBILITY

·         Automatic Transcriptions. Zoom now supports an automatic transcription feature. We’ve enabled this great new tool administratively, so you can start using it immediately.

·         Making Accessible Hyperlinks: This is a very easy change you can make in your courses immediately. Rather than copy > pasting a long URL, highlight the text you want to hyperlink and use the Insert > Hyperlink command. This is because screen readers will attempt to read back each and every character in a long URL string, rather than reading back the linked words. This document explains the process, or you can note what I’m doing within this email.

·         Making Bullet Points Accessible. Always use Word or PowerPoint built-in bullets and list formatting features, rather than creating them manually using tabs, indents, asterisks, dashes, and other workarounds. Screen readers are fine with bullets provided they are added using Office’s built-in features.

·         Making Text Bold and Oblique. Some screen readers do not recognize Bold and Oblique.  To make something bold and/or oblique, use the Strong style command or Emphasis style command instead.

·         UDOIT. This might be a great time to mention again that within every Canvas course is a sidebar feature called UDOIT. This utility, which stands for Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool, will scan your course for compliancy concerns, and provide suggestions for corrections where it can.

·         Accessible Syllabus. Making your course syllabus accessible is easy. Watch this short video developed by Dr. Catterson on how to make your course syllabus accessible for screen readers.

ESU STUDENTS AND TECHNOLOGY

·         We recently completed our annual survey of students and technology at ESU. Some surprises and some expected findings. A few highlights:

o   Students want more use of Canvas and more consistency in where content is located across courses and departments.

o   74% Students requested more use of Open Educational Resources (OER).

o   98% of students have a Smartphone and the majority of them use it to check Canvas content daily.

o   58% of students requested more use of lecture capture.

o   80% of students are satisfied with Canvas and its features.

CANVAS TIPS & TRICKS

·         Use Modules! Without a doubt, Canvas Modules are absolutely the best course design tool you can employ. Modules organize content into discrete, identifiable units, such as chapters, weeks, subjects, etc. Within the Modules you can add your assignments, quizzes, discussions, files, etc. relative to that topic and in the sequence you want students to progress. Then, you can defeat assignments, discussions, quizzes, etc. from the sidebar as they are essentially redundant and create visual clutter. Turning them off on the sidebar does not affect their availability inside the module. As the course progresses, float the most current Module to the top of the list and migrate the retired Module to the bottom.

BLOG AND TWITTER FEED

If you want more information about anything you read here, check out our blog at Blogspot or follow us on Twitter @esulearningtech.