303-735-4357 or oithelp@colorado.edu
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
303-735-4357 or oithelp@colorado.edu
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
There are currently no scheduled or active alerts. Subscribe to Service Alert RSS feed.
This guide provides instructors and teaching assistants with a description of the technology that can be used to support various teaching modalities. This page will be updated as additional tools become available in response to faculty and student needs.
Let students know which communication tools will be used in your course, for what purpose, and when they should expect to hear back from you and/or their peers. Review the Using Announcements and Inbox to Communicate with Students in Canvas page for general guidance on how to use the communication tools in Canvas.
Have text-based, real-time interactions with all the students in your course via the Chat Tool in Canvas.
There are a number of ways you can deliver course content at a distance. Choose the method that most aligns with your learning objectives.
Help students find your course materials (readings, videos, etc.) in Canvas by organizing the content into Modules, by topic or by date. Refer to these tutorials to add, edit, move or reorder, and delete Modules. You can add a variety of course materials to Modules in Canvas
Zoom is a web conferencing tool that can be used for real-time lectures with students as well as for lecture recordings. It is an intuitive and simple tool that can be used on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Zoom has a number of features that can enhance your online class experience, including screen sharing, chat, recording, annotation, and more.
Zoom offers several options to increase the security and privacy of Zoom sessions, including requiring authentication, muting and removing non-invited guests, as well as Tips to Keep Uninvited Guests Out of Your Zoom Event. Use OIT's Secure Meetings Guide for recommended options you can utilize to increase security including:
Classroom Capture is a fully automated recording service available in most large CU Boulder classrooms. It is a good option for recording your lecture for students who cannot be physically present in the classroom. Recordings automatically start, stop, and publish to an online video catalog. Classroom Capture packages slides, faculty lecture, and rich metadata into a streaming video. Recordings are automatically uploaded online where students can login to watch for supplemental or review purposes. Instructors who previously made recordings using the Classroom Capture service can reactivate and repurpose those recordings for remote learning. To take advantage of this, please complete the Reactivate Previously Recorded Content form.
OIT is working with Facilities Management and Academic Scheduling to allow instructors access to these classrooms so they can make recordings during the summer months. When protocols for building access and equipment cleaning have been established, OIT will provide a process for requesting the service during the summer.
OIT is working to provide My Mediasite Personal Capture, a tool that will allow instructors to record, edit and share their own content from any location. My MediaSite will deliver the content to students with the same familiar media player and features they are used to from the on-campus Classroom Capture service. The system allows the recording of high-quality slideshows or screencasts that preserve every annotation and screen movement. Instructors can pair their content with webcam video or simply a voice-over, and My Mediasite’s Desktop Recorder does the rest. It synchronizes everything an instructor says and shows without requiring video production skills. My Mediasite Personal Capture is expected to be available by mid-July.
For instructors recording from home, OIT has published a helpful resource called Tips for Recording Lectures from Home.
Use the Discussions feature in Canvas to simulate in-class discussion and peer interaction. By posing questions or prompts that require complex thinking and the application of concepts covered in course materials, instructors can encourage student engagement and active learning. Students should be provided with specific instructions and clear expectations for their discussion posts, including guidelines on writing style (e.g., formal/informal), number of posts expected per discussion, length (e.g., number of words), frequency, tone, and content (e.g., references to course materials). Note that Discussions can be graded and ungraded in Canvas. Graded discussions provide an easy way to see all the posts and responses of a student on one page. Get started with Discussions in Canvas:
Canvas Studio allows instructors and students to collaborate using video and audio media. Canvas Studio can be used to facilitate student engagement with one another, with their instructor, and with the content they are learning.
Students can record themselves giving a presentation, practicing a speech, or giving a performance within Canvas Studio. Instructors can share videos they want students to have discussions about as students view the video independently. Videos can be recorded directly in Canvas or uploaded from a local file or YouTube. Once a video is uploaded to Canvas, students can add text comments to videos that appear in a discussion section below the video.
Use VoiceThread to facilitate asynchronous student discussions about course materials (images, videos, and documents). Students can contribute to the discussion using text, audio, or video. VoiceThread is available as an integration in Canvas at https://voicethread.colorado.edu, or via the VoiceThread Mobile App.
There are a number of tool options you can use to facilitate group work during online classes and outside of class time.
Asking students questions about the material in the middle of a lecture provides both students and instructors with instant feedback on students’ understanding. iClicker Reef enables remote students to participate in polls that you conduct during your class. If you will be teaching live (rather than distributing pre-recorded lectures) you can enable iClicker Reef in your current iClicker classic program, or better yet, upgrade to iClicker Cloud. This enables you to run clicker questions without the need for a clicker base. Students can answer clicker questions on their home computer, phone, or tablet. iClicker has made Reef accounts free for CU students for the rest of 2020.
In order to use iClicker Reef, you should download iClicker Cloud and enable iClicker Sync in your Canvas course. If you choose to use iClicker Classic (which will be phased out by Spring 2021) you will have to turn on mobile polling in iClicker Classic, create an iClicker account, schedule your class, and enable iClicker Sync in your Canvas course.
Digication is an ePortfolio platform students can use to showcase artifacts of their learning (documents, photos, videos, etc.) in fulfillment of course assignments or in preparation for future employment. Digication features assessment functionality, including a grade book integration in Canvas, which instructors can use to provide students with feedback on their ePortfolio submissions. Students can create an ePortfolio per course or they can use it throughout their entire university experience.
CU Boulder’s diverse lab environments facilitate learning activities that may be difficult to replicate remotely. With some flexibility, though, instructors can use a number of online or virtual resources to adapt their course material.
Students can upload a number of different file types to assignments you create in Canvas, including MicroSoft Office documents, audio, videos, and Google Docs. The first step in accepting assignments is creating one.
Canvas Quizzes can be used to conduct low-stakes quizzes that check student understanding, as well as high-stakes assessments such as tests and exams. Review the How do I create a quiz in Canvas tutorial for an overview of questions types and settings available in the Quizzes tool. Tips for administering exams online:
Make watching online lectures and videos count using the interactive video tool PlayPosit. PlayPosit can be used in conjunction with a recording of your lectures or other videos to assess student understanding, track viewing statistics, and grade student participation.
Proctorio enables instructors to utilize machine learning and facial detection technology to remotely proctor exams to help discourage cheating. Proctorio uses Canvas to verify the student’s identity, then captures audio, motion, and systemic changes to identify suspicious behaviors. Learn more about Proctorio.
To keep your online office hours organized, use the Scheduler appointment groups in the Canvas Calendar to create blocks of time where students can sign up for specified appointment slots (e.g., 15 or 30 minutes). Zoom web conferencing can be used for conducting online office hours.
CU Boulder’s Center for Teaching & Learning serves as campus hub for resources and programming that support teaching. Explore the CTL website to:
303-735-4357 or oithelp@colorado.edu
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
University of Colorado Boulder
© Regents of the University of Colorado
Privacy • Legal & Trademarks • Campus Map