InstructureCon Day 1

InstructureCon and its Spy theme

This week, I am hanging out at Keystone Resort with a few hundred other people learning about new features in Canvas, their corporate version Bridge that looks like a nice fit for what we are trying to accomplish at Auburn University, and lots of third-party products that can make life easier or more interesting when working with Canvas.

The workshop I attended yesterday, Making Canvas Data Approachable, had a hard time getting off the ground (I am wondering if Canvas needs to do some serious training on how to run workshops for its staff members), and was, I have to admit, way over my head.

Bottomline: We can pull data out of Canvas in tables that we can then run for different reports connecting functionality of Canvas with how faculty and students are using it.  That has been around for a while, but now they have developed a tool, Canvas Data Loader, that will make it easier to connect the various tables with each other.  One current downside -- it runs best with Tableau right now for the database backend, with MySQL and Microsoft SQL coming in the future, and Oracle in the distant mythical future.

Why is this exciting?  Well, it could mean that with some learning, we can figure out how to answer such questions as

how many courses are unpublished?

how much are courses using discussions, quizzes, assignments?

when are students the most active in the course, including times to submit assignments?

how long does it take faculty to provide feedback to students or get grades turned around?

what quiz question types are used most frequently?

Some of this may look a bit on the big-brother side, but if we can set it up so that faculty could retrieve that kind of data about their own course to see how they are doing, it may be quite useful.

And here a couple of interesting looking tools that I saw:

Blackboard Ally is a tool that allows faculty to see in Canvas how ADA compliant their documents are, with instructions on how to fix issues.  It looked quite userfriendly and may help create the needed culture of universal design on campus.

Tealpass is an attendance tool -- that is all that it does, so if folks really are not interested in engaging their students through a student response system, this may be what is needed.  However, we have also had some requests for attendance taking at events, and I am wondering if this may work for such an occasion.

ReadSpeaker looks interesting as well, though I believe it may be limited to html code right now, not to any document.  This software allows for turning any highlighted text in any browser to be spoken rather than read, with the additional bonus of translating it into a number of languages (55, I believe).  I tried the translation to German for a somewhat technical chunk, and I was quite impressed with the Germanic nature and accuracy of the translation and the spoken word.

Jewel singing off smartphone

The social part of the conference turned out to be a bit on the wet side, but the evening's concert of Jewel singing a couple of her new songs, a lot of her early hits and then a couple of songs that she could not remember and so someone was on stage with an iphone so that she could read the lyrics was pretty amazing.  Her story and her story telling are also quite impressive.

wild flowers

Finally, nature around here is so nice and different from Alabama in July:  temperatures are pleasant and downright chilly at night, lots of wild flowers, and I was surprised at the number of humming birds.

humming birds

North Snake River