Mell Classroom Building @ RBD Library is Open

Well, we did, are doing it -- week 3 into the semester, and the Mell Classroom Building @ RBD Library is in full swing.

Full EASL

Mell Lecture Hall

Study Space

EASL Lite

Indeed, the moment the doors opened on August 20th, students were in the building, and it feels like they have not left.  Classes are humming along, study rooms are booked and busy, and all the different nooks and crannies the building and the spaces in the connecting library are being used for studying, collaborating, socializing, resting, and again studying.

The ribbon cutting was a big success as well. https://www.facebook.com/mellrbd/



So, what is next?  We are ironing out a few technical bugs, for the most part, because of the amazing work of Auburn University's Office of Information Technology, in particular the networking and classroom design folks, the technology in the building is working very well.  We are tracking the study room reservation system, and it appears that students not only have found the online system but are using it a lot.
The Learning Consultants who support the building are checking the rooms regularly so that we know about technology problems before faculty have to deal with them -- which makes it, I believe, easier for faculty to be daring and try out new things in their courses.
If I can just find someone now to get my office in the basement assembled....

InstructureCon Day 3

Scott Barry Kaufman

Thursday's keynote was Scott Barry Kaufman, a positive psychologist, discussing leveraging human potential.

He reminded us that creativity is connected with messiness, that humans are always a mix of things, never just genius or just insane, and to have a positive outlook on life to foster creativity.

One of his terms is harmonious passion -- people who have it, who are harmonious passionate, tend to be secure in themselves, willing to take risks, autonomous and have/had a strong mentor.  He reminded us that mindfulness is about reducing suffering of others, and that 10,000 hours of practice is not a straight line to accomplishment but a wobbly line of trial and error.

University of North Florida has created five Canvas templates that they are essentially giving away for free.  Two are designed with Design Studio, the others are straight Canvas.  The templates are guided by Quality Matters rubrics, and table explains how each template implements a particular QM criterion:  http://www.unf.edu/cirt/services/id/resource_online-course-template.aspx

From their experience, these templates kickstart faculty use of Canvas while ensuring that a lot of information about university resources, tech help and other support is already part of the content.

Jeff Faust reminded me of a number of tools in Canvas that can be used to individualize student learning:  careful set up of modules so that students can pick and choose how they want to accomplish a particular learning outcome; selective release of assignments to give different options to different students, turn on anonymous grading for less bias towards students, choice of format for assignments, and so much more.

He briefly mentioned a new Ted tool -- TedTalks teamed with Watson to create a powerful search engine inside their site that allows you to ask a question and it creates a play list of TedTalks and parts of them answering the question:  http://watson.ted.com/welcome

He reminded us of Carol Tomlinson's statement that "It's our job to see them all as successful and then create the learning environment that does that."

Jared Stein's keynote on how Canvas helps with engagement and accessibility for all talked about behavioral, cognitive and emotional engagement.  His examples from the University of Auckland, and a South Carolina School of the Blind and Deaf were very powerful, showing how Canvas helps connect students who fell isolated in a higher education setting and how the Canvas tools allow students who are physically isolated to connect with others and to learn.

And then he showed us how he can talk to Canvas through amazon's Alexa -- very cool!  At this point, the intents are still limited to just a few (students  -- what do I have to do, what are my grades; instructors - what do I need to grade; parents -- how can I support my child) -- but this is going to grow.

Another new release is the new app (iOS and Android) Canvas for Teachers.  While this does not give teachers everything in Canvas yet, it does now allow you to grade online, annotating (works esp well with Apple Pencil), grading, announcing and communicating with students.  Find the yellow Canvas icon and start using it -- folks in the audience were already and were quite happy with it.

Penn State has an LTI that allows for peer evaluations in group work -- this looks very promising! And finally the Business School at Stanford came up with an interesting use of Qualtrics by creating one-question surveys and then embed these surveys into Canvas pages to get feedback from students on content comprehension.  Unfortunately, this is not a sustainable model as it does take a lot of work to set up all these surveys and allows for little flexibility.

InstructureCon Day 2

Canvas

The conference was officially kicked off with Sheena Iyengar, giving us a version of her TED Talk, The Art of Choosing, giving us some interesting insight into the complexity of choosing while dispelling some myths.
For example, male and female brains, according to her, are not differently wired from birth but instead may move into different directions because of how society deals with men and women.  We are better off making choices when we are not overwhelmed with them:  we are more likely to buy a product when there is a limited number (say, 6 types of jams) rather than a large variety (say, 24 types of jams).
Her key point is that our attitude towards choice also reflects whether we have a growth mindset or not, and she gave some strategies on how to foster a growth mindset.
1.  set goals
2.  write down these goals (what do I want to have accomplished in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years) and repeat the process every 6 months
3.  share these goals with someone you trust
4.  keep a progress journal

Back to the point of too many choices: we make more mistakes, we procrastinate more, and we have a less satisfactory life experience (my potentially trivial example is that I limit myself to "only" Netflix for watching movies and shows).
Research showed that engineers considered those supervisors dictators who gave no choice, but incompetent those who gave too many choices - so a couple of options is all you need to give.
Finally, when you want feedback that is meaningful, get with your dormant relationships, not just the folks you are already working with -- get out of your echo chamber.
Choice is Invention.

My next session was, alas, another session focusing on left joint tables, but the takeaway for me was that we should pull the report from Canvas as to which courses have not been published and identify those faculty as they are most likely the ones who have not used Canvas -- and that way we can offer a more targeted training for these folks who may not be comfortable getting into technology.

The following keynote unveiled the Canvas Roadmap -- there are a lot of new changes coming, so I think I will do a separate blog post on this.

I learned that I need to get more involved in the Canvas Community as there are such folks out there as James and Kona Jones who develop hacks on a regular basis to make our lives easier.  Their code word is Canvancement -- they have developed quite a few of these, like importing a rubric, reducing the number of clicks when you are in SpeedGrader (Quizwiz), roster sorter, and other nuggets of innovation.  I think we will be testing some of these in the Biggio Center and spread the word.

Canvas of the Future discussed an new LTI, Nudge, that nudges students who have not completed an assignment -- the first test showed that very few students opted out and that the assignment completion rate improved rather dramatically. The concept of Nudge comes out of behavioral economics, in particular the book Nudge:  Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness.

Finally I discovered another tool that may be useful in particular for Math and Chemistry courses -- wiris.  Wiris gets added to the editing tools in Canvas, allowing faculty and students to select formula and chemical elements to work through a problem.  In addition to the elements, the tool also has a handwriting tool that translates my writing of the formula into chunks that are added to Canvas.

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

3 Day Course Redesign

Visual Syllabus

We just finished a 3 day workshop on course redesign, based on Dee Fink's Self-Directed Guide to Significant Learning, and our #fab group thought through their courses very carefully aligning dream learning goals with realistic (more short term) learning goals, with assessments, with activities that provide students with the practice to be successful in the assessments, with the resources we need to provide students to be successful in the activities.

Highlights included the formation of a great new community of teachers, creative versions of a visual syllabus, lots of intense discussions on teaching and learning, with teachers learning about themselves as learners by being thrust into the student position, and videos on microteaching that included stuffed animals and Hello Kitty figures.

We will get back together end of July to see how the visual syllabi and other sketched out activities are taking shape for the Fall term, and we will provide specific, actionable and kind feedback to each other.

Visual Syllabus

Visual Syllabus

Visual Syllabus

Some Takeaways from Therese Huston's talk and World Café today

Therese Huston

At today's gathering led by Therese Huston, focusing on Because How We Decide Matters:  Making Decisions more Inclusive, we learned that all of us are the experts, bringing our different perspectives and knowledge to the table.  Dr. Huston just had to get us going with a couple of points loosely based on her book How Women Decide:  What's True, What's Not, And What Strategies Spark the Best Choices.

After the brief introductory words of wisdom, we discussed how decisions are made in our working area (round 1), ideas on how we can get more diverse perspectives into these discussions (round 2), and steps to make it happen (round 3).  Between rounds, all but one person left their table to find a new spot and thus new group to discuss, with the remaining person as the host welcoming the new group of people and catching them up on the previous discussion.  The result?  We brought up many of the points Dr. Huston was going to make and then some, and we applied them directly to our own work environment, giving us strategies and ideas to take back to our departments and units.  World Café was a great success.

But just in case you do need a reason to read the book, here some of my takeaways, happily overgeneralized:

• having more women in the room for crucial decisions will make these decisions better
• reducing masculinized environments will reduce women's stress level to double excel
• planning hiring interviews carefully will reduce danger of having hidden bias against women and for men (this may depend on the area of interview)
• collaborating leads to better decisions, and being decisive too often is a single, faulty perspective -- and women seen as decisive are seen negatively
• being aware of stereotype threat and not creating situations where this may be a problem -- and counter this yourself with self affirmation
• building coalitions when the risk appears to be high
• remembering that we don't need to know everything about a situation to make suggestions
• showing that we women are willing and able to take risks and be obvious when we have done so
• men take more risk than women -- leading to more and bigger mistakes -- because men are more emotionally stressed when they are in a stressful situation -- this is counter to women being too emotional to make important decisions (which is of course rubbish)
• knowing the difference between confidence and overconfidence
• thinking about a pre-mortem rather than having a devil's advocate
• reframing anxiety into excitement (I am excited rather than I am anxious)
• generating at least one more option (rather than yes or no)
• asking people who you think made a terrible decision to help me understand it
• writing down our decisions so that we can remember them more accurately

All Access at Auburn -- Getting Textbooks into Canvas

Last week, Auburn University Bookstore organized a gathering with faculty and a number of textbook representatives and digital content providers to discuss the options of getting text books and other digital content loaded into Canvas courses so that students have access to necessary content from Day 1.
The university bookstore has been working on this for a number of years, making it possible to

• give all students in a class access to content in Canvas
• customize content
• bill students through e-bill (with opt out and printed version options)
• decrease cost for students up to 30-50% for the texts

We already have quite a few adopters on campus, with UNIV courses having taken the lead a few years back, so feel free to contact Rusty Weldon in the bookstore for what your options are.  Other subject areas that have taken advantage of this model are in Accounting, Biology, Educational Methods, Geology, HDFS, History, Kinesiology, Nutrition, Psychology, and Physical Education.