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Canvas Tip: Canvas Course Checklist

The spring semester is about to start, is your course truly ready? If you haven’t used this checklist before, it’s highly recommended. At the very least, skimming this checklist will help you to make sure your course is accessible on any device and that it meets the needs of all our students.. Take particular note of the highlighted foundational essentials - these are 10 absolute minimum elements all online courses should have.

• Canvas Course Checklist v3.0 (7/2023)

Gmail Tip: You're Using Templates, Right?!

I’m not sure if you already know how these work, but email templates are indispensable for me. If you have to send the same messages via email to students or colleagues, and you’re not using templates, they can be a real time saver. Check out the links below on how.

• How to create templates in Gmail (1:35) - Basically, just enable it from your settings first and then you can create and save them!
• Send pre-written emails with email templates - Text instructions from Google

Edsurge Article on Learning Design Features in Action

I stumbled on a great article that synthesizes the features of excellent online learning design with different learning management systems. The article is an easy skim, and a foundational element is in the ease of use in the platform. In a nutshell, it’s a reinforcement of the critical importance of course design in Canvas. Don’t miss the Learn More links embedded throughout. These are little 3 page PDFs on the related topics (i.e. Connection, Active Learning, Rigorous Content, etc.). This was like a tiny crash course in good instructional design for online courses meant for adults. If you’re thinking about how to tweak your courses this year, give it a skim.

• (2019, November 5). In the Driver’s Seat: Online Professional Learning Design Features in Action. EdSurge Research.

Virtual Worlds & VR

In this month's virtual worlds & VR section I wanted to share several things. First of all, we had a really fun end of the semester dance party. I gave you a head's up on that last month. But unlike the meetups we do in Hubs (we did have one after virtual convocation), ...

...the benefit of a more robust virtual environment like Second Life is that we hangout for a lot longer! That's because of so many more features. We have things like a region radio set to whatever music we want broadcasted (80s tunes are a fave), our dance floor animates our more realistic, customizable full body avatars, we can use voice to talk, but we can also text chat publicly and privately.

So we're listening to music, hanging out and talking with each other, usually for an hour or more because we're really in a place together, and it's fun! Several brand new MLIS students joined us for the first time too, but they're not shown in the photo above or this little video snippet from the event.

Second, Marie Vans and I presented at the OpenSim Community Conference last month. It had been a couple years since we last attended or presented at that one. But we gave a brief presentation on the topic of avatars and identities, and our ideas for a research study. Marie had a very interesting real world situation in which an a university system administrator (who was completely unfamiliar with virtual environments) almost shut down a virtual reality environment because she thought one of the avatars looked threatening, like an assassin or a terrorist. That sort of thing maybe become more of a real problem when more people come into proximity with full range of how humans like to express themselves when being digital allows for almost unlimited possibilities. Stayed tuned as we explore this topic more in 2024. But here's the recording of our presentation Do You Know Who I Am? Avatars & Identities.

One of our MLIS students, Shannon Broden, also co-presented with some colleagues in a presentation titled Help! I’m Lost in the Metaverse! Big kudos to Shannon because I know all too well the level of challenge it takes to present in-world. She (along with other current and past iSchool students) continues to do a great job representing the iSchool and our consistent presence alongside other educators and librarians actively involved with teaching and learning in virtual environments. For example, Shannon's work with the Community Virtual Library's databases project is a continuation of the work started by another one of our alumna from about 2016 or so.

By the way, stay tuned for a future video on presenting in-world, because I recorded myself with my phone doing my presentation so that people could look over my shoulder, and see kind of what it's like on the back end to do this kind of intense 'hyper-tasking'. And yes, the last minute switch from a Skype call to Discord to stream voice was 30 seconds before being live. (Just another day being digital!)

In Other News….VR Headsets Not Needed

The researchers concluded that emotion and agency are critical to creating presence, while visual realism is less important — with one exception.

In case you're wondering what the one exception is, it's fear. And the study involved 360 people with 16 different conditions that explored "presence" in VR. So unless your instructional needs call for the ability to stimulate fear, people should reconsider their assumptions that a VR headset provides a superior sense of immersion. This research finding might be surprising to some, but not to those of us who have used both VR headsets and virtual worlds in desktop mode. I’ve long said that VR headsets are overrated for most educational purposes. Despite the challenges in learning to use them, desktop environments remain the more robust and accessible option we have and it’s a shame we don’t leverage this widely available technology to its full capability.

As one of my VR Exploders noted in our email thread about the article (linked below) - “I want to read iterate keyword agency. Whether it's a keyboard, a hand controller, a body movement tracker, eye directed interface, etc: if the user can't make something different happen in the experience, it's just watching a movie, 3d or not.” (James Neville)

I couldn’t agree more. I often feel like I’m advocating for reading literature while others gush about movie adaptations being superior because of all the special visual effects.

• Erl, J. (2023, December 16). Believable Virtual Reality does not need high-end VR headsets — study.

AI & Education: Information, Tools, & Strategies

I stumbled on a new tool from one of the articles linked below. Sherpa was developed by two student researchers at the Stanford AI & Education lab. Essentially the idea is to have students have conversations with the AI bot that asks them probing questions to uncover the students’ thinking and reasoning about different reading or writing assignments. I signed up to be on their teacher waitlist and while haven’t heard anything on that yet, this tool might be one to watch. They also have a Sherpa community on Facebook.

Check out the links below for more information and ideas about chatbots and education.

• Young, J. R. (2023, October 5). As AI Chatbots Rise, More Educators Look to Oral Exams — With High-Tech Twist. EdSurge News.
• EdSurge general source of articles on the topic of AI and education

Professional Development

Online Course Services Courses

OCS from the California State University system is offering professional development courses for tenure-track faculty and lecturer faculty. Don’t miss a couple good options coming up in late February and March. There is a repeat of the Introduction to AI Tools for Teaching & Learning course (developed by a good friend of mine), as well as two courses to learn more about the Quality Matters rubric and how to apply it to your courses (Improving Your Online Course, Applying the QM Rubric).

Check out their webpage for all six course options. Some institutions in the CSU system use the QLT rubric (which honestly says basically the same thing as the QM rubric). The webpage linked above has overview videos on there, a decision tree to help you identify courses that will suit you, syllabi, testimonials, and also links to registration information.

eCampus Workshops

SJSU’s eCampus offers workshops year round. Click the links below to access details and registration for a variety of workshops with multiple dates to choose from or to watch a recording of a session.

• ChatGPT and Course Activities (a Look at Example Assignments and Expectations) - The recording link to this recent panel discussion is on the eCampus webpage above. There’s also links on there to additional resources and other presentation by some of the panelists from across San Jose State University.

See the full list of upcoming eCampus workshops. Note that workshop dates are listed at the bottom of each image on the page. You can also request to watch a recording of an eCampus workshop.