Reading Time: 4 minutes If you’re getting comfortable working on your courses in Canvas and are ready to take a jump and add design and structure elements to your course, you’ll be thrilled to hear about the template the CTL has created in Canvas. Canvas created the base template, then the CTL modified it to fit our needs. We’re currently using it in all our online courses to provide consistent structure and visual design elements (see our post about the template icons for more details!), and you can use it also to accomplish those goals in your course. Of course, there are elements that you can use and trade out…
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Calibrate: Interview with Rob McDole about InstructureCon
Reading Time: 2 minutes So, Rob, you went to a conference a couple of weeks ago. Can you tell me what conference it was and a little bit about it? I went to InstructureCon in Long Beach, CA. Instructure is the parent company of Canvas, the new learning management system (LMS) that Cedarville University is using in the upcoming 2019/2020 school year. This conference is geared towards administrators, teachers, developers, instructional designers, and technical support professionals who work with Canvas. There were approximately 3,000 attendees representing various businesses and institutions that use Canvas to accomplish their educational goals. Sessions included Canvas tool usage, previews of new tools that are being…
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Canvas Transition: How Should I Use the Icons?
Reading Time: 4 minutes You may remember that when designing a course in Moodle, there were limited options to affect the look and feel of a course. Canvas gives you more options and easier controls to use when designing the visuals in a course. When you use the course template provided by the CTL, you have access to an entire icon system Canvas designed. Why use icons? Icons provide visual interest on a page, and they can grab the reader’s attention. If icons are consistently used by a group, they create a common visual language – the user will recognize that items are tied together because the icon is used…
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How to Write Learning Objectives
Reading Time: 2 minutes A learning objective is “a statement that tells what learners should be able to do when they have completed a segment of instruction” (Smith & Ragan, 2005, p. 96). A precise, concrete, and specific learning objective is valuable to the course designer, instructor, learners, and reviewers. In this post, we will focus on module-level or lesson-level learning objectives that are subordinate to the course level objectives. We will use the learning objectives generator to assist in the objective writing process, using the who+verb+goal+condition pattern. Who: Describe the Learner When you are working on module-level or lesson-level learning objectives, the target learner must be identified for the…
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Calibrate: Interview with Lauren Eissler about Confab
Reading Time: 4 minutes So, Lauren, you went to a conference a couple months ago. Can you tell me what conference it was and a little bit about it? I attended Confab, a content strategy conference. This conference is hosted by Brain Traffic, a content strategy consultancy, and it’s really Kristina Halvorson’s brainchild. She co-wrote the book on content strategy, by the way (Content Strategy for the Web). It’s fabulous, and I highly recommend it. But you might be wondering, “What exactly is content strategy” and that’s an excellent question. Content strategy covers a wide variety of roles and tasks including the design, creation, management, and governance of content across…