Reading Time: 1 minuteIt’s been a bit since we last wrote about Canvas updates, but some cool things have been happening. Canvas is always working on tweaking or adding things (you can keep up with them in the Canvas Release Notes!), but today we’re focusing on what’s changed in the Rich Content Editor (RCE) over the past few months. Access to detailed word/character count statistics The RCE displays word count at the bottom of the editor, but it’s expanded that functionality a bit. Now when you click on that word count, Canvas will pop a window and show you detailed word and character count. Dragging-and-dropping/pasting of content Previously, to add…
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Transform Your Teaching: Servant Teaching with Dr. Quentin Schultze, Part 1
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn this episode of “Transform Your Teaching,” Rob and Jared welcome Dr. Quentin Schultze into their continuing conversation on servant teaching. Dr. Schultze—who has written several books, including one on servant teaching—talks about potential obstacles to being a servant teacher and provides practical solutions for overcoming those obstacles. Check out the episode to hear their conversation about how knowing our students will make us more effective servant teachers. Podcast links Show notes Students have a life outside of being a student. So, how can we see our students as a “whole person”? How can we empathize with our students? Knowing our students will make us more…
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Transform Your Teaching: The Philosophy of Servant Teaching
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn this week’s episode of “Transform Your Teaching,” Rob and Jared introduce a series on servant teaching with a discussion on the philosophy behind it as well as the biblical basis for being a servant teacher. Check out the episode to hear their conversation, including three practical ways to start with servant teaching. Podcast links Show Notes We define servant teaching as “empowering learners by removing barriers, building on their unique strengths, and providing opportunities to succeed.” Everyone has a philosophy of education that is born from their personal philosophy. Consider questions like: What’s real? What’s right, and how do we know it’s right? What do we…
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Is Online Proctoring a Good Solution for Teaching and Learning?
Reading Time: 3 minutesHigher education institutions have implemented many technologies in the past three years to support online and blended teaching and learning activities. Since exams are one of the main forms of assessment in higher education (Barrio, 2022), one of the challenges is to keep online exams valid and reliable. Kimmons and Veletsianos (2021) did a survey on 2,155 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada in November 2020. They found that nearly 63% of higher education institutions in the United States and Canada mentioned proctoring software on their websites, indicating they were likely using one of the proctoring services on the market (Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2021).…
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Introducing the “Transform Your Teaching” Podcast
Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe are excited to announce the launch of a new resource hosted by the CTL – the “Transform Your Teaching” podcast. In this pilot episode, Rob and Jared introduce the purpose of “Transform Your Teaching” – a podcast where we’ll encourage you in your teaching as we discuss innovative teaching practices. They also discuss some of the themes that will be covered in future episodes, including our next series on Servant Teaching. Links for all major podcast platforms will continue to be added to this post as as they’re available. In the meantime, you can listen to the episode here. Podcast links Want to never…
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ChatGPT: Issues in Teaching and Learning
Reading Time: 2 minutesStanding at my trusty stand-up desk, I again pondered the beginning of this post. Yearning to recapture the muse from my last blog post, I leveled up my music selection to Snarky Puppy’s Trinity and again directed my web browser to chat.openai.com. After acknowledging ChatGPT’s stability warning due to heavy usage, I asked my question: “what are the top three teaching and learning issues with ChatGPT?” ChatGPT provided the following: 1. Bias and ethical considerations: ChatGPT is trained on large amounts of text data from the internet and can reflect the biases in that data. This could potentially impact the accuracy and fairness of responses provided by…
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ChatGPT: The New Frontier
Reading Time: 2 minutesSitting at my stand-up desk, I mused about the beginning of this post. Thwack! The idea came to me like a bug playing tag with my windshield on a South Dakota interstate in the middle of June. I would use ChatGPT, a freshly minted artificial intelligence (AI) chat robot. I asked Siri to play the theme from the movie Inception and carefully steered my browser to http://chat.openai.com. With Hans Zimmers’ electronic sound garden in the background, I placed my cursor in the chat box and typed, “Write a 300 word introduction to Servant Teaching.” ChatGPT began working on the query and produced, word-by-word, six paragraphs. I will…
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Final Thoughts about Vegas
Reading Time: 3 minutesI was raised in Ohio and have never lived outside of it. So Las Vegas was a cultural experience for me, to put it lightly. Here are some of my final thoughts on the conference and Vegas, complete with pictures. Panel Presenters and Audience This was the panel and the audience for our presentation on how our institutions reacted and pivoted to COVID-19. Also: researchers are now starting to look at how that rapid transition has made a lasting impact on education. I attended several sessions on educators’ and students’ perceptions of education (both online and face-to-face). It will be interesting, to say the least, when those…
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Lessons from Vegas: Rapid Course Design with Project-Based Learning
Reading Time: 2 minutesWhile I was in Vegas, another session I attended focused on instructional design. A group of designers from Utah Tech University faced the daunting task of developing or redesigning 175 courses as part of 14 new online programs. And they had to finish it in nine months. Oh, and did I mention there were only four designers? Because there were only four designers. It was clear they would need some help. Their solution was to equip their faculty with the skills and tools needed to design courses. For their instructional method, they decided to employ project-based learning. As an aside: project-based learning is an excellent teaching practice…
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Lessons from Vegas: The Digital Florilegium
Reading Time: 2 minutesFlorilegium is a medieval Latin word that is a combination of flor (flowers) + legere (to gather). The term is first seen in print as a title of a book from 1590. The book was a collection of engraved pictures of flowers. That tradition continued through the 1600s and even today through printed books or curated collections. However, that’s not really where florilegium gets its roots. “Jared, that was a horrible pun. Also I’m lost.” I know. I’m getting there. Florilegium is a reading practice used by medieval scribes as early as the 5th century. It referred to the reading of a manuscript and gathering (legre) passages,…