Reading Time: 2 minutes Standing 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…
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ChatGPT: The New Frontier
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sitting 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…
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Beginning of the Semester Reminders and Tips
Reading Time: 2 minutes Welcome to the start of a new semester! Today we’re going be chatting about some tips and reminders to make this first week (and the rest of the semester) easier. We know there’s a big gap between semester starts, so it’s easy for some of these things to slip your memory. Combining Canvas sections You may be teaching multiple sections of the same course but want to combine all your students into one section so you have a single place to work on the course. Canvas makes it simple to combine those multiple sections into one. A brief note: you’ll need to combine them before students…
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Submitting Final Grades from Canvas to the Registrar
Reading Time: < 1 minute It’s a simple process to submit your final course grades to the registrar from Canvas. Before you start this process, however, you’ll want to follow these three tips for checking your Canvas gradebook to make sure you’re all squared away. Once you’re ready, follow these three steps: 1. Click the “Submit Grades to Registrar” link in your course menu. If you don’t see the link there, click “Settings” in the course menu then the “Navigation” tab. Drag and drop “Submit Grades to Registrar” from the inactive items list to the active items list and click “Save.” 2. Scan the information on the “Submit Grades” page. …
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Three Tips for Checking your Canvas Gradebook before Submitting Final Grades
Reading Time: 2 minutes We’ve reached finals, so it’s time to think about wrapping up your courses and prepare to submit grades. Submitting grades is a quick process, but there are a few items you’ll need to do before you click that button. 1. Check your course grading scheme You should have a grading system defined in your syllabus with the values defined for each grade letter. Canvas can display that letter grade to both you and your students, but you need to make sure you have this setting enabled with the correct values set. In your course, go to “Settings” in the course menu Scroll down to “Grading Scheme” …
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Final Thoughts about Vegas
Reading Time: 3 minutes I 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…
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Lessons from Vegas: Rapid Course Design with Project-Based Learning
Reading Time: 2 minutes While 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…
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Lessons from Vegas: The Digital Florilegium
Reading Time: 2 minutes Florilegium 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)…
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Lessons Learned in Las Vegas
Reading Time: 3 minutes I know what you’re thinking…what a bizarre title for a post. Especially on a blog that is part of Cedarville University. You would be right in thinking that if I had not attended the AECT (Association for Educational Communications and Technology) convention in Las Vegas last month. I was invited to be a part of a panel with some other Boise State doctoral students and alums to discuss how our professions changed in response to COVID-19. So I figured that while I’m in the area, I’ll attend some sessions and see what I can bring back to share. This month, I’ll be sharing some of the…
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Using Rubrics for Grading in Canvas
Reading Time: 2 minutes With finals just over a month away, it’s the perfect time to revisit how Canvas rubrics can make your grading life easier. We’ve talked before about some aspects of adding and using rubrics in courses. As a brief refresher, Canvas has excellent resources on creating and adding rubrics to assignments as well as creating and adding rubrics to discussions. We’ve also talked about how to add existing (already created in Canvas) rubrics to an assignment or discussion. Today we’re turning our attention to a setting that’ll make your grading life easier – using a rubric for assignment grading. You may think that you’re doing that by…