Reducing Teacher Workload

Okay. We'll go ahead and get started. So very warm welcome today. My name is Emily Leesk. I am a services consultant with Instructure, and I'm joined by a few of my colleagues who are going to be supporting, with this webinar, by answering some of your questions in the chat or the Q and A box. In this session, we will be focusing on some practical tools that can help, hopefully, make teachers' workload more efficient.

So we do have a varied group of people here today. So some teachers, learning technologists, as well as some technical support and administrators here. So these practical tips and tricks will be useful for you, if you are facilitating courses, but also from a strategic standpoint, to help you make some decisions about what you want to advise your teachers to be doing. So we will be looking at built in Canvas features including, some new releases that have come out in the last couple of weeks. We will be considering these tools at a very high level, so we have a lot to cover and not that much time.

But we will be sending out some resources after the session with links to our Canvas guides, our release notes, as well as the recording from this session, so that you have some resources you can walk away with. We will be doing a q and a at the end, but if you do have any questions in the meantime, we would really appreciate it if you could put those into the q and a box that you'll see at the bottom of your Zoom toolbar, and we'll do our best to answer those as many as best to answer as many of those questions as we can. Brilliant. So just some general guidelines before we get started. So as I mentioned, we're presenting to a varied group today.

And just as a reminder that every instance of Canvas is unique. We're a very flexible platform, and we've got people here from universities, from, professional learning institutions, from secondary education, from higher education. So just as a reminder, every instance is unique. You might do something a little bit different, and we're going to try to hit as many of those use cases as possible today. But if you do have any more specific use cases that are needed, do you have any additional questions, please remember that you can go to the Instructure community and also contact your CSM if you have any, institution specific questions.

Okay. So these are the overarching principles principles that we're going that are going to guide our thinking today. So we want to think about course design so that learners can understand their progress and expectations without having to go to their instructor to get expectations without having to go to their instructor to get an idea of progress. Also, wanting our teachers to focus on teaching, not technical support. I'm sure many of you, from our technical support team, are are coming with lots of guidance and FAQs, and we have that support available.

But we want to empower our students to make sure that they can find the support tools that they need themselves without putting additional burden on our teachers, our instructors, or our technical support teams. And finally, using Canvas tools to streamline our processes, including giving feedback, customizing and differentiating our course content to meet the needs of our students, and then finally interventions. And this is probably the area where teachers are spending the most time is in the actual facilitation of their courses. And there are these processes for a very long time, have been putting lots of extra strain on teachers. And with some a few additional clicks in setting things up in the right way, teachers can easily communicate those expectations and progress with students, limit the amount of questions they might receive about a course or how to use Canvas.

And then we can also make those draining processes like giving feedback so much easier with a few small behavior changes. I'm sure we can add so many things to this list. This list is endless. It could keep growing and growing. This is not a topic we're going to resolve today, but we will keep it to just these three topics for today as we have limited time.

But I'm really interested in your own feedback and experiences, and, hopefully, we can pick that out when we get into our q and a a little bit later on. Okay. So we're now going to jump into Canvas and look at some of these tools in a bit more detail. So we'll structure each topic by sharing first a quick win and a consideration or something that you might want to think about it about. So you'll see this kind of trophy emoji next to our quick wins and our brain emoji next to our considerations.

So our quick wins are going to be our high impact and low effort recommendations, something, hopefully, you can implement, in a very short space of time that will save you a lot of time. While, your considerations or your things to think about might require some more time to implement and might require some more strategic conversations before you think about implementing something or turning a feature option on. So, for our administrators in the room, you might wanna pay attention to those considerations as they might lead into those strategic conversations that you might be having about Canvas. So the first topic we're going to focus on is our course design. So we want to design our courses in a way that the course itself is communicating student progress and expectations instead of the teacher communicating this individually to every student and repeatedly.

So the first tool and our first quick win, we'll be looking at our module structure and especially looking at our requirements and prerequisites tool. I do see a lot of familiar faces in the chat. And if you've had any trainings with me previously, you know I love to go on and on about this tool. This is probably my favorite Canvas tool even though it's such a simple, simple tool, but I think it has the largest impact on increasing student engagement and helping to preempt some of those questions. So when students are going into a course, and I have an example course that we're going to look at today, when students navigate to a course and they might navigate to their modules page, the question that they'll have is, what have I done in this course, and what do I still need to do? So we want to very clearly and very quickly communicate what is this student's progress in the course and have them be able to see that visually for themselves.

So I'm going to jump into student view so that we can demonstrate what this looks like. I have requirements and prerequisites turned on in this course, and I, as a student, can very easily see that I am working through module one. I have completed this page and this page, and the next thing I have to do is that quiz. So I've got this blank. Hopefully, you can see it on the screen, but it might be quite faint.

I have this circle empty circle on the module item that I need to complete next. And because I've set this up where students have to complete each item in order, I'm not able to move on to the next item without completing the previous item. This does require a couple of extra clicks to set up, but once it's done, it does just allow this easy streamline communication process for students so that they can just very easily see where they are in the course, what they've done already, and what is coming up next. So if we leave student view and jump over to our module, we can see that we have those requirements turned on. All we need to do is click those three dots next to our module and click edit, and our sidebar opens up that allows us to edit our module settings.

We have the option to add prerequisites, meaning that students will need to complete all of the requirements from one module before they can move on to the next module. This is really helpful if you're doing a fully asynchronous course and you want to be able to control access to content without having to manually move students from one topic to another. We can also set our requirements. So we have the option for students to complete all requirements, and here is where we can tick that box so that students have to complete those requirements in sequential order. Or if we want to get really fancy, we can also offer an element of choice where we can say you need to do either this assignment or this assignment, and their requirement will be that they need to choose one or the other.

We can add in our requirements for our pages and our files. We can either choose to view the item or mark as done. And then for our interactive content, we can choose to view the item, submit the, quiz or assignment or contribute to the discussion, or we can set this that they need to score at least a certain amount before they can move on to the next requirement. Once this is all set up in the module, we click save, and then we'll be able to monitor students' progress. But more importantly, students will be able to monitor their own progress in the course and take a bit more ownership over their learning.

When this is enabled, you'll see this view progress button at the top of your modules page, and you'll be able to see how students are progressing through the requirements in your course. This is also really key if you want to use tools like credentials, certificate tools that can be triggered based on the last module requirement in the course. So this is a very quick win. It takes, a few extra clicks to set up, but not a lot of extra clicks. And it does all of that passive communication for you so that you're not constantly getting hounded with, did I do that? Did you receive that? Did I submit that? What score did I get? What do I need to do next? We're stopping all of that communication, and it will be very clear to the students what they've done and what they still need to do.

For our consideration in course design, we might want to think about highlighting support resources. So for our accessibility teams in the room, you might be familiar with the WCAG guidelines. If you've not heard of that acronym before, WCAG, that is our Web Accessibility Guidelines. In they've published recently a draft of the new guidelines that you can see. And in the latest update, they've added something to those guidelines that technical support should be available on every page.

So it might be something to think about for the future to make sure that you're compliant with accessibility, but this can also be something that we do that saves time for our teachers. We do not want our instructors to turn into the technical support team. And if students don't know where to go, as we all probably know, if we're from the classroom, if they don't know what to do or where to go, in the first instance, they will probably contact our instructors, and we don't want to give them that additional burden. So on our pages, we can add a section for guidance and support with links to support resources, and I've even added a support page to this course that just details overall how to get support, and I've linked over to the Canvas guides. So as far as our course design and structure, there's a lot of other things that we could talk about, and we'll have some more detail given in, the resources that go out after the session.

But our module structure and requirements, adding that in is a quick win, and adding our support resources, it might take a little bit more effort to add that in on every page, but it will have a large impact on reducing the amount of questions that are going to teachers, that will detract from their job as leaders of learning. So we want our teachers to spend time on teaching and learning and not on facilitating questions or becoming tech support. So moving on to our next topic, we're going to look at how we can save time on creating new content and how we can easily share that content with our colleagues. This can be the area where teachers spend the most time. So these tips will hopefully have a big impact on workflow.

And you might have seen a preview of this earlier when I was demoing my course. But the first thing as our quick win is thinking about adding a content template module. So for our admins, we you're probably wanting to think about keeping a level of consistency to your content in Canvas as well as linking in with that support content to make sure students know how to access support. But as you're probably thinking about a second ago, this could be a lot of time to add to our individual content items. So by creating content templates and adding these to a module, we can save ourselves some time by giving us a head start in creating content.

So just at the top of my course here, I have my do not publish content templates. I've set this up for pages, for assignments, for quizzes, and discussions, and these are templates that I can very easily make a copy of, add in some details about the, about the piece of work, and then move those over to our modules. So as an example for my assignment template, I've added some header images, some support at the bottom with navigation. We've got our instructions, and, importantly, we have our guidance and support. So this links in with some common guides that are going to be useful for every assignment that students do.

So we're linking over to the Canvas guides as well as to our support page. So once this assignment template is created, I can just make endless copies of this, and these resources will more than likely still be applicable. I can also add in my points to the assignment. And if I want to, I can add a rubric to the assignment as well, and this will be available on the copy. So if I find a rubric for this course, just add in a basic rubric here, and then I go back into my modules, I can then very quickly just, duplicate this assignment template.

We'll go in there. I'm ready to edit those pages, and my rubric comes through. So all of those settings that you added in will come through. So if you're concerned about and and make it very easy for our teams to create new content. Now there are some product updates that are coming out in the near ish future.

So you may have heard, from InstructureCon that happened in July. You may have heard about our block editor that's coming out, soon. That is going to also make this templating really easy for instructors so we can make, page templates much a a simpler process. But in the meantime, this can be a really easy way that we can duplicate content, maintain all the settings, and take away that piece of work and decision making from our instructors. Now this is a resource you might want to consider adding to your course templates or your blueprints so that they are available and synced to all of your courses.

And that way, you can make a very consistent, design for your pages and your pieces of content throughout your institution. The next thing we're going to cover for our something to think about is we want to talk a little bit about some of the AI tools that are now available in Canvas. So our product teams are working very hard pushing out new AI tools designed to save teachers' time. So that's our priority at the moment is time saving tools. The first tool that you'll have available now is our discussion summaries tool, but there will be more tools coming later on.

So it's definitely worth admins considering how you want to embed these tools into your practice. All of these are going to be feature options that can be enabled at an or subaccount level. So thinking about your approach to AI, your strategy when it comes to how you want to roll it out, Probably a more of a high level discussion, but it's worth thinking about it now before we have lots of tools coming out over the next few months. The tool I'm just going to demo today is our discussion summaries tool, which is now available as a feature option. So we have a discussion here in this course.

We've got our discussions redesign turned on, so we the UI might look slightly different. But I can see there are quite a lot of posts, a lot of threaded replies, and it would take me a while as a teacher to go through all of this and understand what our students are struggling with. Now at the top, I have this button that says summarize, and I can just click on that. And it is adding a summary of that discussion. I can even add in some information here about what I have questions on.

So I can put in some information. What are the high level questions that my students have and generate a new summary, and it will give me some more information diving deeper down. And this is gonna allow me to better respond to students and make content or adjust my content, adjust those learning pathways to be more responsive based on the discussion, and allow me to synthesize larger discussion posts very quickly so I can understand the general feedback before moving on. And the second tool that is in our considerations is our Canvas Commons. So you may be familiar with this tool already or you may not be.

But once we have created our resources, we'll want to share them very easily with our team. We can use Canvas Commons to create essentially a learning object repository with institution approved content that can be shared, downloaded, and updated by our teaching team. So if you have Canvas Commons installed on your instance, you'll see this just on the global navigation bar here. We can send any of our content to Canvas Commons by clicking the three dots, and you'll see this share to comments button. This might also be a good way of sharing any content templates out.

If we want to make multiple versions of content templates, we can make them available in commons. And once we send an object to commons and we send lots of learning objects to commons, it becomes essentially a marketplace for teachers to shop for content. So you'll see here, this is our example of commons. We have all different types of, content in here, so we can share modules, assignments, full courses, or just individual pages. These can be approved by the institution, so we can just have a library of our content.

This could also be set up so we only share content to people in certain groups. So you could have a place in commons that's just for the English department or just for the maths department, and it becomes a place where you can share and download content. Now if I choose to download this piece of content, go in here, I can preview the content, or I'll go to a better example. So I can preview the content. So if it comes in a module, I can see the individual pages, discussions, any files that will be added.

And then once I'm ready, I can click import, and I can import that into my course, and it will be there once I navigate back. Now what's really nice about commons, especially if you have teams like instructional designers that are updating content regularly, is in commons, you'll see we have this updates tab. So as content is updated in the roots course where it was originally created, that will be published as updates that teachers can go in and they can update any of the content that they've downloaded directly into their course. So this makes it really easy if, say, you publish, if you publish that page or that content template module and you realize you have a typo in there, you need to make an update. Once you update that in the route, that will then be available to update in all of the courses where that content has been downloaded.

So that content's still tied together. We're saving even more time so we're not having to send a message. Hey. Everyone that I shared that to, you're gonna have to make this change. We don't have to do that anymore.

We can just update it directly from comments. Moving along to the next tool that we're going to look at, And I do see your questions. We'll make sure that those get answered, and we will have some designated time for q and a at the end. So moving along to our next tool, we'll be looking at streamlining our marking and feedback processes. So the first thing we're going to do is take a look at SpeedGrader.

Hopefully, everyone is familiar with our SpeedGrader tool. So this is the place where we can easily give feedback by cycling through the list of students, seeing their work, adding commentary, and grades. And I'll jump back into this course, and we'll just take a quick look at SpeedGrader. When I navigate to an assignment that has grades, I can see I've got submissions that I need to grade. And I can go into SpeedGrader, and we cycle through our different students, and we see their piece of work.

And these are all fake, but, I can still give them feedback. So a lot of times what teachers will do is they will give a grade. So we can mark this assignment, give that grade to students, and then we might start typing out feedback. And your feedback is probably a little bit more expensive, than what I've just added, but we can start we'll start typing out our feedback. But this tends to be the most time consuming aspect of the feedback cycle because the average typing speed is forty to eighty words per minute.

So for for the average human, typing speed is usually between forty and eighty, while the average conversational speed for human speech is between a hundred and fifty and a hundred and eighty words per minute. So we as probably, hopefully, not a surprise, we speak a lot faster than we talk or we speak a lot faster than we type. Video or audio feedback can really reduce the amount of time spent giving feedback by, nearly a third. And we do have those tools in Canvas. So we have a tool that's our speech to text tool.

So if you want students to receive, written feedback, we can just use this tool to translate our speech into text, and that will appear in our comment box. I can go ahead and make some changes to that and submit that content content once I'm ready. Or, and probably in a more personalized way, we can give video or audio feedback. So if I click this button here, I can record media. So I can have my, webcam off or I can turn my webcam on.

And I also and this is the new tool that you might not have seen yet as was recently released, is our screen capture tool. So I can use this to share my screen, and I might be going over, and I'll start recording so we can see my screen. I'm over here. I can talk through the assignment instructions, talk through any support resources, give some general feedback to the student. And then once I'm finished, I'll click finish recording.

We can save that media, and that will be available to the student. And that took far less time than it would take me to type out all of that feedback, especially if I'm giving really extensive feedback on a piece of written work presentation that might require more long form feedback. A tool that hopefully you're aware of, but I've seen some people miss out on it is our comment library. So you see that tiny speech bubble above our comment box. This is our library.

So we can add a common feedback that we'll give to students. So I can add something to my library, edit any comments in my library, and then I have this show suggestions when typing. So if I start typing in here, I'll get a pop up from my library that will put in that content. I can insert student's name. We can personalize this.

I can add some more feedback to this, and then I can share that content. So if you have more long form commentary to give to students, I encourage you to set up your comment library so that you can very quickly import those into your speed grader for feedback. Now it's important to note that the comment library belongs to the teacher, not to the course. So if you do add comments to your library, they will be available to you in every course that you're using speed grader. So definitely worth taking a look at this.

This is something to think about for any upcoming teacher training just to present the possibility of giving audio or video feedback, sharing your screen, and making that more accessible for students. The next tool we're going to look at is our rubrics tool. So, again, hopefully, everyone is aware of our rubrics tool and how to use rubrics. My background is in education. I love you loved using rubrics in my classroom.

It makes the grading process more equitable for students, so I'm giving them the criteria in advance. Again, that's less communication that I need to do about expectations because the rubric is communicating expectations for me. Students can clearly see this before they submit the assignment, as we looked at earlier in this course, I'll edit this, and we can add a rubric to it. And we can see We'll add a rubric to it, and we can see what students will see when they go to the course. So when they go to submit this assignment and, oh, I need to publish it.

But when they go and submit this assignment, they'll see the criteria here. They'll see all of the feedback on the rubric. Now a new tool that we have is our Rubrics redesign that was just released, on the twentieth of July, so just a couple of weeks ago. And the Rubik's redesign makes it even easier to give content. So or to give feedback.

So I'm just gonna go into our beta environment as this where I have this enabled. We go to our rubric section and create a new rubric and create a new criteria. If you've used our legacy rubrics builder, you'll know how much easier this looks to build and draft criteria. So we can drag and drop. We can add new sections.

We can enable ranges and points. We can just go up and down. This is going to be a lot easier, make it a lot quicker to add rubrics to your courses. Now once we do have a rubric enabled on our assignments so I've created this essay rubric in my beta environment, and I have added this to our assignment. So I have my rubric available here.

If I go into SpeedGrader for this assignment and I click view rubric, we've got some new views that will make it easier for you to mark students' assignments quickly. So we have our traditional view, which will look similar to our previous rubrics or our legacy rubrics design. We also have the horizontal view, which if you are, wanting to give students feedback, giving the grades, seeing the assignment. This will make it a lot easier, more compact. And we have our vertical view as well so you can see the criteria more quickly.

Now the marking process is very easy because I just need to click through to give students feedback. And once I am done, I can submit my assessment. That will then be available for the students to use, and that updates the grade as well. Then I can navigate through and grade other students' work. As a reminder, you can build rubrics in your beta or not your beta.

You can build rubrics at an account or subaccount level. So if you are using shared rubrics, really recommended for your heads of department to build those rubrics at an at your account or subaccount level so that those will be available to every instructor or teacher in your account, and we can make sure that, we can make sure that everyone is giving consistent feedback. Okay. So we are hopefully going to be okay for time. The last topic we're going to cover is differentiation and interventions or how we can ensure our courses are meeting the needs of our students and how we're following up on this with supportive strategies.

So the first tool and our quick win that we're going to look at is new analytics. So if you haven't looked at new analytics yet, I really, really recommend this, and I recommend setting up a regular cadence so that you can look, at how students are getting on in your course on a regular basis. So on this learning analytics tool, it makes it really easy to very quickly identify which students might be struggling and to quickly contact students based on criteria like their grades or their engagement in course content. So jumping over to new analytics, I'm just in a different, course that has a little bit more data in it. But I can very easily see how students are getting on on various assignments in the course.

So if I click on any of the assignments, I'll get a pop up that shows me the spread of grades on that assignment. If I'm interested to know who falls into that category, I can click there and see which students might be struggling there. And then you'll see this email icon throughout new analytics, and that is our message students who tool. Now you might be familiar with this from the grade book, but it's also peppered throughout our new analytics. So if I click on that, I'll have a pop up that allows me to filter based on who received a certain score in the course.

So I can change this range if I would like to. If I click on the six students, I can see the students that will be contacted. So Canvas does all of that filtering for me. If I remove students, I might know some extenuating circumstances and want to remove them from that contact, or I can reset them. And then I'll put in a subject line and a message, and that will send a BCCed email to all of those students reaching out for additional support.

I can also contact students based on whether the assignment is missing or whether the assignment is late. So, again, just really quickly filtering that data down so that I can make sure I'm contacting the right students, and I can make sure it's at the right time. We also have this tool available in our weekly online activity dashboard. So this will tell us about our average page views and average participation week by week. This will also tell us about the engagement and participation on every item in the course.

So at the end of your course, this could be a good way of seeing what content is working really well and what is not getting a lot of engagement and might need to be cut out. And from here, I also have a message students who, but this will allow me to message students based on whether they viewed a piece of content or didn't view that content, whether they participated or did not participate. So maybe I want to contact students based on who did not participate in this task. Again, I can see all of the students put in that message and send a reminder to complete a particular task. So new analytics has been around for a little while.

So it maybe is not that new anymore, but we would recommend, especially for our strategic leaders, to think about setting up a regular cadence or expectation for teachers to go into new analytics and see how things are going. It's a lot easier and a lot quicker to address situations before they become a situation, and new analytics will help us do all of that filtering so that we can send one email instead of having to send a hundred emails to students who are falling behind. But something you may want to think about when it comes to differentiation is, selective release of content. So creating sections for students who might require additional support or extension and targeting content to these groups. So in this course let's see if it's here or in the beta environment.

Yep. So in this course, I have created two sections. So I've created an extension section for students who might need additional challenge, and I've created a support section for students who might need some additional support. Now this will not be visible to students if we do not have the people page enabled. They won't be able to see which section they're in or if they're in a section.

So something to think about is just visibility for students and whether we want to give teachers the permission to create these sections themselves. But you were previously probably familiar with our assign to tool, which let us create content and assign it to students based on, sections so we could assign something and give different due dates for or assign it to a certain group of students. But this tool was only available for our assignments and our quizzes, but it's now available for every piece of content in a course. So for example, maybe I want to make this, module just a module for my extension students. I can click the three dots and click assign to, and we'll see this new sidebar window pull up.

Now I can set the visibility to everyone or I can just assign it to a particular group in my course. So if I'm using groups, I can assign it to a certain group. I can assign it to individual students, or I can assign it to, sections. So once I assign that module, we'll have this view assigned to so I can see who is going to have visibility over this module. And now this module will not be visible unless students are in that extension, group.

This also is going to be available on a page by page, level. So we'll see if we have a particular page that we just want to assign to, let's say, a certain student in that. I can give them, just act just that individual student access to that page. And just like in assignments, I can give available from and until date so they'll only be able to view that content within the window that I set. So this will allow us to very easily, very quickly provide additional materials to students who need that additional support.

And as Jess is picking up on, this is a new tool in our new July release notes. That was a very juicy release notes, so we would recommend taking a look at those in more detail. There's a lot coming. And so our discussion summaries, selective release of content, rubrics redesign, our phase one for rubrics, all released in July. So very, very new tools that are going to have a high impact on saving teachers' time.

Now we're finishing right on time so that we have time enough to answer any questions. And thank you so much to Jess who has been doing a fantastic job of fielding those questions in the chat and in the q and a. Let me just pull that up, and I can have a read through. But if there are any questions at this point, please do feel free to put those into the q and a box, and we'll get to that as soon as possible. And I'm just gonna reshare my screen because for some reason, I'm not able to see that q and a box.

But there we go. Okay, Victoria. Yeah. That's a good point. So we want to think of just about the permissions that we give.

So it might be, something that we can review when we give permissions to students. I've not seen sections appear in the inbox, but, that might be something that we just take away and we look at with your CSM. So it might be a permissions issue that we can hopefully resolve for you. Okay. Hopefully, the relative silence indicates that we have covered quite a lot today.

I know today was very, very rapid fire. We went through a lot of different tools and a lot of very new tools that hopefully you've seen, but, I I imagine that for a lot of our admins coming back from summer break and we had a huge release in July, this might have been the first time that you've seen a lot of these tools. So as a reminder, we will be sending, some additional resources after the session with links to our July release notes and links to some of our Canvas guides. As we've released quite a lot in July, our documentation is being updated. So for now, the release notes are the best place to go. Or if you have any questions, please do contact your CSM. We've got a really brilliant team of CSMs in the EMEA region working really closely with our, services team, and we'll make sure that those questions are answered.