TEL Team Completed Projects

The TEL team have completed the following developments, if you have any questions about any of these projects please do not hesitate to get in touch with the Teaching and Learning Academy via LJMUHelpMe.

Each canvas course contains learning content which tutors have added, e.g. PowerPoints, videos, images and text. These are laid out in a design of where these appear in the course and how they are accessed. There is variability within practices around the content and design. Auditing content and design to determine the level of compliance to aspects of accessibility, e.g. image alt tag, accessibility of documents, will help the institution to understand where it is at in terms of digital accessibility within Canvas. The Teaching and Learning Academy are currently developing a plan to audit a number of randomly allocated courses to help train, develop, and advise staff on best practices. 

This project supports staff and students through the deprecation of two aspects of the Turnitin service.  

• Aspect 1: The removal of a legacy method for tutors to add Turnitin to a Canvas assignment. Please note: that this will not prevent you from using Turnitin for assessment, the Turnitin Framework tool will still be available as a plagiarism detection tool.  

• Aspect 2. The removal of the Turnitin Feedback Studio that allows staff to mark student papers within Turnitin. Moving forward all marking and feedback will be added via Canvas Speedgrader. Staff will continue to be able to use Turnitin for plagiarism detection through the Turnitin Framework Tool.  

Deprecation will be completed in August 2022. See Blogpost: Important Changes To Turnitin

This project aims to improve the current process of moving Panopto recordings each year. Currently, teaching staff have to request the moving of multiple recordings into the new Canvas course. They also have to re-connect any Canvas pages that have a recording embedded within it once the recordings have moved. Panopto have developed a process to automated this. TLA will be working with Panopto to test and evaluate this process Summer 2022.

The TLA are evaluating a new tool called Buddycheck. This is a simple to use peer evaluation tool within Canvas, which allows students to evaluate each team member’s performance in a group activity, as well as self-assessment. It is an useful tool to helping your students successfully manage group work. The evaluation will focus on the possible benefits it can bring to group formative and summative feedback.

The Zoom Dashboard is the next stage in the ongoing Canvas and Technology Enhanced Learning Analytics offering from the Teaching and Learning Academy It is intended to support teaching and learning by providing insights in to how students engage and interact with your teaching. Zoom has been an important tool in helping to deliver teaching in an online way and understanding how our students are engaging with the online delivery can help us to improve both their engagement and delivery of teaching. Using the dashboard it is possible to filter students by Faculty, School, Programme and Level of study in order to obtain a sense of their overall level of engagement and identify any recent drops inactivity. You can also select an individual student and examine in detail how their activity looks over time and even how much time has been spent in individual sesssions. Module tutors can filter by their details to view student session participation relative to their own online classes.

This JISC research project explores opportunities to use extended learning analytics data to make meaningful insights around curriculum analytics and build a new service. This will involve working with IT services and Registry. It will connect with some of the directions in the Mycanvascourse and Feedback project. See this JISC link for more information.

The TEL team examined the possible benefits and issues connected with developing a Canvas blogging tool. Blogging is form of personal publishing distinctive from other forms of online publishing  (such as websites) by its reverse chronological order, which enables the writer and reader to move through previous posts . Blogs are being used within education in a number of ways. Three key pedagogical applications at LJMU are:

• Reflective Learning. Supporting students in examining their own learning process which enables the lecturer to understand students learning journey. For example, a student writing a blog entry each week about their experiences on a field trip.
• Authentic Assessment. Creating assessments that allow students to act as practitioners on the border between education and ‘real world’ practice. Examples would include, arts students promoting their work through a website, or sociology students displaying content that could be useful for a general or local audience.
• Professional-based Portfolio. Supporting students to construct and organise a display of their completed achievements. This is common in professional based courses such as nursing and pharmacy.

This Canvas development is now complete; private course journals can now be added to your course.

• Diagnostic Assessment. Quizzes taken early on in a students time at LJMU are a helpful way to establish a baseline for newer students and identify where some of their strengths and areas for development may be. This can help to inform early personal tutor sessions
• Formative Assessment. Some courses deploy a series of quizzes throughout the course of a semester. As well as providing indications as to how students are engaging with the course it also allows students to reflect on their learning and address any areas of concern prior to final assessments.
• Summative Assessment. Many staff use online tests as part of summative assessment to count towards the overall grade of a particular course or module.

The TEL team have made some improvements to My Canvas Admin. This space is really useful for managing your course list and exporting grades, but the TEL team in consultation with staff have come together to offer you some new features including:

• Displaying the number of student enrolments for each course.
• Customised course filters, allowing you the ability to group courses by code or year for adding/removing/viewing.
• Quick Unenroll, just click on the x next to the course you'd like to unenroll from.
• Course Groups - You can now export a list of course groups and their enrolments.
• Course Journals - My Canvas Admin now facilitates the option to create private course journal for each student within your course