Welcome to Digital Dialogues! 

We hope you and your families are well. The Quarantine Queens (Becky & Ann) are back at it helping to support you in this Canvas and Online transition. We wanted to send out some communication about the Canvas transition as we have received lots of questions.

Teaching Tips- Canvas

Many of you have begun engaging with Canvas through your dashboard, trainings, and fall courses. With this engagement has come excitement, doubts, questions, and freak-outs! We hope this email will help clarify a couple of things but please know we are all learning this process together and we will provide information as soon as we get it!

1. Your fall course is supposed to be blank! This is the new way MSU Denver will roll out courses. Once you are registered to teach a course each semester, you will get the course in your course dashboard and it will be blank. Lead faculty will give you the course template to populate your course before the semester starts. You’ll learn more about this in the ACT-20 Capstone course.

1. You have probably noticed in your Canvas dashboard the following type of courses:

1. 1. Sandbox: These are blank courses that are available for you to create new courses, redesign a course, or just practice skills. You can create pages here for any course element and can easily copy/export it over to your official courses after the templates have rolled.
   2. Fall Courses: These are blank blueprints/shells that will be populated with the course template. They will always be blank when you first get them before they are populated with the course template/past course section.
   3. K16 Courses: These are your migrated shells from Blackboard. These K16 courses have EVERYTHING in them. Some of you may not have K16 courses and that is okay!
   4. Exemplar Courses: These are just examples for you to see different types of course design, explore and see if you like elements of these classes.

1. You will have continued access to your old Blackboard courses until January 2022 so do not fear. It is easy to copy items from Blackboard to your Sandbox Course and then into your “real” fall or spring course that is in Canvas.
2. After you get the template copied into your fall course, it will require more checking and potential arranging then you have done in the past. You will need to double check dates, links, and formatting of the template to make sure it imported correctly. We’ll cover more about this in the Online 101 trainings that we want every SW faculty member to take this fall.
3. With all of this, your patience is appreciated! For the next couple of semesters, it is going to require some more upfront work with regard checking your courses, adding dates, and working out the glitches, but I think you’ll enjoy working with Canvas once you get used to it. Please communicate frequently with your Lead faculty and know we appreciate the extra work you are doing to make this transition successful!

Resources

As part of our efforts to support faculty, we have developed two versions of the Online 101 course for faculty, and the department is asking every faculty member to take one of these courses to talk about synchronous sessions, using Canvas, department guidelines, and best practices for online teaching.

• Online 101:Online 101 is required for all faculty teaching this fall.  This version is for those who are new to MSU Denver, or new to teaching online RSVP Here.
• Online 101 Refresher:  This training is designed as a refresh for those who may have previous online experience or have already taken online 101 in the past. If your only experience teaching online was during the emergency COVID transition in Spring, you should take the basic 101, not the refresher. RSVP here. 

Please stay in touch with us this summer; we are here to help!
Becky Cottrell: [email protected]
Ann Obermann: [email protected]