Pre-Sabbatical InstructureCarn – Summer 2018
I was checking in on my timeline I presented in my sabbatical proposal and remembered that my FPG travel in July was part of my sabbatical. My plan for Summer 2018 included attending the annual Canvas conference, InstructureCarn, which was held in late July in Colorado. I used FPG funds for this conference travel. At the conference I made some connections with more schools that are using Canvas Data Portal that I can hopefully connect with later during my sabbatical.
The conference had a carnival theme and a ton of sessions on Canvas Data, so I had a nice lineup to choose from. Most of the session presenters were actual data scientists, so a lot of what they talked about was over my head – very technical. It will be nice to go back and watch a few of the sessions again once Instructure posts the recordings online and I know little more about the technical side. For instance, the first session I sat in was Concept-Based Data Analysis: A New Method for Organizing and Visualizing Data Using Course Design Principles. Fascinating stuff, but I had no idea how to get to where they were. The presentation explained that by combining sound pedagogical principles with new methods of data collection from Canvas, there’s a method for visualizing classroom data to evaluate the effectiveness of course material, highlight concepts that call for improvement, and present this data to students, faculty, and administrators in a holistic format. Yes, please!
The next session I attended made a lot more sense to me, a novice, and was geared more to what I imagine I could possible persuade our campus to set up. The presentation, Determining Student Activity in Canvas Data, showed how you can efficiently clean and use the data in Canvas Data to build a database and determine student activity and grades from just a few tables. The one thing I’m learning about all these great data projects is that it takes a team to develop them. They get buy-in from admin, IT, Student Services, Faculty and Data Scientist before they create anything. That could end up being a challenge for me.
Overall, I attended 10 sessions that had something to do with Canvas Data or Analytics. Luckily for me Instructure had a lot of planned fun carnival activities built into the day and evening because my brain hurt after some of those sessions. But it was nice to unwind in the evening with colleagues and friends. We actually attended a carnival with all kinds of different street food, rides and games. I mean, who could pass up a table full of candied apples. We couldn’t!
I think Beth may have had too much sugar.
And yes, I did eat the whole thing. We even got little panda bears and all kinds of other swag.
All in all it was time well spent, both in the conference sessions and all the fun in between. I will say my biggest disappointment was a session I was looking forward to disappeared off the program and no longer existed. It was the perfect session for me: A Non-Programmers Guide to Using the Canvas Data Portal. Yes! Sign me up. Nope. Gone. 🙁 They enticed me with: “The Canvas Data Portal is a great tool, but can be intimidating for non-technical or non-programming professionals. In this session, I will go through my personal journey learning and utilizing the Canvas Data Portal as well as provide tutorials, tips, and strategies for non-technical or non-programming individuals so they can fully utilize the Canvas Data Portal in their Canvas Instance.” But then they didn’t show up. No “personal journey.” No “tutorials, tips, and strategies.” I should track them down.
Summer Project 2013 Final Report: Developing My Personal Learning Nework (PLN)
My project involved establishing a Personal Learning Network (PLN) for myself and faculty on our campus. It involved establishing an online presence and building a community on various social media sites for myself and our CTLE. I researched blogs, organizations and professionals to include in this community, as well as produced content for our blog covering the best pedagogical practices in online teaching. The goal of the PLN was to get faculty to connect, collaborate and contribute so that we can become aware, connected, empowered, and confident learners. I spent time researching and learning about creating a successful PLN and how to get others involved. I attended a national conference, researched and read to help me produce PLN content and connections.
A description of your experience and the achievement of expected learning outcomes of the project.
I now have a better understanding of the effective uses of discussion in online courses, strategies for preparing students for effective and productive discussion, ground rules that help make students feel sufficiently safe to participate in discussion, and how to structure discussion to help achieve learning goals after attending a pre-conference workshop at the Teaching Professor conference in May. After I returned from the conference, I was able to immediately improve my online summer course to include better student to student interactions as prescribed by the best practices presented at the workshop. I picked up lots of best practices, not just in the pre-conference workshop, but in many of the sessions as well. Students in my summer online class expressed appreciation for the new, small group led discussions.
For the PLN part of my project, I was able to create a list of possible content for our blog, which is the hub of our PLN and the mechanism for sharing with other faculty within the network for these best practices for teaching online. I was able to research and find free Twitter curation tools to enhance the PLN. I also learned more about hashtags and how to get more out of your PLN using Twitter and hashtags. I wasn’t able to work closely with our CTLE, but the completion of the project resulted in some good professional development activities, not just for me, but for all faculty on our campus. I created content for workshops on building online lessons with numerous online lesson creation tools. I’ve presented on that twice so far this fall. And I’m putting the final touches on a workshop on How to Get More Out of Your PLN. So I was able to improve our workshop offerings for faculty to include information learned at the conference, as well as during the development of the PLN.
Describe your professional growth. Read more
