In This Email

• Video Tip - Excusing an Assignment
• What's New with Webcourses@UCF
• Affordable Instructional Materials - AIM High Event Registration
• Design with Quality in Mind - Self-Assessment and Reflection
• Kelvin's Corner - Teacher Empathy
  

New/Updated Features:

Canvas Commons – Import Favorites

Favorited Commons items can be imported from Quizzes, Pages, Discussion, Assignments, and Modules. This change allows users to import all favorited content from Commons into one of the five supported Canvas areas.

• After favoriting Commons content, instructors can open Quizzes, Pages, Discussions, Assignments, or Modules in their course and import favorited items into the content area. Previously content could only be imported to a course directly from Commons
  
• When a user views a Canvas area and imports favorited content, the type of content supported by the area displays in the sidebar. For instance, selecting the Commons Favorites option from the Assignments page displays all favorited assignments.

For more updates, view the February 15, 2020 Canvas Release Notes.

The AIM High event recognizes faculty across UCF who have made an effort to keep their required course materials affordable for students through the UCF Affordable Instructional Materials (AIM) Initiative.

Join us in the Live Oak Ballroom for the event that features a full program with guest speakers, awards, testimonials, and time to network and learn more about ways the University is collaborating to reduce and/or remove cost barriers to academic content.  

View AIM High awardees on the AIM High 2020 Event page.

Looking for tips on how to design your online courses? Design with Quality in Mind is a series of brief articles that explores best practices in online course design. Each post in this series highlights one item that exemplifies quality online course design, based on UCF’s Quality and High Quality Course.

The most recent post of this series, Encourage Online Students to Assess and Reflect, explains why asking students to actively think about their own work improves the quality of your online course. The post also provides tips for how to design these opportunities and showcases examples from UCF faculty who are incorporating self-assessment and reflection in their online courses.

Heading towards the mid-term, we can see students’ stress levels starting to show. It might surprise you to know experts say empathy can seriously affect our ability to learn. In today’s Kelvin’s Corner, we invite you to listen to this 19-minute EdSurge podcast titled, “The Science of Empathy: What Researchers Want Teachers to Know”. Guest speaker John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist and professor from University of Washington School of Medicine, talks about how teacher empathy can impact student grades and how traditional classroom context isn’t very brain-friendly.  

Kelvin Thompson is the Executive Director for the Center for Distributed Learning. He is always finding, sharing, recommending interesting and insightful resources about teaching and learning.