11/26/2024

• Quick Tip - Monitor Student Engagement
  
• What's New with Webcourses@UCF
• New Quizzes - Enroll in Self-Paced Course
• Video Tip - Online Communication Strategies
  
• Design with Quality in Mind - Display Content to Support Learning
  
• Start of Semester Reminders - Academic Engagement, Display Your Syllabus
• Faculty Multimedia Center - Summer Hours
• Digital Learning Center - Summer Hours
• Kelvin's Corner - Don’t Fret Design: A Student-Centered Approach to Online Learning
  

Whether you’re in the middle of Summer “C” semester or wrapping up “A” semester, keeping an eye on student engagement helps ensure student success. Reach out to inactive and/or struggling students with these built-in tools in Webcourses@UCF: 

• Use New Analytics to view student activity information. Available analytics include course grade, weekly online activity, and communication. By default, the analytics page displays an interactive graph of all data. 

• Use Message Students Who to contact students from the Gradebook. Messages can be filtered to identify students who haven’t submitted an assignment yet or by their scores.  

This weekend's update is light and not relevant to most users at UCF. However, you may be interested in two updates to the user interface that were deployed last weekend.

Vector button in Equation Editor – A vector button was added to the Equation Editor in the Rich Content Editor. Instructors can now include vector arrows when creating an equation. 

Syllabus Icons – Previously, assignments, quizzes, and graded discussions displayed the same assignment icon in the Syllabus. Icons are now displayed in the Syllabus Course Summary, allowing users to quickly identify assignment types. 

View the June 18, 2022 Canvas Release Notes →

Webcourses@UCF will be migrating to the new quizzing engine beginning Spring 2023. To get a head-start on your quiz migration or to learn more about New Quizzes, we ask that you enroll in a self-paced course or contact Webcourses@UCF Support to request a training session for yourself or your department.

To learn more about the new quizzing tool, important timelines, resources, and to enroll in a self-paced online introduction course, visit the New Quizzes Migration page. 

Ashley Taylor, winner of the 2021 Dziuban Award, talks about her communication strategies for teaching online, including adding a Q & A page, using discussion posts to encourage community, and using polls in Quizzes to keep tabs on how the students feel during the semester.

As you continue to look for ways to improve your online and blended courses, check out the other posts in Design with Quality in Mind, a growing collection of brief articles based on UCF’s Quality and High-Quality Course Reviews, that describe ways to support all students to succeed in your online courses.   

(Image by Markéta Machová from Pixabay.)

Due to staffing shortage, the Faculty Multimedia Center (FMC) will be closed on Fridays for the months of June and July. This will allow the team time to complete installations,  set ups, and training without interruption. We appreciate your understanding as we work toward making the FMC the best resource possible for faculty content creation.   

Drop-in hours for June and July will be Monday – Thursday, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m. We encourage scheduling an appointment to reserve space or equipment.  Please email the FMC at fmc@ucf.edu with any questions you may have. 

From July 1 through August 12th, the Digital Learning Center (DLC) building will be closed on Fridays. All DLC staff will be working remotely on Fridays during the summer months. Please note, the shuttle will not be stopping at the DLC on the dates the building is closed. 

During this time, for

• General Assistance, call: 407-823-4910
• Webcourses@UCF Support, call: 407-823-0407 

DLC on-site work will resume Friday, August 19th. 

This month, Kelvin recommends this 40-minute EdPlus Course Stories podcast, “Don’t Fret Design, A Student-Centered Approach to Online Learning.” Dr. Brendan Lake talks with Instructional Designer Rowena Luce about his efforts to build flexibility into his online course to facilitate a creative and personalized space where students are encouraged to take risks. While Dr. Lake teaches music, the ideas implemented in his course are applicable to any online course. 

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.