11/25/2024

• Quick Tip - Comment Library
  
• What's New with Webcourses@UCF
  
• New Quizzes - What's New, What's Changed, and What's Coming
• Accessibility Tip - Headings
• UCF’s Quality and High Quality Course Designations
  
• Design with Quality in Mind - Promote Academic Integrity
• Dziuban Award - Submission opens September 26
• Upcoming Events - AIM High, Innovation Summit
• Kelvin's Corner - Assessments - Improve Student Learning
  
• Book Discussion Group - Connecting in the Online Classroom

We know the benefits of providing meaningful feedback to students. But sometimes you find yourself repeating the same feedback when reviewing student submissions for an assignment. The Comment Library in SpeedGrader can help! Simply add frequently repeated comments into the SpeedGrader Comment Library and then insert them into the grading comments box. Using this tool cuts down redundancy and saves you time while grading.

To learn more, visit the Canvas Instructor Guide “How do I use the Comment Library in SpeedGrader?”

The Canvas update for September is limited to New Quizzes. The next scheduled release will be October 15, 2022.

View the September 17, 2022 Canvas Release Notes.

With UCF’s upcoming move to New Quizzes in Webcourses@UCF, we want to keep you abreast of feature changes as they roll out. Recent updates to keep in mind:

• In place of a Survey quiz type, faculty can use Microsoft Forms or zero-point quiz questions.
• If you are using Mastery Path, you will need to re-link the quiz questions after migrating your quiz.
• Quiz integrations with proctoring tools and some publisher materials are coming soon.

To see a full list of changes to New Quizzes, please visit the UCF Quiz Migration page.

Like an outline, headings provide organization to your content. A properly formatted heading allows screen readers and other assistive technology to scan the content page. When creating content pages in Webcourses@UCF, we sometimes see headings created by changing font size and making the text bold. However, it’s best to use the Heading style found in the Rich Content Editor to format headings.

Other heading related accessibility tips include:

• Don’t use the heading style to format paragraph text
  
• Avoid standalone headings
• Be consistent with your heading use

For more accessibility tips, visit the Canvas Community article: Accessibility in Online Course Design

The CDL Instructional Design team offers online course reviews to faculty credentialed to create W, RS, and V courses, as well as blended course reviews to faculty credentialed to create M courses. For more information about the Quality and High Quality course designations, visit the UCF Quality Initiative website.

Faculty who have engaged in the review process cite smoother navigation, less student confusion, and heightened accessibility of course materials as just a few benefits experienced.

We are pleased to recognize the May 2022 – August 2022 faculty who have earned a Quality and/or High Quality designation for at least one of their online or blended courses. Congratulations!

Integrity is fundamental to teaching and learning, incorporating core values of trust, responsibility, and fairness. There are steps teachers can take to support academic integrity in online courses. Check out Promote Academic Integrity for tips on mitigating opportunities and motivations for students to cheat in online assignments and assessments.

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. 

The Chuck D. Dziuban Award for Excellence in Online Teaching recognizes one UCF faculty member who has recently taught an exemplary online (W) or video (V) course.

The Fall 2022 submission period opens Monday, September 26 at 8:00 a.m. and closes Monday, October 10 at 11:59 p.m. Updated eligibility and submission information for this award is available on the Dziuban Award page.

Innovation Summit CFP Open

Event Date: March 30, 2023

The call for proposals submission portal is open for the 5th Annual Florida Innovation Summit until Tuesday, October 25, 2022. 

This month, Kelvin recommends “Assessment” - a 30-minute episode from the “Tea for Teaching” podcast from SUNY Oswego featuring a conversation with Dr. David Eubanks (Furman University), noted critic of common higher education assessment practices. In the podcast, Dr. Eubanks discusses how assessment can help improve student learning and how to be more efficient and productive in our assessment activities.

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.