Students seem to really appreciate being able to interact with experts and others as they are learning. The instructor is a visible part of their course experience. We recommend that communicate daily with your students, especially during emergency periods. This can be done through the Discussion Board, Announcements, and Email tools in Canvas, and there are tutorials for all of these, but below are strategies to explore:

• Instructor Presence
• Recipes for Active Learning
• How Students Check Your Feedback
• Surviving the Age of Technology-Enhanced Learning
• Rubrics

There are several options for peer-to-peer interaction. The discussion board (see below) is one of the more popular asynchronous tools. You can also assign students to group in either Canvas or try TEAMS for synchronous interactions by putting students into TEAMS channels where they can work as a group:

• Creating Canvas Groups tutorials
• Active Learning tips
• Microsoft TEAMS tutorials
• Other ideas to try

Canvas’ Discussion Board tool can be used to provide students space to introduce themselves to classmates, express themselves and their understanding of a certain topic, debate/argue formally their point, raise questions, and work with one another as a group, among other things. While you can manually review and grade students’ postings in the Discussion Board, it may present quite a time challenge, particularly with large classes. Student postings will be of varied lengths, and some may be lengthier than expected and others may be too brief. Sometimes, instructors or graders become overwhelmed with trying to quantify student participation by counting the number of discussion initial posts and replies. Instead, you can set up a grading rubric in Canvas that specifies not just quantity expectations for discussion participation, but also describes indicators of quality in the posts.

• Setting up Canvas groups
• Overview of Canvas Discussion Board
• Organizing the Discussion Board
• Discussion Tutorials

TEAMS for pre-recorded lectures, live lectures and/or discussions. The resources below include how to post to STREAM, the Microsoft video service, and enable closed captioning for ADA compliance:

• Teams for Education tutorials
• Quick Start Guide for Meetings/Calls(PDF)
• Quick Start Guide for Students (PDF)
• Quick Start Guide for Educators (PDF)
• Microsoft Teams quick tips videos
• STREAM tutorials

Zoom for pre-recorded lectures, live lectures and/or discussions:

• Zoom Search
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Mediasite for in-class lecture capture and live streaming:

• Mediasite for lecture capture/live streaming