Instructional Technology and Design Services
Snow covering the MSU campus

Preparing for Winter Session

Preparing for Winter 2023/2024

Photo of MSU campus with moon visible in the background

When: Tuesday, December 5, 9:00am – 12:15pm

Where: Online via InSpace

 

The Summer/Winter Session Office, in partnership with the ITDS team, will offer workshops online during this half-day event. Workshop participants will receive resources in Canvas.

 

All faculty are encouraged to register for a one-on-one consultation as needed. 

Register Now

Agenda

Time Sessions
8:45 – 9:00 Check in / Set up using In Space
9:00 – 9:45 Welcome & Updates from Summer/Winter Session & ITDS

Excelling in Accelerated Formats: Strategies and Best Practices for Winter Session Faculty

Adapting your course to an accelerated format requires special attention to pacing, workload, and other considerations to facilitate student success in just four weeks. This session describes strategies and best practices to consider while adapting your course. Dr. Sangeeta Parashar, Associate Professor of Sociology, joins us to share her experience, successes, and lessons learned.
10:00 – 10:30 Keeping Up With What’s New in Canvas

We have put together a series of Tips & Tricks to ensure you have everything you need to effectively and efficiently prepare your Winter courses. Whether you are new to Canvas or not, there may be some tricks you are unaware of or even possibilities in teaching your course that you have not yet considered.
10:30 – 11:15 Responding to Artificial Intelligence Effective Instructional Design

Generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT have exploded in popularity and pose many questions in higher education related to academic integrity and authenticity of work produced by our students. This workshop empowers faculty with an overview of ChatGPT and other similar AI text generators, assessment design approaches for mitigating misuse, and considerations on leveraging these tools to enhance learning activities.
11:30 – 12:15 Enhancing Student Experiences on Canvas with Graphic Design

Using appropriate graphic design on your Canvas pages, assignments, quizzes, and course materials can make all the difference in ensuring that your students have an accessible and engaging learning environment. Join us in exploring how you can enhance your courses on Canvas with the careful application of graphic design!

Workshop Offerings

Instructional Technology and Design Services offers many workshops and faculty development opportunities year-round to support teaching and learning. We’ve highlighted a few to help you prepare your Winter Session courses.

african american Woman working from home. waving to laptop

Excelling in Accelerated Formats: Strategies and Best Practices for Winter Session Faculty

 

This workshop provides best practices on repackaging your course content for accelerated formats, tips on student engagement and assessment, and advice from faculty teaching accelerated courses.

Register for an Upcoming Workshop

  • Simple Syllabus – Simple Syllabus is a centralized, template-driven platform that enables faculty to quickly personalize and publish interactive class syllabi.
  • Introduction to Ed Discussion – Ed Discussion is a quick and easy drop-in for class Q&A with superior functionality and usability. Seamlessly facilitate Q&A discussions, empowering students to express their ideas using a built-in equation editor, share runnable code, annotate images, and much more.
  • Reimagining Online Discussions with Flip – Flip is a discussion tool that uses video recording and sharing as the primary method of conversation.
  • Using Polls as Formative Assessment Tools – Polls are a great way to break up the traditional lecture pattern while also providing valuable data on the knowledge our students have obtained (and where they may be struggling) in a low-stakes environment. Join us as we take a look at three polling platforms: Kahoot, Zoom, and Poll Everywhere.
  • Using Padlet and Jamboard to Promote Collaboration – Padlet is a simple collaborative bulletin board that allows participants to interact by posting text, links, images, videos, and more. It can be used as a quick bulletin board, brainstorming space, a blog, a portfolio, class exit ticket and much more. Join us for this basic overview via an interactive demonstration on the Google Jamboard, highlighting the functionality of using this whiteboard collaboratively.
  • Using Mind Maps to Increase Student Understanding & Engagement – Mind mapping is an effective strategy to visually organize and analyze information and can be a method to help students understand more complex concepts in your course. This strategy is fantastic for content analysis and is proven to increase higher-order thinking, engagement, and recall amongst students.
  • Social Reading and Collaborative Annotation – This workshop will showcase the ways social reading and collaborative annotation can be used as a valuable way to assess student work. We will explore two social annotation tools that integrate with Canvas: Perusall and Hypothesis.
  • Engaging Students in Online Discussions – This session introduces pedagogical strategies and practices to facilitate effective online discussions in asynchronous/synchronous environments, or to extend engaging interactions beyond the classroom.
  • Designing Activities to Promote Student Engagement – In this workshop, we will discuss some active learning techniques and tools that you could use in individual assignments, pair work and large group activities to promote student engagement in an online or hybrid environment.

Course Design Consultations

tools on a workbench

Our team of instructional designers are available to work with you on many aspects of designing your course(s). Whether you’re implementing a quick fix or developing long term changes, instructional designers offer valuable support rooted in pedagogical best practices and experience.

Schedule a Course Design Consultation

Canvas Support

photo of Patrick Scioscia, Terry Steckowich, and Pam Fallivene

We offer support on using Canvas to build a student-friendly course, including building and configuring course content, course management, and more.

Schedule a Canvas Support ConsultationRegister for a Canvas Workshop

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