Grab a beverage and snack, plug in the laptop, and join the LTC!
Keep the momentum up with the semester by joining a 60-minute workshop with the LTC! We offer numerous opportunities each week to learn a new skill, advance what you already know, or take a moment to refresh and reset. Sessions are often hosted in hybrid formats, so join us in-person, from home, from your workspace, or where ever you are!
Get your grades up to date for midterms (or 8W1 finals) with our Canvas Grading Lab.
Dive into Canvas Learning Analytics to see what data is available, and how to get more next semester.
Thinking ahead about the Spring? Or Fall 2022? So are we!
Continue to develop your instructional design skills with “Next-Level” Design strategies to prepare for Spring 2022 and beyond! Missed our September sessions? Not a problem, sessions are designed to be independent.
Check out the next installments of the “Digital Transformation” series focusing on tips and tools to increase performance in a digital environment!
Administrative and Non-Instructional Staff
Outside of the classroom, campus is just as busy! Join the LTC to dig deeper into new features of Webex and some insider secrets of Outlook!
The LTC offers individual and small group consultations on a variety of topics and services, please email ltc@uww.edu to learn more and get started!
If you require assistance or have questions on campus technology, please feel free to contact the Help Desk. Outside of Help Desk hours, we invite you to search our Knowledge Base for helpful articles on using and troubleshooting campus technology.
Welcome back, Warhawks to a new academic year! Summer was a busy period for the Learning Technology Center (LTC): we welcomed new members to the team, developed new engagement opportunities, managed technology updates and rollouts, celebrated technology innovators, supported technology needs across our campus, and prepared for the start of the new academic year! This post will recap many of the most important updates and feature enhancements of commonly-used technologies across campus, as well as give you a taste of what is to come this year!
Eric Loepp assumed the role of Director of the LTC at the start of the Fall 2021 term and will maintain his faculty position in Political Science. A long-time advocate for technology-enhanced teaching and learning, Eric will continue to develop ideas and innovations that will enhance the learning experience for Warhawks across campus!
Jeffrey Thomas joined the team as Assistant Director in January 2021. Jeff’s professional background is in French Language & Literature and Second Language Acquisition (PhD, UW-Madison). He also has a wide variety of experience in instructional design, curricular development, program coordination, and technology training in administrative and instructional settings.
Honoring Campus Innovators
On May 19, 2021, UW-Whitewater colleagues gathered for a day-long discussion and series of presentations about equity, inclusion, and technological innovations in teaching and learning. The Learning Technology Center and the LEARN Center joined to host both of these events. The Celebration concluded with the announcement of this year’s Cisco/Presidio “Teaching with Technology Innovator” honorarium, awarded to Meg Waraczynski!
Next year’s “Celebrating Teaching and Learning” is scheduled for May 18, 2022 – we hope to see you there!
Webex is our campus-supported solution for video conferencing and online instruction. Webex integrations with Canvas, Microsoft Office, and other platforms have made teaching, learning, and working very successful experiences.
Over the summer, Cisco Webex was rebranded and released a new unified application. The messaging and calling features of “Webex Teams” are now included in the unified “Webex” application.
To better propel your learning, we have organized some sessions into thematic groupings. Designed to build upon baseline skills, these sessions advanced skill development and work to promote a technology-inclusive environment on campus.
The Blending My In-Person Course with Online Elements Pathway shows you how to integrate technology to enhance learning, streamline instructor workload, and maximize student engagement. Instructors will build upon previously created materials to improve face-to-face and blended courses.
The Creating Dynamic Course Content Pathway assists instructors in creating Canvas content that uses embedded video, active links to content both inside of and out of the Canvas course, and other campus supported technologies to improve student engagement.
“Next-Level Tech” for Teaching and Design Workshops
Get a look at your colleagues’ Canvas courses in these hands-on workshops filled with innovative faculty examples, step-by-step instructions on how to adapt those innovations to your own courses, and tips and tricks to take your course designs to the “Next Level.” Join the sessions that fit your needs in workshops organized along two themes: “Next-Level” Design in Canvas and “Next-Level” Multimedia. Signup Now!
Digital Transformation Workshops
Designed to illustrate how digital solutions can enable new types of innovation and creativity, these workshops will explore how the adoption of technology impacts our work. Signup Now!
Canvas Updates
Did you know Canvas receives updates every month? These updates are reviewed and tested by Canvas administrators across UW-System before their release dates. We provide regular updates and highlights on our blog. See the latest updates and recap from the summer.
Canvas has a robust technical support service that includes 24 / 7 / 365 toll-free hotline and live online chat interactions. Please use this for all Canvas Questions.
Did you know that you can get a weekly email update about what’s going on in the LTC? Every Monday morning, you will get an email that contains a summary of the latest items from our blog. To signup for these updates, just fill out the form below!
Self-Service Knowledge Base
All of our self-service documentation is now available inside of the ServiceNow Knowledge Base (KB). The KB articles can easily be searched by going to: http://uww.service-now.com/kb
New KB articles are added regularly – so check back often!
Microphone Kits
The Sennheiser microphone kits that many instructors used during the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters are now available for checkout from our ICIT AV-Checkouts center. These microphones can be checked out for the entire semester.
Requests can be made online at http://av-checkouts.uww.edu. Search of “XS Wireless” to locate the mics in the request interface. Microphone pickup and returns are done through the Andersen 1008 Media Lab.
LockDown Browser
Respondus LockDown Browser is now available on Chromebooks! Previously, we were beta testing this feature and instructors needed to adjust settings within the quiz. This feature is now generally available and no additional configuration is needed by the instructor.
Students who used it during the beta testing period may need to remove and reinstall the extension on their Chromebooks.
If you are looking for ways to increase student engagement, you might be interested in using Poll Everywhere. Capture powerful feedback instantly during virtual meetings and in-person classes using Poll Everywhere. A variety of interactive activities, which can be seamlessly integrated into PowerPoint or Google Slides, can help you take attendance, give quizzes, gauge interest, and more whether your students are near or far!
Are you looking to record professional lectures for your courses? The Learning Technology Center (LTC) Studio is available!
We have a number of unique and engaging setups including “presenter only,” “weatherman,” or using our kleerboard. Looking to do something different? Just let us know! Schedule your appointment now with our online form.
Don’t forget to Visit Us
Are you still with us? If so – great, you made it to the end! As a reminder, we are located in McGraw Hall, Suite 120 and are available between 8:00 AM and 4:30 PM weekdays. We can also be reached at ltc@uww.edu or 262.472.1004. We encourage you to call ahead to schedule an appointment when possible. We’ll always be willing to help, and have plenty of treats on hand for your sweet tooth. Have a great semester!
On Saturday, September 18, Instructure will deploy the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notes are also available.
Rich Content Editor – Accessibility Checker Indicator: When accessibility issues are detected within the Rich Content Editor, the Accessibility Checker automatically displays an indicator. This indicator helps users know about these issues without having to open the Accessibility Checker. Opening the Accessibility Checker will show the number of errors and how to correct each error.
New Analytics – Canvas Online Attendance: New Analytics includes an Online Attendance tab, which updates according to criteria set at the account level. Instructors will be able to tell which days a student has done at least one of the following:
Accessed a Page in Canvas.
Created a Page (if you have provided that permission).
Made a Discussion post.
Submitted an Assignment.
Started and/or submitted a Quiz.
Loaded a collaboration to view/edit.
Prior Canvas Updates
It can be really hard to keep up with Canvas releases, so the following are the prominant updates that have happened since the end of spring semester.
Assignments – Student Annotated Submissions: Instructors can use annotated document assignment type to upload a document for students to annotate and submit directly in Canvas. This assignment type is included under the online assignment types so that instructors can select additional submission options for students unable to annotate onscreen.
Course settings – Section Date Enhancement: A visual change was made to the availability dates option for sections of a course. This update made the visuals of the date settings for the sections match those of the course.
SpeedGrader – Comment Library: Comments can be added and saved for reuse within SpeedGrader, allowing individual users to save frequently used comments to be reused across assignments in multiple courses.
Canvas – Maintenance Window: Instructure has moved their intermittent maintenance to twice monthly scheduled maintenance windows. Moving forward, maintenance will be performed on the first and third Thursdays of each month, beginning at 1:00am, and running no later than 3:00am. Canvas may be unavailable to users during these windows. All users are able to view maintenance window times through Account then Settings. For additional information, please refer to the Canvas Community discussion.
New Quizzes – Multiple Attempts First Score Option: It is now possible to give students multiple attempts on a New Quiz, but retain their first score as their grade.
New Quizzes – Item Bank Management: Item banks can now be shared with the entire account or individual users. When instructors share an item bank, the item bank supports a new View permission, which can be given to a user and provides access to the bank as read only. The user who shares an item bank can continue to specify editing access for other users.
New Quizzes – Save and Build Button Workflow: The New Quiz creation page includes both a Save and a Build button. When an instructor creates and enters details for a quiz, the page displays both a Save and a Build button. Previously the page only included the Save button, which counterintuitively launched in the New Quiz editor.
If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, or even just curious about how they can help you, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.
Can’t join at scheduled times? No problem, email ltc@uww.edu to request a personal or department session. Links to previously recorded sessions are also often available.
Don’t see a session on something you’d like to learn? Let us know! We look forward to meeting your needs as best we can — email ltc@uww.edu with your request. And, don’t forget, LinkedIn Learning offers on-demand classes on many topics!
What is a “Pathway”? The LTC offers a wide variety of trainings, but how are they tied together? We have organized our trainings into groups that drive towards common ideas. The “Pathway” courses are designed for users who are already familiar with the basics of tools such as a Canvas (e.g., building a Page) or Webex Teams (e.g., creating a Space). The sessions blend advanced skill development with deeper conceptual discussion into the affordances of more technology-inclusive environments on campus, regardless of whether you are an instructor or not!
Register in advance and be sure to tell your colleagues!
This pathways approaches “blended” classrooms from a larger perspective, namely the integration of technology to enhance learning, streamline instructor workload, and maximize student engagement. Instructors will utilize materials created during the 2020 school year to improve face to face, and blended courses. Leveraging recently digitized content, while making small adjustments to it, to engage students and get the most use out of content.
Google Apps for Education Learn about the different Google Apps for Education you can use to collaborate and file-share on the go! This workshop is an overview of Google Apps including Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Presentations, Forms, Drawing, and Sites. Learn the basics of each program to get you up and running quickly with Google applications.
Better Courses Through Better Pages Have you moved past the basics of how to get content into Canvas, and looking for a simple way to improve the learning experience for your students? This synchronous training is meant as a supplement to our asynchronous, self-paced resource designed to help instructors take lengthy modules, and turn them into sleek pages.
DX1 – Culture: Design for the Student Perspective This is the first of a three partworkshop series exploring impacts of Digital Transformation on Higher Education. Digital Transformation #1 — Culture: Designing with the Student Perspective in Mind.
Breakouts in Webex Meetings Would you like to breakout your meeting participants into smaller groups allowing them to collaborate and share ideas over audio and video? Use Webex Meetings new integrated breakout sessions for workshops, classrooms, or for when you need a moment to talk privately with a few participants, outside of the main meeting. Join this lively class and check out what you can do in breakout sessions as a meeting host, co-host, or attendee.
Improving Navigation This session explores modular organization, use cases like the FAQ syllabus, links and tricks to save you time copying courses from one section to another, and other tips to reuse modules.
Teaching with Webex (Teams) Searching for ways to build community with students in your online class? Looking for a way to facilitate communication and collaboration between your students in your face-to-face class? You may benefit from the Learning Technology Center’s (LTC) “Teaching with Webex.” (Webex is the application formerly known as Webex Teams.) The facilitator will provide examples to help participants understand what Webex is (and is not), how it works, and the purpose in using it. We will also provide some examples of instructors who have integrated Webex into their course and some “best practices” for use.
Canvas Higher Integrity Quizzes This session will focus on the things you can do with your quizzes besides monitoring software to improve the integrity of your quizzes. We will use the description area of the assignment to remind students what they can and can’t do during your quizzes, set up timing and randomized questions, use different question types to make looking up answers more difficult, and try to change the focus of questions to application of skills. Feel free to review this phenomenal seven minute video to try some of these on your own.
September 29, 2021, 1:00PM | Register here October 7, 2021, 10:00AM | Register here Note: To get the most out of this session, we recommend that you are already familiar with the following tools: Quizzes
Suggestions for Effective Webex Meetings & Events Do you know how to schedule a Webex Meeting and/or Event, but are looking to make them more smooth, efficient, productive, and comfortable? We’ll cover some pre-meeting details that can help as well as and facilitation techniques to help you and your attendees have better virtual meeting experiences. We’ll focus on tips and tricks found in Webex Meetings and Events to take your baseline skills to the next level.
Interactive Polling with Slido Polls are a great way for hosts to get input from meeting participants. Use them to engage your audience, test knowledge, and ask for feedback. Webex Meetings now has an interactive polling feature built right into the meeting so you can easily engage with your participants. In this session, you’ll learn how to:
Create, edit, delete and activate a poll, quiz or survey;
Share the poll;
View poll results and reset a poll;
Export and share poll results after a meeting;
Add guest collaborators; and
Access your Slido account from https://slido.com and manage your polls.
What Students Want in Canvas There are many good ways to set up a course. This training will focus on making a series of small, easy, and optional, shifts from your current course design to a setup backed by feedback from student panels conducted right here at UW-Whitewater.
November 3, 2021, 9:00AM | Register here November 9, 2021, 1:00PM | Register here Note: To get the most out of this session, we recommend that you are already familiar with the following tools: Assignments, Announcements, Pages, Modules, Rubrics.
Instructors will be able to create Canvas content that uses embedded video, active links to content both inside of and out of the Canvas course, and/or utilizes other campus supported technologies, while remaining accessible for all users. Dynamic course content has been shown to improve student engagement. This pathway will explore ways that instructors can produce and recycle dynamic, multimodal and multimedia course materials that strengthens student content interactions.
“Next-Level” Design in Canvas – Chunking and Modular Design This session explores modular organization, use cases like the FAQ syllabus, links and tricks to save you time copying courses from one section to another, and other tips to reuse modules.
“Next-Level” Design in Canvas – Navigation and Gating This session explores how faculty use gating and timed releases, prerequisites in Canvas, and use cases when – and when not — to use these techniques.
“Next-Level” Multimedia – Creative Use Cases This session explores how faculty use multimedia in creative ways, from intro videos to weekly video “to-do” lists, to short podcasts. We will also explore how to incorporate multimedia into student assignments, video presentations, and discussion boards.
Campus Technology Resources to Help You Succeed The goal of this session is to create awareness of the campus-supported communication, collaboration, and work productivity tools that apply to all staff and introduce participants to support resources. This session will be particularly helpful to those new to campus, however, all staff may benefit from hearing about technology tools they might not be aware of or changes to technology that make the tools more useful for their work.
Google Apps for Education Learn about the different Google Apps for Education you can use to collaborate and file-share on the go! This workshop is an overview of Google Apps including Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Presentations, Forms, Drawing, and Sites. Learn the basics of each program to get you up and running quickly with Google applications.
Better Courses Through Better Pages: Have you moved past the basics of how to get content into Canvas, and looking for a simple way to improve the learning experience for your students? This synchronous training is meant as a supplement to our asynchronous, self-paced resource designed to help instructors take lengthy modules, and turn them into sleek pages. Not only is the content of the course about how to create more engaging pages, it also demonstrates simple steps you can take to do this with your own courses, by showing the transition from a typical course design to one based on a more dynamic page.
Faster Grading With Better Feedback: Be prepared to edit an upcoming assessment in this hands-on session. We will focus on transforming existing quiz questions into tools able to remediate student misconceptions, and point them back to the relevant materials in your course. We will also go through updating rubrics to include targeted feedback about specific reasons students lose points. We will also go over the new Comment Library available in SpeedGrader.
September 28, 2021, 1:00PM | Register here October 6, 2021, 9:00AM | Register here October 14, 2021, 2:00PM | Register here October 27, 2021, 9:00AM | Register here November 16, 2021, 1:00PM | Register here November 17, 2021, 9:00AM | Register here Note: To get the most out of this session, we recommend that you are already familiar with the following tools: Assignments, Rubrics, Quizzes.
“What Students Want in Canvas“: There are many good ways to set up a course. This training will focus on making a series of small, easy, and optional, shifts from your current course design to a setup backed by feedback from student panels conducted right here at UW-Whitewater.
November 3, 2021, 9:00AM | Register here November 9, 2021, 1:00PM | Register here Note: To get the most out of this session, we recommend that you are already familiar with the following tools: Assignments, Announcements, Pages, Modules, Rubrics.
Building a Better Syllabus: What makes a good syllabus, and what makes a good syllabus better? This session will talk about what can be done to improve an existing syllabus, and interesting reworks from the ground up. You can get started on your own with these great resources:
Are you looking to learn from other faculty examples what works for Next-Level pages in Canvas? Now is your chance! Join us for hands-on workshops filled with faculty examples, step-by-step instructions on how to adapt those innovations to your own courses, and tips and tricks to take your Course designs to the “Next Level”.
TWO sets of three related workshops. EVERY workshop is independent; you don’t have to commit to more than one to attend.
Every workshop will have both faculty examples and a guided “how to” take away that they can work through in the workshop and immediately apply it to your classes. Pexels photograph by Andrea Piacquadio.
Program Goals:
Discover use cases in practice by Whitewater instructors and faculty.
Apply innovation solutions to your specific classroom challenges.
Explore the techniques, processes, methods, and technology to level up your course design.
This session explores modular organization, use cases like the FAQ syllabus, links and tricks to save you time copying courses from one section to another, and other tips to reuse modules.
“Next-Level” Design in Canvas – Navigation and Gating
This session explores how faculty use multimedia in creative ways, from intro videos to weekly video “to-do” lists, to short podcasts. We will also explore how to incorporate multimedia into student assignments, video presentations, and discussion boards.
“Next-Level” Multimedia – Rethinking the “Blended Lecture”
This session explores how to rethink the “Blended Lecture”. What are the best practices for multimodal video capture? How long should videos be? What shouldn’t be captured? How can I interleave lecture content with other blended materials? How else can I connect content and assessment?
“Next-Level” Multimedia – Rethinking the “Discussion Board”
This session explores rethinking the “Discussion Board”: Examples of how to use video discussions; when to use Canvas compared to when to use other discussion tools like Webex; equity and privacy concerns; and faculty use cases of discussion boards.
Digital Transformation is the adoption of digital technology to transform services or businesses, by replacing non-digital or manual processes with digital processes. Digital solutions may enable new types of innovation and creativity, rather than simply enhancing and supporting traditional methods.
Join the LTC as we explore how these concepts can impact traditional teaching and learning methods within Higher Education and your classroom including:
Exploring the challenges and opportunities that Digital Transformation will have on Higher education.
Improving design by exploring the impact from the student perspective.
Learning strategies to save time in a digital environment.
Discovering tips and tools to increase performance utilizing technology.
Check out the details of the upcoming three-part series below. We hope to see you soon!
Digital Transformation #1 — Culture: Design for the Student Perspective September 14th 3:00 pm | Register here
Digital Transformation #2 — Workforce: Strategies for Saving Time in a Digital Environment September 28th, 3:00 pm | Register here
Digital Transformation #3 — Technology: Tips and Tools to Increase Performance in a Digital Environment October 19 3:00 pm | Register here
On Tuesday, July 6th, Cisco released the Webex Meetings 41.6 update. Highlights of this release are listed below with full release notes also available.
Increased Meeting Number to 11 digits: With a tremendous increase in meeting traffic, Cisco Webex will increase session meeting numbers for Webex Meetings and Webex Events (classic and new) to 11-digits. This change applies only to newly scheduled meetings. The meeting number size increase doesn’t affect existing meetings and Personal Room meetings. However, new employees and students will have 11 digit numbers for their Personal Room meetings.
Move a User from the Participant Panel to the Stage: You can now move a user to the stage from the Participants panel. To do this, right- click on the user you want to move to stage and choose Move to stage.
See more Videos in the Filmstrip: You can now see more videos when scaling the filmstrip. This helps you keep an eye on more people, even when content is shared or if you’re in one of the stage views.
First Participant Brought to the Stage View and Synced will be in Recordings: Recordings will now show the first participant video that was brought to the stage by host or cohost and synced across all the attendees in the meeting. This is bringing back the behavior of locking the video of a participant for everyone in the meeting and then recording.
To make it easy for you to find updates to Webex Meetings, we’ve created “What’s New in Webex – Product Update Highlights,” which will contain links to monthly updates for Webex Meetings and Webex (Teams).
On Saturday, July 17, Instructure will deploy the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notesare also available.
SpeedGrader – Comment Library: Comments can be added and saved for reuse within SpeedGrader, allowing individual users to save frequently used comments to be reused across assignments in multiple courses.
New Quizzes – Item Bank Management: Item banks can now be shared with the entire account or individual users. When instructors share an item bank, the item bank supports a new View permission, which can be given to a user and provides access to the bank as read only. The user who shares an item bank can continue to specify editing access for other users.
Canvas – Maintenance Window: Instructure has moved their intermittent maintenance to twice monthly scheduled maintenance windows. Moving forward, maintenance will be performed on the first and third Thursdays of each month, beginning at 1:00am, and running no later than 3:00am. Canvas may be unavailable to users during these windows. All users are able to view maintenance window times through Account then Settings. For additional information, please refer to the Canvas Community discussion.
“Fireworks 04” by drjoshuawhitman is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
On May 19, 2021, UW-Whitewater colleagues gathered for a day-long discussion and series of presentations about equity, inclusion, and technological innovations in teaching and learning. The Learning Technology Center and the LEARN Center joined to host both of these events. Many thanks to those who were able to attend and for those behind the scenes!
The morning session began with the LEARN Center Equity Ambassadors: Jenna Cushing-Leubner (COEPS), Nate Maddux (COIS), Juk Bhattachryya (COLS), Christine Hoover(COBE), and Susan Wildermuth (COEPS). Each of the presentations offered keen insight into the development of equitable courses and inclusive classroom communities with each talk offering participants precise strategies to implement in the future. Thank you for your hard work!
The afternoon sessions marked the beginning of “Celebrating Teaching and Learning,” a yearly event hosted by the Learning Technology Center designed to showcase technological innovations by UW-Whitewater instructional staff and faculty. This time around, Erin Bauer (Music) walked us through the affordances of online platforms to critically interrogate traditional music history curricula. Meg Waraczynski (Psychology) dove into granularity of adaptive, scenario-based learning using the Realizeit platform. Jeannine Rowe (Social Work) articulated her foundations in the PICRAT framework and methodology to structure students’ technology-mediated engagement in the course. Finally, Steven Girard (Chemistry) exhibited his use of interactive quiz technologies (Kahoot) to engage students and build community, as well as his creation of an online, open resource textbook created specifically for his students.
The Celebration concluded with the announcement of this year’s Cisco/Presidio “Teaching with Technology Innovator” honorarium, awarded to Meg Waraczynski! Congratulations again to each of this year’s finalists!
Next year’s “Celebrating Teaching and Learning” is scheduled for May 18, 2022 – we hope to see you there!
