As a College of IST faculty member, you are receiving this email to help assist you with Canvas and online learning.
Welcome to the College of IST Learning Design eNewsletter
May 2017
Canvas Updates
Canvas released its latest updates on May 13th. Not all of the updates may apply to Penn State’s usage of Canvas. Of note from Canvas:
Dashboard Color Overlay
Canvas users may now elect to have their dashboard not display color overlays. This may be useful when dashboard imagery is used. To remove the color overlay, users should hit the gear shift on the dashboard and then remove the color overlay check.
For full release notes, please visit Canvas.
Image: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-11052-canvas-production-release-notes-2017-05-13
Canvas Penn State Student Experience Report Available
The IST Office of Learning Design, along with others across the University, have been conducting student experience testing in Canvas. We are proud to announce that a comprehensive report has just been released which helps outline best practices for building courses in Canvas.
Zoom Chosen for Conferencing Tool
Over the last several months, Penn State has been piloting several cloud-based web conferencing platforms. Penn State IT recently announced that Zoom has been chosen to be Penn State’s tool of choice. Other tools considered were Adobe Connect and BlueJeans.
On May 31st, there is a planned announcement regarding the Zoom rollout and next steps.
Academic Integrity-Related Tools
Our offices have been hearing more and more about academic integrity issues. We wanted to pass along some tools which may assist with academic integrity issues that are now available to and some that may be available soon,.
The University recently announced that Turnitin, a tool which helps to identify possible plagiarism violations, is now integrated with Canvas.
The University and the Learning Design community are also reviewing Examity, an online proctoring solution. If you are interested in more information or possibly piloting this tool, we ask that you contact our office at ld@ist.psu.edu.
Summer News
As some of you may know, the Learning Design staff will be moving offices this summer. Currently our department is located on the third floor of the IST Building, soon to be renamed Westgate. But by August 1st we should be moved to our new locations on the first floor in the offices closest to Burrows St (office rooms are also going to be updated). We always like when faculty members stop by so we hope you will visit us in our new digs!Also, our Online Teaching Luncheons will be taking a break this summer and will resume in August. More details in the future. We’ll be sending more eNewsletters in the months ahead, but until next time we wish all of our faculty a great summer!