Use digital tools to support your teaching
It is important that you plan a clear and structured use of digital tools to support students in their work with the course.
Example using Canvas as a framework
Many students may experience the information and expectations as quite overwhelming, and uncertainty about plans, deadlines, and teaching methods can prevent their learning. For students to be able to concentrate on learning the knowledges and skills, you can use Canvas to create a predictable framework for the course.
To use Canvas effectively in course planning you can:
- Use modules to divide the semester into smaller sections. The structure should reflect how students can progress through the course, in what order they will meet the various elements, and what activities they should do.
- Use announcements to broadcast regular messages about what's going on. The announcements are sent by email to all students and all group teachers, and provides a shared understanding of what will happen each week.
- Use some of the integrated tools in Canvas (Discussion, Quiz, Pages and Zoom) to support student activity and learning outside of the lectures and seminars.
Overview of digital tools
Each tool has a specific pedagogical purpose:
- The course pages: information about the course, calendar, messages, uploading lecture videos and other resources
- Canvas: learning platform with tools for dialogue, assignments and assessment.
- Zoom: real-time video meetings between students and lecturers.
- Forelesningsopptak: video recording tool, direct upload to the subject pages.
- Microsoft Teams: chat, file sharing, and co-writing in Office 365 applications
- Office 365: collection of tools for writing etc.
- Mentimeter: ask simple questions in a lecture.
- Leganto: curriculum lists and learning resources.
- Inspera: UiO's exam system.
- Nettskjema: anonymous web forms for evaluation
Questions for planning:
- How will you divide the course into modules to give the students an overview?
- How can you use Canvas to help students work with the curriculum?
- How do you plan for students to use the other digital resources during the course?
- How does each digital tool support the students to achieve the learning outcomes?
- What can be the added value for you and the students if you set aside time to give a weekly announcement on the topic of teaching, expectations and deadlines?
Further reading:
- The list above provides links to the relevant guides
- Inspiration: Canvas-Inspo
- Website: Teaching online
- Overview: UiO Service Catalog