Choose Your Own Learning Adventure: A New Approach to Modules

The Modules tab on Canvas is a great way to organize your course, providing your students with a way to navigate the course and separate the lecture topics. Being able to list my students' weekly to dos, including the chapter's lecture via PowerPoint, was an easy to way to provide the course information to my asynchronous online courses. However, I began to feel limited in this approach, bothered by only relaying the information via a PowerPoint lecture with some words and my voice. Thus, I have created a second approach to this fall's materials: A choose your own learning adventure approach to the Canvas modules

CourseNetworking: How a Social Media Platform Can Connect Us in a Crisis

These are statements taken directly from my students this semester. How was I able to have my students open up so intimately and honestly? I use CourseNetworking, an academic social networking platform that can be integrated into Canvas, and have done so for years. I first started using it as a chance to get to know my students more since I never get to meet them face-to-face, often posting what we did over the weekend, our favorite TV shows and books, and discuss topics from the classroom that have popped up in everyday life. Then the pandemic hit and my students’ lives were turned upside down. Some were forced to move out of their campus housing, many lost their jobs, and all them had their classes go completely online. Campus leadership constantly worries how this pandemic might be affecting our students. We are told to reach out and let the students know we are here for them. We are encouraged to have frequent communication with them. And with CourseNetworking, this was already in place in my classes at the beginning of the semester. I have been able to reach out to my students each week and ask them how they are doing, and they are able to share with others how much their lives have changed. And thanks to a social media platform, my students and I are scared together, we are overwhelmed together, and we are alone together. But we are together

Creating Authentic Assessments Through Controversy

We are surrounded by controversy—politics, religion, diets, and even science are all up for debate in our 24/7 world of social media and the internet. With this controversy comes a lot of misinformation and competition with what our students might otherwise be learning in our classrooms. I know this intimately, since I teach fitness and nutrition courses, two topics widely addressed by internet “experts” who continually contradict what I teach in my class. Whereas some may say this makes an instructor’s job more difficult, I have decided to rise to the challenge and use controversy to enhance my students’ learning. By using an assortment of technologies and platforms—web searches, Twitter, TikTok, and more—I have been able to move beyond the classroom to engage my students in real-world problems, a strategy that results in more authentic assessments