Remote Learning Heroes for June: All of Our JumpStart Lite Attendees

Learning Technologies would like to recognize this month's Remote Learning Faculty Heroes: the attendees of our Summer 2020 JumpStart Lite course design trainings!

As the Covid-19 pandemic progresses, ESU faculty and Learning Tech staff have had to be creative in how to communicate the course design process to as many people as possible, while remaining both remote and socially distanced. To accomplish this goal, the concept of JumpStart Lite, a scaled-down version of the traditional JumpStart course, was created and rolled out starting in early June.

Since then, we've had three cohorts of faculty come through our training successfully. It hasn't always been easy; there has been a steep learning curve for those of us presenting the material and for the faculty learning that same material, the two days of Zoom training can be draining.

Nonetheless, faculty from a variety of disciplines have put in the work, asked the hard, but important, questions, raised good points, and laughed dutifully at our jokes. We hope that you are learning as much as we are and thank you for your patience, great attitude, and willingness to contribute to this "unprecedented situation" (a phrase of which I think we are all getting heartily sick!)

Congratulations and thank you to our faculty!

Learning Technologies staff

Recent Updates to Canvas

Canvas is constantly rolling out updates in the form of "sprints." There were several new features included in the recent sprints, including:

• Assignment menus in the gradebook now contain a link to SpeedGrader, making accessing SpeedGrader simpler.
• There is a new option called Direct Share that allows users to copy individual course items into another course and share those individual items with other users.
  
• Drag and drop functionality for multiple files has been added. This simplifies importing large numbers of documents and makes the process more efficient.
  
• Instructors can now limit the number of attempts for an assignment. Rather than automatically allowing unlimited attempts, you can restrict students to only one or two submissions.
• All users can now mute notifications on a course by course basis.

As always, contact the Help Desk or a Learning Designer for assistance with any of these new features.There will be more sprints coming in June and July; keep an eye on this space for more information!