Well, I started working in earnest on the Introduction to Psychology class that I was hired to do with Unity College.
At first I was really frustrated with Canvas, the LMS, but, admittedly, it is now growing on me! I actually like it quite a bit.
While the basic unit in Blackboard is a “folder” into which you put items, the basic unit in Canvas is a “Page”…these too act like folders but you simply put links to other Pages.
The process is such that you are best preparing the pages that you want ahead of time and then you can create links between them in other pages. Pretty neat and it is set up with a nice font.
I’m not sure how well it works on the student end. I have not made any assignments or anything yet. I’ve got all my content pages created as templates and I went through and added all the Learning Outcomes for the 8 weeks of modules that make up the class.
Canvas
I decided to do a unique design on this class for the Unity audience. A lot of the assignments connect the concepts to topics related to outdoors, nature, recreation, and the the type of work that these students will be doing. I feel that this has left me more creative, though I do believe it is going to take me longer to get this class done than if I copied material from my existing class.
I’m also actively constructing all the assessments to be “transparent” using what I learned at the Achieving the Dream conference.
All in all, having a great time creating this class. All the LOs are done, so the plan is to update all the Assessments tomorrow. This will be long as I’m making them transparent so I need to come up with some good sample papers.
Mark K.