Reflection of chapter 4 of canvas design

  As a part of the experiment of canvas practicing, I have received and accepted all the invitation of other three courses established by Sunny, Angela and Sam as a student. The canvas system sent me the invitation email to my registered email address automatically when they clicked the “invite” button in people module.

  Different from people module which utilizes external email service to communicate with others, inbox module provides an internal way for communication in canvas system around teachers and students or other participants. I can compose a new message to particular audience who are belonging to different discussion groups in different courses and I can also receive messages from others in courses I’m involved in.

  I can customize each conversation as unread and starred to highlight it for later reading or archived important conversation for later recalling. Absolutely, I can filter different types of marked conversations from all by choosing different sorts listed in diverse drop-down menu.

  Similar with inbox module, announcements module is another effective way to establish a conversation between teachers and students that teachers can create an announcement for his or her course to remind something important or interesting for students to pay attention. As the establisher, teachers can decide if the announcement could be commented and if comments from others could be shown for students who didn’t make a reply before. If teachers make it available for comment, then students can reply the announcement in the special area for comments as a feedback for it.

  As the very important part of academic feedback, students’ grades of different course always need to be sent back to them immediately to let them know their performing in past learning decades. Absolutely, teachers can mute some assignments to hide students’ grades temporarily till the course ending to avoid decreasing their learning interests if they didn’t do well on previous work, but it means that students won’t be allowed to submit comments for assignments and teachers cannot change grade or curve assignments and send relative notifications unless they unmute them.

  There are also many diverse options for teachers to choose according to their purpose in pop-off menus inside the course name and beside the “export” button. For example, teachers can view students’ assignments and give points there directly from “SpeedGrade” page, they can also download students’ assignments as Microsoft Word format and re-upload a new submission which contains their modifying suggestions for specific areas in students’ assignments by marking some sentences which need modify or delete or others. Because I didn’t modify the beginning time of my AR course, I don’t have a chance to see how this grade module works authentically till Mar. 1^st. I’m sorry about that. You know I have set my grading scale in syllabus before without serious consideration. But this grades module provides a practical grading scale for teachers automatically when they type in grades for different assignments, I searched the specific level by trying different points in grading system and finally I figured the grading level of system and modified my previous grading scale according to it.

  Though I also didn’t have a chance to experience the real conference in canvas, I think it’s a really powerful function for online course that teachers can teach class like in real classroom. Teachers can create a conference and set different duration for it depending on their actual purpose, then students can join the conference synchronously with teachers.

  In the new page of online conference, teachers can share his or her webcam, microphone or computer screen to facilitate communication with students and even shoot the video of conference by click shooting button in the right left corner. The name and status of teachers and students will displayed in the user area and teachers can decide the audio input from students by alternatively mute their microphones by clicking dedicated button. For presentation based course, teachers can upload the presentation to the default area and make some marks on it to illustrate their points in the process of conference. Besides audio communication, teachers and students can also type in characters in the chat area and the text contents can be recorded automatically for later reviewing. Canvas provides seven diverse models for online conference by emphasizing different areas so that teachers can choose which to use according to their real needs.

  In my opinion, communication is the spirit of learning and teaching. As you can see, the modules I mentioned above can really make this process as efficient and convenient as traditional class communication or better. I really appreciate this.