Plan Your Instruction

[This is a guided explanation of how to get started with Canvas for faculty members who have been making minimal use of Canvas so far. The following pages detail how to set up a very basic site, and once you have done this confidently you will be ready to take any next steps you wish to take.]

Your next task is to decide on what “virtual instruction” in the course will look like.

For a start, just think in terms of two weeks:  what kind of instruction do you want to accomplish in the two weeks before Spring Break?  Figure that out now, and then, when you have the course set up, think about the bigger issues of getting to know more about Canvas, trying new tools, etc…

There are two general forms of instruction that you can use:

Synchronous:  everyone meets at the same time online and interacts together at that time. Instructors who use synchronous instruction use a program like Zoom to gather everyone together during the scheduled class time.

Asynchronous:  you and your students do your work at different times, usually by a deadline.

For now, a basic plan would be to keep it asynchronous;  keep it simple.

In an asynchronous plan, students will log on to the site, receive instruction from you, will do activities you specify, and will submit work to you by a deadline you set.

Canvas provides you with the general tools that you need to do set up a basic, asynchronous plan:

Pages:  places where you can write instruction.

Files:  Documents that you upload to canvas for students to download.

Assignments:  Places where students submit work to you.

More advanced:

Discussion:  places where you and your students can discuss course content in less formal ways.

Video:  You can record yourself talking to your students or embed video from another outside site into one of your pages.

At this stage, depending on your confidence with Canvas, a reasonable first step for setting up your course work during a week might be:

  1. Provide written instruction and direct students to work with an outside source (e. g. a textbook),
  2. Instruct them to communicate questions to you (via email), and then
  3. Assign them to submit an assignment, perhaps something like a brief reflective essay, to which you will respond.

For Castleton online courses, the general expectation is that instructors will have some individual contact with each student once a week.  You can achieve a basic form of contact by following these three steps.

Once you have the big picture, you might begin by writing a letter to your students outlining and explaining each step.  You might note both instruction you will give and directions you will provide them. If you know that you will detail special instructions in another document (e. g. you will have a longer individual essay assignment), then you might just  summarize that here in the letter and plan to provide the assignment separately.  You know how to imagine a student who doesn’t know you or your expectations as a way to make them clear to everyone; write to that student.

In the next steps, you will set up your course site to deliver this plan.