I want to make my course’s LMS home page more visually appealing.
We use Canvas as our LMS and I use the modules page as my course home page. I’m all about leveraging module requirements to ensure that students actually go through the modules. The modules page in Canvas is essentially an accordion style navigation page so when expanded out, all those pages can be intimidating and overwhelming. I’ve tinkered with using emojis in the module titles and used module headers once or twice – that was more of a proof of concept type of thing just to see how it works and how students responded to it. This semester I’m going all in with thoughtful use of emojis and headers to help students understand what they are seeing at a glance such as:
- 🎦 indicates a page videos for them to watch
- ✍️ indicates a handwritten assignment
This also means I’m spending an inordinate amount time deciding what emoji to use for things like a link to a Google Doc that will create a copy of that doc in the student’s Google Drive. [Clipboard 📋? Wrapped gift 🎁? The magic wand emoji coming out later this year might be good, but it’s not available now. ]
Simplify Grading
I’ve already gone a long way in simplifying grading when I switched to mastery based grading (MBG) a couple of years ago. It’s taken me that long to refine it in a way that will work for me, and I think I finally have a system that both provides students actionable feedback & keeps my grading manageable. I love MBG for a bunch of reasons (it deserves its own post which I hope to do soon), but finding a way to implement it that let students easily know their letter grade took me a while. My new system is basically a checklist: as students show mastery of outcomes and satisfactorily complete certain projects, they check them off a list; based on what they have checked off, they can know their letter grade. (I even adapted an interactive Google Sheet checklist from one of my MBG colleagues which I think the students will really like.)
I’m also going to have students upload a lot of their handwritten work to either Canvas or Gradescope – no papers for me to carry, students can hold on to their work to review and I can use an online grader. Canvas and Gradescope both have their pros and cons which I won’t get into here. (If we had an institutional account with Gradescope which includes Canvas integration, I’d go with Gradescope, but the convenience of grading everything in Canvas is winning out.)
Use Trinkets to Introduce Students to Computational Physics
I know coding is all the rage, but for my students – introductory physics students who are mostly pursuing careers in engineering, math and computer science – coding is a powerful computational tool that they will use in their upper division courses and in their professional careers. I spent last year learning a lot about incorporating computational physics from the amazing folks at PICUP (Partnership for the Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics).
Trinkets (using mostly Glowscript) makes the coding accessible to students even if they have no coding experience. I’m providing working code in the Trinket (some made or adapted by me from PICUP exercises but many from Sherwood & Chabay) and the students modify it. I’m very excited to have my students use Trinkets to explore things that don’t have easy “math solutions” and are usually avoided in introductory classes. I hope they will see how it can also be a powerful tool to do “traditional” problems as well.
I actually do enjoy coding (back in my day we called it “programming” – I’m old) and I’m happy to get back to it!
Diffuse Reflections 