Training

Online Faculty Orientation (OFO)

Tailored to empower instructors with the knowledge and skills essential for effective teaching and learning in distance education, OFO participants delve into key concepts, strategies, and best practices customized to address the unique needs of online learners and to foster inclusive, engaging learning environments. Faculty typically complete OFO in five hours or less.

To register for OFO, email oeet@butler.edu.

Facilitating an Effective Online Experience

The “Facilitating an Effective Online Experience” module equips you with key strategies for teaching online, hybrid, and HyFlex courses. By the end, you’ll be able to identify unique policies, foster community and interaction, apply best practices for synchronous and asynchronous activities, monitor learner progress, and understand the benefits and challenges of multi-modal instruction.

Teaching a Virtual Laboratory

Laboratory courses require special consideration in a fully online format or within a pivot pedagogy model.  Face to face laboratories often have outcomes that are hands-on and skill based. A virtual laboratory may not be able to replicate critical laboratory skills. Thus, student outcomes will likely differ from a face to face experience.

Canvas 101 Training for Instructors

This self-enroll course is designed to get you familiar with Canvas. Structured into eight modules, the course covers the overall Canvas interface, content and activity creation, grading, and user settings. If you would like a sandbox to practice the skills covered in this course, complete the Sandbox Request form.

Canvas Next Steps

This self-paced course, designed to take around 2 hours, will guide you through essential Canvas features for enhancing group work, managing assignments, and tracking student progress. By the end, you’ll be able to set up groups, create and manage group assignments, utilize communication and analytics tools, and customize the Gradebook to improve course management and student support.

Customizing Canvas Courses with the HTML Editor

The main goal of this course is to increase your comfort level using the HTML editor so that you can design beautiful, student-friendly courses. This course is intended for teachers who have already learned the basics of setting up a Canvas course through the Canvas 101 and Canvas Tips & Tricks courses, but no prior experience using HTML is required. 

Zoom – Before the Meeting

This module has a twofold purpose: (1) to provide a brief overview of Zoom—what it is, how it works, and why you might want to use it; and (2) to acquaint you with two distinct workflows for scheduling meetings.

Zoom – During the Meeting

Now that you know how to schedule Zoom meetings and update your profile, this module will take you through basic skills to confidently host your own Zoom meeting. 

Zoom for Education

In this module, you will learn about features of Zoom that are beneficial to the classroom. Additionally, you will learn about the Zoom integrations with Canvas that make managing Zoom meetings and recordings more efficient.

Getting Started with Panopto

Panopto is the system used for academic content capture at Butler University. This software allows you to capture audio, video, your computer screen, and other sources connected to a computer. There are also apps for Android and iOS devices. Faculty use Panopto to flip the classroom; introduce complex concepts; record role-playing, lectures, student presentations, and more. Students are able to record their work, activities, and competencies using Panopto. Panopto integrates with Canvas and provides playback for all computer platforms and mobile devices. 

This module is a self-paced resource that will familiarize you with the applications of Panopto and basic recording and playback skills.

Panopto Next Steps

This module is directed to faculty who are comfortable with creating recordings using the Panopto Recorder and sharing those recordings either through Canvas or another means. If you are not comfortable with these skills in Panopto or need a refresher, see the Getting Started with Panopto module.

The objective of this module is to increase your familiarity and confidence with the editing, accessibility, and analytic features of Panopto. 

Student Engagement with Panopto & Canvas Studio

In the “Student Engagement with Panopto & Canvas Studio” course, faculty will learn to use Canvas Studio and Panopto to enhance student engagement through video content. Key topics include facilitating student-created videos, fostering discussions, and integrating embedded quizzes to create interactive learning experiences.

Keeping Accessibility Front of Mind

The “Keeping Accessibility Front of Mind” module empowers you to create inclusive learning experiences. By the end, you’ll understand how accessibility benefits all learners, differentiate between access and accommodation, utilize Canvas accessibility tools, apply Universal Design for Learning principles, and create accessible course materials.

Inclusive Tips for Your Teaching

The goal of this course is help instructors understand the various ways to ensure their course/teaching is more inclusive.

Flipped Classroom Approaches

There is no such thing as the flipped classroom, but what then is a flipped classroom? Flipped pedagogy approaches are evolving along with instructional technology resources. The classroom is now face-to-face, synchronous online, asynchronous online and a dizzying blend of all three within a single course offering. This module will present current flipped pedagogy, its benefits, the importance of active learning and opportunities to see how different faculty are applying flipped to deliver flexible, learner-centered learning.

Mapping Your Course

As you plan your next course, you may be faced with the challenge of pivoting your course techniques and activities to meet whatever changing circumstances occur — whether it’s stay at home orders, social distancing challenges, or student and faculty illness. We hope this module provides some help guiding you through the process for “mapping” your course activities to the outcomes your students need to achieve. 

With a mapped course, you’ll be able to plan ahead for opportunities to rethink activities and be better able to meet whatever upcoming challenges arise. Planning multiple approaches to learning activities and varied modes of delivery in advance will hopefully decrease some stress in the coming semester. In addition, mapping your course gives you a quick overview to refresh your memory on content, activities, and techniques for those courses you may not teach regularly.

The goal is to guide you through key considerations to proactively design effective learning experiences for learners in asynchronous online, synchronous online, and in-class modes throughout a single course of study.

Designing and Administering Exams and Quizzes

This module provides best practices and examples for quiz and exam questions.

Canvas has two different quizzing engines, Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes. While New Quizzes has additional question types, Classic Quizzes is the only tool that is compatible with Proctorio, Butler’s secure exam lockdown and proctoring solution. Because the student experience is different with the two tools, we recommend using one tool consistently for the duration of the semester; therefore, faculty will need to weigh the pros and cons of each tool before adopting one for their course. Consult the New Quizzes Feature Comparison for more information.

To activate the New Quizzes in your course, follow this guide.

Designing Rubrics

Rubrics provide an efficient and effective means to consistently measure student performance on subjective assessments. They should clearly specify the criteria you will use to judge learner work and should be linked to the appropriate SLOs.

Learners benefit from clear rubrics because clear, definitive criteria allow them to evaluate their own effort and work and take more responsibility for their learning.