Teaching with Technology Certificate and Course Enrollments (2024-25 AY)

CATL is continuing the “Teaching with Technology Certificate” program this year! Instructors interested in learning more about how to leverage Canvas and other tools for effective teaching, regardless of modality, are encouraged to participate and complete the full certificate.

The Teaching with Technology Certificate consists of three “Learning and Integrating Technology for Education” (LITE) courses that act as progressive steps in a sequence. Instructors will earn a digital badge after completing the first and second courses in the series, and the Teaching with Technology Certificate after completing the third course. Full-time instructors for the 2024-25 academic year will also earn stipends after completing the second and third courses in the sequence.*

Note: If you have already completed the Distance Education Certificate, this is not a new credential; it has simply been re-titled, so there is no need to re-enroll.

Course Availability, Deadlines, & Compensation

LITE 101: Course Modalities & Technologies

  • All full-time instructors are automatically enrolled in LITE 101: Course Modalities & Technologies. The course will remain open indefinitely, and there is no deadline for completion.
  • LITE 101 is not tied to a stipend.
  • All instructors working toward the Teaching with Technology Certificate who complete LITE 101: Course Modalities & Technologies will be able to enroll in LITE 201: Course Design the following semester.

If you are not a full-time instructor but would like to be added to the course, please email CATL@uwgb.edu.

LITE 201: Course Design

  • Registration for the Spring 2025 cohort of LITE 201 is now closed. Stay tuned for registration info next fall.
  • Full-time instructors who complete LITE 201 within the 2024-25 academic year will qualify for a $250 stipend.*
  • All instructors working toward the Teaching with Technology Certificate who complete LITE 201 will be able to enroll in LITE 301 the following semester/year.

LITE 301: Course Revisions

  • Registration for the Spring 2025 cohort of LITE 301 is now closed. Stay tuned for registration info next year.
  • Full-time instructors who complete LITE 301 within the 2024-25 academic year will qualify for a $250 stipend.*
  • All instructors who complete LITE 301 will receive the Teaching with Technology Certificate.

*Only full-time instructors for the 2024-25 AY are eligible for compensation. To receive compensation, participants must receive approval from their unit chair. Instructors that have already met their maximum overload payment for the contract period do not qualify for compensation.

If you have questions about these courses, please contact CATL at catl@uwgb.edu. If you have questions about compensation or the payment process, please contact Human Resources at hr@uwgb.edu.

Course Descriptions

The first course in the series is called LITE 101: Course Modalities & Technologies. This self-paced course includes information about the different course modalities offered at UW-Green Bay, as well as the technologies you might use for teaching in each one, including in-person teaching. This course also serves as the foundation of the Teaching with Technology Certificate series because it provides an overview of our specific distance education modalities and the technologies that will help you to be successful in them.

LITE 201: Course Design (formerly called Trail Guides) picks up where the first course leaves off. LITE 201 course centers on developing learning pathways for students. This self-paced course is for you if you would like to explore how to develop courses more systematically using evidence-based practices. Through LITE 201, you will develop two modules for a course in Canvas. LITE 201 is self-paced but offered on a semester basis.

In LITE 301: Course Revisions (formerly called Retreats), you will be encouraged to reflect on your own teaching practices. LITE 301 focuses on the process of using feedback, reflection, and scholarly teaching practices to refine classes. You will, for example, explore scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) literature relevant to issues in your course or to revisions or teaching innovations you are considering. You will also engage with several of your colleagues through synchronous and asynchronous activities designed to support your efforts in reflecting on and refining your teaching practices. LITE 301 is offered as a cohort-based, semester-long community of practice.

LITE 115 Course: Enhancing Course Videos with PlayPosit

Is there a teaching technology that you’ve heard CATL talk about but haven’t gotten the chance to try out yet? Want to learn a new tool alongside fellow instructors so you can swap ideas and tips? In addition to the three courses in the Teaching with Technology Certificate, CATL is offering supplemental professional development training courses that explore certain teaching tools and techniques in more depth!

Learning and Integrating Technology for Education (LITE) 115: Enhancing Course Videos with PlayPosit will equip you with the guidance you need to start building interactive videos, called “bulbs,” for your own courses. Work through each module at your own pace as you discover the basics of PlayPosit, build your first bulb, and finally implement PlayPosit bulbs in one of your courses. Participants will also learn how to monitor bulbs and use PlayPosit’s analytics to reveal data on student engagement and achievement that may be informative for planning future iterations of a course.

Prerequisites: None (though completion of LITE 101 is recommended)

When: Registration for the 2025 J-Term section of LITE 115 is now closed. Stay tuned for future opportunities to register.

Badges

Participants will earn a digital badge for completing each of the three modules in LITE 115 that you can include in your email signature or embed in online portfolios or resumes as evidence of your commitment to professional development! Participants will not be obligated to complete all three modules and may participate at whichever level fits their interest and capacity.

Questions?

If you have any questions about LITE 115 or PlayPosit in general, please contact CATL (CATL@uwgb.edu). You can also check out our blog resources on PlayPosit as well as a selection of step-by-step guides in the UWGB IT Knowledgebase.

On Keeping a Teaching Journal

Article by Tara DaPra, Teaching Professor & 2024-25 Instructional Development Consultant

On the last day of the semester, I read the Brendan Kennelly poem “Begin” to my creative writing students, which ends thus: “Though we live in a world that dreams of ending/that always seems about to give in/something that will not acknowledge conclusion/insists that we forever begin.” It’s the perfect poem to describe the commotion of the semester’s end, so when I share this with my students, I acknowledge the desperation many of us feel to get to the other side.

But then what? As the poem instructs, we do it all again. I tell my students that it’s okay if the semester didn’t go just as they’d hoped, that they can try again. They have another semester to accomplish a little more, to do a little better, to become a little stronger. And in the meantime, they should acknowledge all that they have achieved and take a moment to celebrate. And we, their professors can do the same.

What does any of this have to do with a teaching journal?

Whether or not you keep one, you already know what a teaching journal is, but here’s a definition for good measure. In their book Professional Development for Language Teachers, Richards and Farrell define a teaching journal as “an ongoing written account of observations, reflections, and other thoughts about teaching, … which serves as a source of discussion, reflection, or evaluation” (68). If you’re not in the practice of keeping a teaching journal, try responding to formal or informal prompts after an ordinary day of teaching—or a particularly tough one: Which part of today’s class was most successful? Least successful? Did students contribute actively? How did I organize and interact with groups? What did students truly learn?

Richards and Farrell distinguish between an intrapersonal journal, written for oneself, and a dialogical journal, written for another. Many of us learned to keep a dialogical teaching journal as graduate students. In Ohio University’s TA Pedagogy Seminar, teaching assistants are instructed to write at least one entry each week, monitored by the supervising professor. While our teaching today is largely an independent practice, a dialogical journal may still be useful, for example, if you co-teach a course or if you and your colleagues who teach the same general education course wish to compare notes.

But all of us can benefit from an intrapersonal journal, a record of our teaching wins and defeats, a record of tweaks you wish to make the next time you teach the class, that, if not written down, may be forgotten until you repeat the misstep. In a blog post for Inside Higher Ed, “Teach Like You Write,” Daniel Knorr describes his version of a teaching journal, which he does simply by annotating his syllabus during the semester. In this, he acknowledges the influence his students play in his planned revisions. He writes, “I wish my students could see how I will teach this course differently in the future because of their questions and insights. Remembering that this is the beginning of my teaching career and that my students’ learning does not stop when they leave my classroom has helped me focus on the ways I can best teach them now given our other responsibilities and limited time together.”

While it’s easy to use a teaching journal to track the minutiae of day-to-day—this lecture needs to be slower, this discussion fell flat—I admire Knorr’s approach for two reasons: First, he recognizes teaching as a collaborative act, one that our specific students take part in. This requires us to react in real time but also to consider how our students change over the years and decades. We all know that what worked in 2019 may no longer work in the same way. Second, I admire Knorr’s ability to zoom out. He reminds us to see teaching as a vocation we are cultivating: What do I hope students remember a year, five years, twenty years from now? What do I hope to retain and develop in my teaching practice a year, five years, twenty years from now?

Teaching, on a good day, is hard work. Some days that hard work feels deeply gratifying. On others, we may feel a desperation of our own, to get to the other side of the semester, to just be done. (Can’t that Giant Stack of Grading die already?) But we get through it. We always do. And these are the days—the joyous ones and the hardest ones—we ought to pay attention to. Note the tweaks you wish to make but don’t neglect recording the wins. This practice, a kind of gratitude, may help to sustain you.

When I first began sharing with students Brendan Kennelly’s poem “Begin,” this was done on instinct—it just felt right for the occasion. In time, I saw why: it reminds me that what I love best about teaching is the practice, the ability to revise. A teaching journal can help you plot the course.

(You can listen to Brendan Kennelly recite his poem, or, if you prefer, Hozier will read for you.)

Sources Consulted

Howells, Kerry. “The Role of Gratitude in Higher Education.” (2024 Jan). Higher Education Research and Development. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228909266_The_role_of_gratitude_in_higher_education

Kennelly, Brendan. “Begin.” (1999 Dec 1). Begin. Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

Knorr, Daniel, “Teach Like You Write.” (2018 Nov 8.) Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/teach-you-write

“Reflective Writing: Keeping a Teaching Journal.” (2024.) Resources for Teaching Assistants. Ohio University. Retrieved from https://www.ohio.edu/cas/about/assessment/teaching-assistant-resources/reflective-writing-keeping-teaching-journal

Richards, Jack C. and Farrell, Thomas S. C. (eds). (2005). “Keeping a teaching journal.” Professional Development for Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press, pp. 68-84.

Upgrading Outdated Kaltura Players in Canvas

If you use Kaltura to embed videos in your Canvas courses, you may have noticed a change in the appearance of the video player for newly embedded videos. Kaltura video embeds created since August 5, 2024, use an updated “v7” player, which offers faster loading times and new features, including a searchable transcript panel, which improves accessibility and provides students with another way to engage with video content. This change did not upgrade previously embedded videos, so older video embeds still use the now-outdated “v2” player. Because vendor support is ending for the v2 player, we are encouraging UW-Green Bay instructors to replace old v2 player embeds while preparing future Canvas courses and providing resources in this post which will help you accomplish this task.

Why Upgrade?

It is important to upgrade your video embeds because Kaltura will no longer be providing support for the v2 player after December 30, 2024. While we expect v2 player embeds will continue to function for the foreseeable future, no support will be available for future v2 player issues, which could be caused by updates to Canvas or internet browsers. Upgrading embeds now will ensure that you will not need to do so in a panic if v2 player embeds unexpectedly break in the future. Upgrading will also allow students to take advantage of the new search and transcript features added to the v7 player. More information on this player transition is available in this Universities of Wisconsin KnowledgeBase article.

How to tell if your video uses the v2 player?

A side-by-side comparison image of the v2 and v7 Kaltura players. The v2 player on the left has a rectangular play button. The v7 player on the left has a circle-shaped play button.

To help instructors identify video embeds that use the outdated v2 player, a small warning indicator is now visible in the upper left corner of the v2 player during the first ten seconds of playback. This warning indicator first appeared on December 2, 2024, and is a sure sign that the video embed uses the old player. The v2 and v7 players are also visibly distinct in other ways. Before playing a video, the only control visible on the v7 player is a circle-shaped play button in the middle of the player. The outdated v2 player shows additional controls at the bottom of the player before playback, and the play button in the middle of the v2 player is rectangular. More tips for distinguishing between the video players are available in this IT KnowledgeBase article.

How to upgrade players?

Upgrading a single video embed is easy: edit the Canvas page, delete the existing video embed, and then use the My Media tool to create a new embed of the video from your My Media library. You can find more information on manually replacing video embeds in this guide.

Perhaps you use enough videos in your Canvas courses that the thought of finding and manually replacing all those embeds feels overwhelming. If this is the case, we’ve developed a procedure to upgrade all video embeds in a course at once! This procedure uses the Search tool in Canvas to find all v2 player embeds in a Canvas course and replace them with v7 player embeds automatically. By following this procedure, you may be able to upgrade all of the Kaltura video players in a course in as little as five minutes. We recommend first watching the video below to learn how.

The full set of instructions for using this procedure are available on this guide page. For most courses, running this process one time using the find and replace codes provided in the instructions for replacing “Standard Player LTI Embeds” will update all of the video players in the course. We recommend that instructors who want a quick way to update their players try this once to see if it works. Chances are that it will work, but if it doesn’t, you won’t break anything in your course—the search tool just won’t find any matching players. Rest assured, in the very unlikely scenario that something does go terribly wrong with your find and replace attempt, there is an “undo” button for reverting all changes.

When this find and replace doesn’t work on the first try, the process gets trickier. The find and replace codes for “Standard Player LTI Embeds” won’t find any matching players if you selected alternate players (like the “Download/Share/Embed” and “Simplified” players) in the advanced options menu while embedding or if you embedded by copying iframe embed codes from My Media instead of using the button in the Rich Content Editor. The challenge in these cases is remembering which player(s) you used and determining which alternative find and replace codes from the guide will work to upgrade those embeds. The find and replace codes used in this procedure each target a single, specific embed type. If you mixed and matched the players and methods you used to embed videos in a course, you may have to perform multiple find and replace operations in the same course to upgrade all of the videos.

Need Help?

In those tricky cases, please do not hesitate to reach out to CATL for assistance. CATL staff have the knowledge and experience needed for identifying the player types and embed methods used in a course, and we are happy to provide guidance when the standard find and replace codes do not work in a course. If you have tried the procedure with the standard codes, didn’t have success, and are unsure of what to try next, please fill out this survey to request assistance from CATL. Please only submit courses you are preparing for an upcoming term or sandbox courses that you regularly use and update; CATL staff will not have the capacity to work on concluded courses or honor requests to update “all my courses.”

Creating and Using Rubrics for Assessment 

checklist on a clipboard

A rubric is a scoring tool that breaks down the expectations for an assignment into grading criteria. Rubrics serve as a guide for students to complete an assignment successfully and as a measurement tool for instructors to determine to what degree students have met the assignment’s expectations. Rubrics are highly flexible and can be used for a wide variety of assessments. Besides instructor grading, rubrics can also be useful for peer review and student self-evaluation. This guide provides an overview of the different types of rubrics, considerations for creating and using them, as well as examples you can borrow from.

Table of Contents

Advantages of Using Rubrics

Using rubrics for assessment can benefit both the student and the instructor. Rubrics provide transparency in how an assignment will be graded, helping students understand their instructor’s expectations. For instructors, using rubrics can help ensure that their assignment’s grading criteria are aligned with course and assignment outcomes. Grading with a rubric can also increase consistency and objectivity, whether you are the sole grader or are working with a co-teacher or TA. Although creating a rubric requires an initial time investment, it can make your grading process more efficient in the long run.

Rubric Types and Components

Rubrics can be used to assess a wide range of activities – formative and summative assessments, written and oral reports, individual and group projects, and everything in between. Most rubrics list the criteria along the left side and performance level categories (e.g., “meets” or “does not meet” expectations) along the top, creating a matrix for scoring. Other rubrics may omit these performance level categories in favor of freeform comments. A rubric may or may not have points attached to each criterion, depending on how the rubric is being used to assess a student’s work.

Criteria

checklistA rubric defines the criteria used to assess an activity, project, or performance. On a typical rubric, the criteria are listed along the left side, and the document is divided into rows. The number of criteria a rubric contains will vary greatly depending on the complexity of the task being assessed and how granular the instructor would like the grade breakdown to be. A rubric for a simple activity might only have two or three criteria, whereas a rubric for a complex summative assessment might have ten.

Generally speaking, a rubric’s criteria should be:

  • Mutually exclusive. Criteria should not overlap with one another to avoid awarding or detracting points for the same category more than once.
  • Objective. Criteria should be measurable and rely on concrete, observable evidence. Try to avoid using subjective terminology like “interesting” or “good.”
  • Exhaustive. The listed criteria should cover all aspects that an assignment is designed to assess. Likewise, the point total for a rubric should match the point total for the activity.

Additionally, a rubric’s criteria should align with the assignment and course outcomes. As you develop a rubric, compare its criteria with the outcomes of the assignment. Are there any elements you need to assess that are not captured in the rubric? Are there elements in the rubric that are irrelevant to the assignment’s purpose? If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, consider revising your rubric’s criteria to more accurately reflect the assignment’s learning outcomes.

Performance Levels

Most rubrics are broken down into performance levels that describe the quality of a student’s work and/or the level of completeness. Like criteria, the number of performance level categories can vary greatly depending on the type of assessment and the preferences of the instructor. Including more performance levels allows for more granular grading, but also makes a rubric more complex. Performance levels are usually listed as a scale along the top of a rubric, dividing the document into columns.

Example Performance Level Scales

2 Performance Levels 3+ Performance Levels
  • Meets Expectations
  • Does Not Meet Expectations
  • Exceeds Expectations
  • Meets Expectations
  • Does Not Meet Expectations
  • Complete
  • Incomplete
  • Advanced
  • Proficient
  • Developing
  • Beginner
  • Yes
  • No
  • Excellent
  • Good
  • Fair
  • Poor
  • Unacceptable/Inadequate

Descriptions

If you include performance levels, you should also explain what these levels look like for each criterion. For example, if “organization” is a criterion for a written report, what exactly does “excellent” organization in a report look like? What about a paper with “good” or “fair” organization? These descriptions should clarify any ambiguity about the criteria and the performance levels, guiding students in their successful completion of the assignment.

Points

scoreboard

It is common for each criterion of a rubric to have a point value tied to it. The point values can be the same for each criterion, or they can vary if some criteria are a bigger contributing factor to students’ success on the assignment compared to the other criteria. If the rubric uses performance levels, each performance level should be assigned a point value as well. The highest performance level is awarded the maximum point value for a given criterion, with the rest of the performance levels assigned decreasing amounts of points accordingly.

If you’re not sure how to define point categories on a rubric, first determine the maximum number of points you’d like to award for a given criterion. Then, set a point value scale based on this maximum point value and the number of performance categories. Not every point scale will contain “0”, but if the criterion is something that a student could hypothetically earn no points on, you may want to factor that into your point scale.

You will also need to decide if you want each performance level to correlate to a single point value or encompass a range of point values. Using point value ranges allows for more flexibility in terms of scoring but it can also make grading more complicated than using set values. For example, if the “excellent” performance level is worth between 8 and 10 points, that allows you to assign a score of “9,” “9.5”, or any score that falls within that range when grading.

Example Point Scales

Let’s say you have a criterion worth 10 points and five performance level categories. Here are a few ways you could go about setting your point value scale depending on your grading needs. Notice that for the “Point Value Range” example there must not be any gaps or overlaps in the score ranges.

Set Point Values (Omitting Zero) Set Point Values (Including Zero) Point Value Range
Excellent: 10 pts

Good: 8 pts

Fair: 6 pts

Poor: 4 pts

Incomplete/No Submission: 2 pts

 Excellent: 10 pts

Good: 7.5 pts

Fair: 5 pts

Poor: 2.5 pts

Incomplete/No Submission: 0 pts

 Excellent: 10 > 8 pts

Good: 8 > 6 pts

Fair: 6 > 4 pts

Poor: 4 > 2 pts

Incomplete/No Submission: 2 > 0 pts

Using Rubrics Without Points

It is also possible to use a rubric without point values. If you’d like, you can grade students using just the performance categories or by writing freeform comments for each criterion. This can be useful for low-stakes formative assessments, in-class practice activities, and peer review exercises. Using rubrics without points also allows you to provide qualitative feedback for work graded on a complete/incomplete basis.

Recommendations for Using Rubrics

students adding post-it notes to a wall

In addition to the decisions outlined above regarding criteria, performance levels, descriptions, and points, here are a few recommendations to consider when using rubrics. These strategies can help you make the most out of rubrics as both a teaching tool and an assessment tool. Click on a suggestion to expand the accordion and read more.

One of the key advantages of using rubrics for assessment is that they can make your expectations more transparent to students. By sharing the rubric for an assignment in advance, students can use it as a guide to successfully complete the assignment. This practice is beneficial for all students but has particularly positive impacts for certain demographics that may require additional transparency in assignment directions, like first-gen students and neurodivergent students. 

There is quite a bit of research that supports the idea of involving students in the assessment creation process to enhance their engagement and learning (Stiggins & Chappuis, 2005; Lubicz-Nawrocka, 2018; ). One way to achieve this is by developing rubrics together as a class. This work can be done synchronously through brainstorming session during class or asynchronously through a discussion board or survey. By co-authoring rubrics with your students, you allow them to develop a deeper understanding of their own learning and the nature of assessment. If you’d like to learn more about this strategy, this model for collaborative rubric construction from the Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice is a good place to start. 

Sometimes showing is more powerful than telling. In addition to providing written descriptions of your expectations within the rubric itself, consider providing a couple examples of what exemplary, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory work looks like. These could be resources that you’ve created, examples sourced online, or anonymized student work from a previous semester that you've received consent to use. Keep in mind that you can share just part of a work sample if you want it to serve as an example for a specific criterion. 

Although you can grade with rubrics in Microsoft Word or write out comments on paper, using the rubrics tool in Canvas has its own unique advantages. When you attach a Canvas rubric to an assignment or graded discussion, the rubric will also show up in SpeedGrader, making it very quick and easy to grade online submissions. To grade with a Canvas rubric, simply click a box for each criterion to indicate the student’s performance level. You can also type comments for each criterion. If you check the box “use rubric for assignment grading” when attaching a rubric to an assignment, Canvas will even auto-calculate the point total as you fill out the rubric. Plus, once you’ve built a rubric in Canvas, you can easily reuse it in any of your other courses. You can learn more about creating and using Canvas rubrics in the Canvas instructor guides or by setting up and consultation with CATL. 

Example Rubrics

Not sure where to start? See the examples below for rubrics for various assessments, projects, and disciplines. You might also consider using a GAI tool like Microsoft Copilot to speed up the drafting process.

Questions?

CATL is available for consultations if you have any questions about rubrics or are wondering how to create your own. Send us an email or fill out our consultation form to set up a meeting with a CATL member. Or drop us a comment below to let us know how you’ve rubrics in your own courses!

Additional Resources & Further Reading

Web Guides from Other Universities

Books

Articles and Research