Faculty are periodically asked to check their courses for students who are not engaged with the course and report these students in Navigate so that advisors can follow-up with the student. This page outlines the main tools that can be used to check a Canvas course for students who are not engaged.
Please note that these Canvas tools are imperfect, so CATL does not recommend that they be used for grading participation in your course.
New Analytics
Instructors can use the New Analytics tool in their Canvas course to view a sortable table of student participation data that includes the last participation date, page view count, and participation count for each student. A list of what Canvas counts as participations can be found in this guide. Here is how you can view this table in your course’s New Analytics page:
Click the New Analytics button that is located on the right side of the course home page or click the New Analytics link in the course navigation menu.
In the New Analytics page, click the Students tab to view the table of student participation data.
Click on any table column’s header to sort the list of students by that column’s data.
Students who have not engaged with the course at all will have no or very few page views counted in this table.
Instructors can look more closely at individual students by clicking their names. Please reference this Canvas guide for more information on using New Analytics to view individual student participation statistics.
Please note that data in New Analytics refreshes once every 24 hours, so this page may not reflect recent activity in the course. The date and time the data was last refreshed are visible near the top of the page under the “Average Course Grade.”
Course Access Reports
If greater detail is needed, instructors can view a list of course pages that a student has accessed by viewing that student’s course access report. Here’s how to view the course access report for a student in your course:
Open the People page of the Canvas course by clicking People in the course navigation menu.
In the list of students, click on the student’s name.
In the sidebar that appears on the right side of the page, click on the student’s name.
Click the Access Report button located on the right side of the user details page.
If the access report is empty, the student has not accessed the Canvas course.
People Page
The list of students on the People page in your Canvas course contains some student participation data, including the last activity date and total activity time. Students with no date listed under the last activity column have likely never accessed the course.
The reported total activity time does not track time spent viewing the course on the Canvas mobile apps and is prone to other measurement errors, so it is often an inaccurate representation of a student’s actual engagement with a course.
One point of confusion for instructors with the People page is the presence of an “inactive” tag after a student’s name. This tag indicates that the student has dropped the course in SIS; it is not an indication of disengagement from an enrolled student.
While this fall semester looks and feels different, social distancing does not mean that we are socially distanced from the events of the world around us. In fact, it sometimes feels as though being socially distanced from one another amplifies the impact of the events in the world around us.
As we navigate the days and weeks after the Presidential election, we may find ourselves confronted with realities of this significant event even if we have not invited the election into our classroom. Our students may ask questions, discuss reports about the election, or share perspectives that we may not be prepared to guide an entire class through, especially in an online, asynchronous modality.
If you are concerned about how you will engage students in polite political discourse as we move through the post-election responses, you are not alone. Here are a few resources that you might find useful as you consider if and how you could include discussion of the election in your course.
The Students Learn Students Vote Coalition and Ask Every Student host a recurring virtual post-election gathering to discuss resources for campus stakeholders and faculty. Ask Every Student also provides a detailed Post-Election Campus Resource and Response Guide. The guide is broken into six key areas with suggestions and resources for each:
Prepare partnerships ahead of time.
Instill confidence in election results.
Allow time and space for processing.
Facilitate opportunities for healing.
Hold spaces for dialogue and verbal expression.
Move towards action.
One way you can better support your students in engaging in polite political discourse is to create and frame a space for them to express their thoughts in your Canvas course.If you have a class discussion forum – you may call this the class questions, class forum, water cooler, or in the halls discussion board in your Canvas course – you could start a thread specifically to discuss the Presidential Election. Remind students with the initial thread that this is a public space for students to share their thoughts in a collegial and respectful manner.
Maintaining civil discourse in an online environment is not a new concern and there are a lot of resources to help guide how you frame an online dialogue with students. Jean Dimeo’s 2017 article, “Keeping it Civil Online”, provides faculty-tested strategies. Alyson Klein’s more recent article, “Talking Civics in a Remote Classes in 2020: What Could Go Wrong?” contextualizes the challenges with online discourse to our current context. Plus, you can always reach out to CATL directly to share your ideas about how to frame a potentially charged conversation in your online class.
If the thought of an open discussion forum leaves you a little uneasy, you may want to direct your students to other resources. You could post an announcement or refer students who reach out to you directly to any of the following virtual events:
UW-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies is hosting an Election Post–Mortem on Nov. 6, 2020, from 3 – 5 pm CT.
Harper College’s Professional Advisors Committee Speaker Series presents Post Election Outlook 2020 on Nov. 12, 2020, at 10 am CT.
There are also resources on campus that can help students process their emotional response to the election.UW-Green Bay’s Wellness Centerprovides free counseling services for students and a variety of other resources related to wellness and mental health. Counseling is also available at the Manitowoc, Marinette, and Sheboygan campuses.
Every four years there is a significant political touch point that can ignite any classroom into incivility. Our goal as faculty is to foster polite political discourse. While that goal may seem more challenging in our current learning landscape, it is not impossible.
By the time this post is published, we’ll be past the halfway mark of the fall semester. Adding the spring semester to this fall, that’s around a full semester of mostly online, virtual synchronous, and blended/hybrid instruction. These are instructional modalities that some instructors and students are disinclined to use. But here we are, nonetheless, making the best of things. Students are continuing their educational journey in what are for many new and uncomfortable environments, while instructors are wrestling with providing an equitable learning experience through technology and perseverance.
It is perhaps because of the focus on providing remote students all of the same information and activities that we can sometimes forget to include “us.” Online education can often devolve into a series of tasks that one checks off. We meander into holding virtual correspondence courses, silently reviewing student homework, assessments, and discussion posts and assigning scores.
When we’re teaching in-person, having a side conversation with students before or after class or an informal chat during group worktime can be a trivial task to complete and also be rewarding for students and instructors at the same time. Office hours, although perhaps underutilized, provide another opportunity for ad-hoc in-person engagement with students. But what happens when we don’t actually see our students? Where do ad-hoc and interpersonal conversations go? Some people may argue the lack of that type of engagement with our students and them with us is part and parcel of online instruction.
“Online students choose this environment.”
—Made-up instructor used for narrative purposes
Even if one does subscribe to that approach, the nature of our current educational environment includes many remote students who did not choose their current learning environment. They prefer in-person education, talking with their peers and instructors, and a structured educational experience. Online students prefer personal interactions with their instructors as well! In fact, it’s been shown to positively relate to student grades (Jaggars, S. & Xu, D., 2013)
So how does one recreate the feeling of connectedness, ad-hoc conversations, and interpersonal engagement with remote students? We’ve provided some examples of how instructors can do this while increasing their “there-ness” in courses, below.
Provide timely feedback on student work
Assignment and assessment feedback can serve double duty for instructors. First, feedback allows students to correct misconceptions, assess the amount of effort they’re putting into the course and perhaps increase it, and be better prepared for subsequent assessments. Second, feedback allows instructors to form an interpersonal connection with students. Depending on the subject matter and the course, feedback may be the only personal connection instructors form with students. Feedback can provide an opportunity to provide personalized instruction to students that may not be available through other means.
Consider including the student’s name when providing feedback, even if the feedback is somewhat canned. It personalizes the feedback, lets students know they’re “seen,” and communicates nonverbally that the student is “part of the community of people…” (Willemsen, 1995, p. 15). As Kent Syverud (1993) points out, “who is the one teacher in your entire life who made the biggest difference for you — who taught you so well that you still think about him or her as your best teacher. I bet that for almost all of us, that best teacher was someone who knew you by name” (p. 247).
“We put a bird on toast.”
Put a bird face (or voice) on it
Although not for everyone, instructors can add presence to their course through the incorporation of brief videos. We’re not referring to hour-long PowerPoint presentations, but rather short webcam recordings. These recordings can be used to introduce units, particularly challenging topics, or to serve as a way to deliver announcements to the class. In an example below, Prof. Matt Mooney (History at Santa Barbara Community College) uses videos at the start of a new modules to help students through sticky topics. Mooney visually communicates a historical phenomenon included in an upcoming module that students are known to struggle with.
An additional or alternative way to reinforce your course presence is through “video postcards.” The example below is from Fabiola Torres, Ethnic Studies professor at Glendale College, who uses video postcards to communicate with her students when she’s not readily available. In the example provided, Dr. Torres is at a conference and using her smartphone to record a brief message to her students.
Recordings like Dr. Torres’s reinforce to their students that their professor is in fact a real person and their course is not led by a robot. This process of “humanization” is shown to increase positive traits like trust and psychological safety in student-instructor relationships, which can help keep your students engage with the course long-term (Gehlbach et al., 2016).
For those disinclined to recording video of themselves, recording just audio may provide a happy middle-ground. Besides providing a human connection that written text cannot, audio recordings can also help prevent misinterpretations in tone that reading text can lead to. Because of this, audio recordings are often paired with feedback to students on their work. However, audio recordings don’t need to be restricted to feedback. Some experienced online instructors choose to use audio recordings throughout their courses to introduce topics, explain difficult concepts, and provide and additional way learners can engage with content.
Communicate regularly
Another way to engage and build rapport with remote students is through regular communication and announcements. This messaging can help students not accustomed to being in a less structured learning environment to stay on track, and also allow for ad-hoc responses from students that may be silently struggling. Irregular communication was identified as a large problem by students following the spring semester and is often over-looked as a simple way to address student disengagement and feelings of disconnection.
Some areas that can lend themselves well to regular communication are introducing new units or topics, shining light on a difficult concept or something that came up in discussion or through private communication, kudos to share with the class to call out quality student work and call out what quality work looks like for those that aren’t quite there yet, and recapping units that the class is finishing up to reinforce critical concepts.
Message students who…
When working with students in-person, it can be fairly trivial to let students know it would be in their best interest to contact you regarding their graded work. However, when teaching remotely this can seem much more challenging. Did they read the feedback that was provided? Who knows?
Regardless of whether they read your feedback, you can still make it clear they really ought to get in touch. This can be accomplished through the Message Students Who feature in Canvas. This feature allows instructors to message any students in their classes that meet certain criteria for a particular graded activity. Options include students that have not submitted anything for the graded activity, those that haven’t been graded yet, and those with scores lower or higher than a specified threshold. More information is available here.
Office hours
Although instructors aren’t likely to be offering office hours in-person this year, it’s still possible to hold “live” office hours through virtual meetings. Consider providing a recurring virtual meeting to your students during your scheduled office hours. This can allow your students to take advantage of the focused help that office hours provide, along with the non-verbal cues a video call can provide and include the tone missing from textual communication.
The meeting could be set up as a Collaborate Ultra meeting in Canvas, an open Teams or Zoom meeting link provided in your course, an Outlook Calendar invite to your students containing the room link, or through some other method.
If Discussions are used, use Discussions
The discussions area of Canvas can be another place where instructors can engage with their students. If you’re already using Discussions in your course but don’t participate, consider how you could. This provides another opportunity for students to connect with you as sage or guide and gives you an opportunity to turn the discussion in the proper direction when needed and correct misconceptions.
Sound like more work than you’d like to take on? It can be. That’s why it’s important to manage the time spent in discussions. Set aside twenty or thirty minutes a couple times per week with the intent of replying to discussion posts. In the time you’ve set aside, post where you feel you’ll have the greatest impact, not in response to every student.
Make a schedule
Veteran online instructors often integrate a to-do list for their classes into their own weekly schedules. This can help in keeping oneself accountable and on task and help segregate class-time from other responsibilities. A schedule might include things like, ready/post in weekly discussion, make weekly announcement, contact at-risk students, send encouraging email, etc.
How do you “connect” with your students?
The information above is far from an exhaustive coverage of methods to make oneself visibly available and connected with one’s course. What methods do you implement? What has and hasn’t worked well? Questions about implementing something above or seen elsewhere? Drop a comment below or email us at CATL@uwgb.edu.
Overlapping crises have framed our experience this fall and the election brings these crises intosharp focus. Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) write “amid a rising tide of political polarization, hate crimes, and widespread social mobilization, the United States is at a heightened risk of violence and instability going into the 2020 election.” This risk, they note “is further exacerbated by an economic contraction triggered by the global COVID-19 pandemic, which may now be posed for a second wave.” Instructors, students, and staff feel the impact of this instability and vulnerability alike.
Whether or not the election itself is a relevant and teachable topic for your class, it will likely be a major influence on the lived experience of all of us. This post collects some information on how to work with the reality that the election hovers over all of us. Then,the post discusses some ways you may wish to incorporate it into your classroom. It ends with places to refer students.
The election touches us all (but not equally)
We all live within a context of increased stress as we approach the election. Much of this stress is outside our direct control. Depending on the identities one holds, they may also experience the increased stress of racist, homophobic, or otherwise marginalizing public discourse.Our experiences with the election are not equal. In this context,political polarization has increased the general perception of feeling dehumanized. We all carry complicated feelings into the classroom but we do so unequally.
To complicate matters, many instructors are already doing additional care work in their teaching and home lives. The election may bring on feelings of more care work to come. The University of Oregon has collected some self-care strategies and some ways to communicate care to students that you may find useful to employ in your classroom. The goal is not to increase the already high workload but rather to acknowledge the care work instructors are doing and offer strategies for doing it.
Self–care strategies
Plan flexibility into your schedule:It may be helpful to look at your meetings and see which ones are crucial and which ones are not. Perhaps you can find ways to decrease your workload and find space to reflect, process, and breathe.
Plan to process your emotions:If you haven’t already, identify people you feel you can contact to discuss your feelings about the election—even plan for when you’ll connect.
Access resources that support mental and emotional health:The university has mental health resources available to students and employees.
Communicate care to students
Verbalize care:You may wish to put an announcement in Canvas that you acknowledge that the election is a stressful event and that you care about your students’ well–being regardless of their political beliefs.
Build flexibility into your class schedule:Assess the workload for the week of the election and see if there is possibility to build in some flexibility with deadlines.
Refer students:You cannot solve all problems and may wish to share the resources at the bottom of this post with your students.
If the election fits into your course content
What role does your discipline play?
Teaching about the election may not suit your classes. But, if it does, just about every discipline can help our students evaluate the platforms of our elected leaders from a critical perspective. The University of Michigan Center for Research in Learning and Teaching(CRLT) has put together some resources to help instructors think through how to facilitate lessons about the election from within their disciplines:
As you prepare to facilitate discussion about the election, consider these questions:
Which topics within my discipline might require special attention in light of the election?
How might the candidate platforms be a resource for teaching and learning these topics?
How might my discipline be impacted by policy decisions as a result of the election?
What are the diverse perspectives and voices that characterize my field related to these topics, and how do I maintain some balance in presenting them?
How might your courses allow students to practice core democratic skills?
Again, as the Michigan CRLT recommends, the classroom can be a place of informed and respectful dialogue amid a political context when this is all too rare. In that sense classrooms are vital democratic spaces.In addition to the content of our individual disciplines, there are overarching democratic skills that students can develop in courses across the University. These include:
The ability to engage in respectful discourse and thoughtful argumentation
The capacity to speak and listen in ways that promote collective learning and advance social good
The skills of critical literacy and the ability to evaluate bias in text, discourse, and other mediums
It is easy to feel alone when under stress. If you know of students who are struggling as they deal with election issues or outcomes, there are resources on campus where you can refer them.
The Phoenix Cares site serves as a hub for financial, academic, and mental health support. It also has emergency food and housing options available to students.
You may wish to refer students to specialized help from many of our campus offices that have specific expertise:
The election affects us all but we may not all engage with it in the classroom in the same way. The purpose of this post is not to provide “the answer” for how to teach the importance of the election to students. Rather it acknowledges the election’s role as a framing element of our lives and offers multiple ways to engage with it at the personal, interpersonal, and disciplinary levels.
Are you having a hard time reaching all of your students through your usual communication channels or are you unsure of ways to re-engage students who haven’t been turning in work? In our blog post last week, we collected resources about how to get feedback from your students at mid-semesterto figure out what’s working and what might need to shift. This week, we want to give you some strategies for engaging with your students when they may be difficult to reach mid-semester.
Here are our strategies for leveraging technology and tools tore-engage students:
Use transparent and consistent messaging strategies.Letting students know how you’re going to contact them early in the semester can help set this expectation, but ifwhat you decided to use isn’t working as expected, try reaching out to the whole class with a duplicate message either:
Use the “Message Students Who” tool built into the Canvas Gradebook. This feature allows you to just message students who haven’t submitted to an assignment or based on some other criteria.
Record short, just-in-time-videos to help direct students to the things they should focus on for the week and in the upcoming weeks. You can create videos using Kaltura My Media.
Consider also creating a page or schedule where students can see with all due dates listed for the course if you don’t have one already.
Add due dates to assignments, discussions, and quizzes so that students are reminded via the “student to–do list” on the course homepage.
You can give students these instructions on how to sign up for an appointment time slot.
Regardless of whether you used Navigate to create progress reports for your students around week 5, you can still create “ad hoc alerts” to help students who may need some additional assistance connect with their advisors.
Here’s a YouTube video that covers how to issue alerts in Navigate.
Whatother scalabletips and tricks you can share to reach students? Let us know either by commenting here or emailing us at CATL@uwgb.edu.
It is perhaps because of the focus on providing remote students all of the same information and activities that we can sometimes forget to include “us.” Online education can often devolve into a series of tasks that one checks off. We meander into holding virtual correspondence courses, silently reviewing student homework, assessments, and discussion posts and assigning scores.
