The SAMR Model

The SAMR framework stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. It was developed by Ruben Puentedura to categorize classroom technologies and can be used to decide which technologies might be right for you in a given situation.

Consider these “degrees” (rather than “levels”). Each has their place. Let’s look at the acronym using a typical classroom lecture as our example. This is, of course, only an overview for you to consider as you decide the best ways to communicate with your students, choose and build course materials, create assessments, and more. To go into any of this in more detail, always feel free to meet with someone in CATL.

  • S—Substitution: The new medium replaces the old medium but does not change the task.
    An example might be going from chalk to dry erase—the lecture remains the same.
  • A—Augmentation: The new medium is still a substitute but adds functionality.
    In our example, let’s say you have some magnetic models to put on the board—you can supplement your lecture with these illustrations and save time re-drawing the same figures.
  • M—Modification: The technology is used to re-design the task.
    For example, students use a classroom response system to steer the lecture—the lecture is taking on a new form; it’s still recognizable as such, but even the material will vary depending on how the students interact.
  • And R—Redefinition: Designing and creating a new task altogether.
    If lecture just doesn’t cut it, you might instead build a site your entire class can use to develop an Open Educational Resource.

The SAMR model is a valuable tool to use as you’re considering technologies for your courses. Keep in mind, as you move “up” the model (or down the list above), you will introduce additional cognitive load. It is important to balance additions with scaffolding and by returning to your objectives and reviewing the alignment of your course.

Checking for Students Who Are Not Engaged in Canvas

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:

  1. 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.
    Screenshot of the New Analytics button
  2. In the New Analytics page, click the Students tab to view the table of student participation data.
  3. Click on any table column’s header to sort the list of students by that column’s data.
    Screenshot of the Canvas New Analytics student table screen highlighting the Students tab and the column headers that can be clicked for sorting the table.

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:

  1. Open the People page of the Canvas course by clicking People in the course navigation menu.
  2. In the list of students, click on the student’s name.
  3. In the sidebar that appears on the right side of the page, click on the student’s name.
  4. Click the Access Report button located on the right side of the user details page.

Screenshot of the Access Report button in Canvas

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.

Backward Design

What is backward design?

Backward design is a three-stage process for designing a course:

  1. Identify outcomes or the desired results of learning.
  2. Determine what counts as acceptable evidence of learning.
  3. Plan learning experiences or instruction that will lead students. to achieve your outcomes and provide evidence of learning.

Instructional designers call this process “backward” because one starts with the outcomes and works backward towards daily lessons. One strategy for arraying course experiences is called “scaffolding”—building on prior knowledge to reach new knowledge. A detailed overview of scaffolding can be found here.

This process is most closely associated with a book called Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005). You can read a condensed version of the book if you like or watch the video below to learn more.

How does backward design relate to digital democracy?

The structure of your course speaks volumes to students. When learning outcomes, activities, and assessments work together, students know what to do and how their work contributes to their overall success in the course. At a time when face-to-face communication is at a premium, the structure of the course stands stands in for the check-ins at the beginning of class, where the instructor orients students to how the activities of the day contribute to the overall goals of the course. When the course itself makes transparent connections between outcomes, activities, and assessments you and your students do not have to lumber off to a web conference to discuss these matters. Moreover, students who are not able to attend a web conference are not left out.

How can backward design help me?

Backward design ensures that your outcomes, activities, and assessments work together. As William Strunk, Jr. said of writing: “sentences should contain no unnecessary words… for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts” (Elements of Style, Rule 17.) So too should a course contain no unnecessary work. Backward design helps you determine which elements of your course to keep (those that help students meet the course outcomes as measured by the assessments) and which elements may be edited out (those which do not help your students show mastery of the course outcomes).

Alignment

Diagram showing a "triangle" of intended outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessment.

Backward design implies a linear method (albeit in reverse) where one starts with outcomes works backward to assessment and then back again to daily learning activities. In an ideal world, that would be true. But in reality it is more useful to think of backward design as a process that instructors can enter at any of the three points and then use the other two to triangulate their course design.

For example, you may have a really great group project that you think will make a great assessment. To ensure the project fits in your course you will want to attach learning outcomes to it and plan daily activities that will lead your students toward being successful on the final project. This group project is every bit as aligned as one which started with the outcomes and proceeded backward to the assessment (group project) and back again to the daily activities. The key idea is that all three sides of the triangle should work together.

Applying Backward Design

Backward design may be useful for updating your course in multiple ways.

First, you will want to see that your assessments provide evidence that your students have mastered your learning outcomes.

Second, as you consider the various ways students may access your class (face-to-face, online, synchronous online, etc.) you will want to see if your daily activities are aligned equally well in each learning environment. For example, if you do a think-pair-share in a face-to-face lecture so that students can practice key concepts, you will want to do a similar activity in the online environment, such as a journal activity where students explain key concepts in their own terms. The activities don’t have to be the same but they should provide an equivalent experience that is equally well aligned with assessments and learning outcomes.

Finally, backward design serves as a way to check if something is worth doing (does it align?) and a method for incorporating new elements that you can’t resist doing (how can it be made to align with the outcomes, assessments, and learning activities?).

Canvas: Rich Content Editor

The Canvas Rich Content Editor (RCE) is an editor for Canvas pages, assignments, discussions, quizzes, and announcements. If you’ve ever edited a Canvas page or added a description to an assignment, you’ve already used it! The RCE allows you to add and format text, insert photos and videos, and link web content in many areas of your course.

Table of Contents

Why Should I Use the Rich Content Editor?

The Rich Content Editor puts many powerful tools right in the fingertips of instructors. Besides allowing you to compose text, it also makes adding images, videos, documents, and links to many areas of your course incredibly easy. By using the RCE to keep relevant materials together in the same area, your students will also feel more confident in what they need to use and when. Consider how you might implement the following practical applications of the Rich Content Editor in your own course:

  • Link files in assignment descriptions. Avoid confusion from students over what materials are relevant to an assignment by linking them right in an assignment description. If your instructions reference a reading, link your PDF where you mention it. If you would like students to fill out and submit a Word doc you created, include a link to the file and then there will be no confusion over which file to use.
  • Update your course materials right in Canvas. Sometimes you may decide to change the details of a project or another course element. Rather than digging through your computer files to update a document and then reuploading it to your course, consider copying the instructions into the appropriate assignment, discussion, or page in your Canvas course where you can easily edit them anytime.
  • Make your course content easy for your students to access. Use the RCE to create your course content in Canvas pages instead of uploading Word or PowerPoint files. Creating your content within Canvas will ensure that your students can access it on all devices and ensure that the ability to view your content isn’t dependent on the installation of specific software. It will also prevent students from having to juggle many tabs and windows at once to switch between downloaded files and your Canvas course.
  • Use videos in new areas of your course. If you’ve taught online, you’ve almost definitely had a video embedded on a page before, but did you know you can also use the RCE to add videos to announcements, discussion threads, and even quizzes? If you’re one that prefers to communicate through speaking rather than written text, consider adding a video to your next announcement (while still including transcripts or a written overview for accessibility).

How Can I Use the Rich Content Editor to Make My Content More Accessible?

Use Built-In Text Formatting

The Rich Content Editor is a great tool for making your course content more readable. It is recommended that you format your text using Canvas’s built-in text styles from the dropdown menu in the Rich Content Editor. For example, Header 2 and Header 3 are great for page headers, while Paragraph is perfect for body text. Using these text styles will keep the appearance of your content consistent across your course, plus the text will scale correctly when a user zooms in on their browser. Canvas formatting also helps screen readers determine which parts of the text are headers and which are body text.

Add Alt Text to Images

Adding alt text to images is another best practice for making your course more accessible. Alt text provides a description of images that is readable by those that use screen readers. When you upload a new image with the New Rich Content Editor, add a brief description in the Alt Text field.

Use the Accessibility Checker

The Rich Content Editor also comes equipped with a built-in accessibility checker that runs some basic checks and makes recommendations to improve the accessibility of the content you are editing.

More Detailed Information

Do more with advanced HTML

You can do more with Canvas pages by using the HTML editor built in. CATL has some more information and sample code available here to get you started.

Reveal Additional Tools with the More Button

To see additional features, click the three stacked dots in the top right corner of the RCE toolbar. Depending on the size of the window in which you have Canvas open, more or fewer tools will be hidden behind this “More…” button.

More options

There is a menu bar at the very top of the Rich Content Editor. From this menu bar you can:

  • Cut, copy, paste, and undo with the Edit menu
  • Toggle between rich text and HTML view with the View menu
  • Insert various types of media, as well as tables and equations
  • Format your text
  • Explore external Tools (this is also where you will embed Kaltura videos)
  • Manage Table properties

Animated demo of the RCE menu

Course content and external content can be linked through the menu bar or toolbar. Photos, documents, URL links, and course content links can be added through the “Insert” menu or the toolbar buttons with icons that match those found within the Insert menu.

Course Link Menu Item

Access Third-Party Tools Through the Menu Bar or Toolbar

Office 365 content and Kaltura/My Media content can be embedded with their respective buttons in the RCE toolbar.

Office and Kaltura Buttons

Other third-party tools like YouTube, Vimeo, and Films on Demand can be accessed through the “Apps” button with a plug icon. You can also access all external tools by going to Tools > Apps > View All in the menu bar. After you use a tool for the first time, it will appear under “Apps” without having to click “View All”.

Apps, My Media

If You Can’t Find What You’re Looking For…

To help you navigate this menu system, we’ve linked instructions below for some common features. Note that the process for each of these is the same whether you are using the RCE in a page, an assignment, a discussion, etc.

 

Exam Conversions Available

In response to the added challenges of the semester, CATL has procured limited access to a tool for converting and importing quizzes (or exams) to Canvas. The tool converts a formatted text document (.txt, .rtf, or Word) into a Canvas quiz. Details of the formatting required can be found in this document (downloadable PDF).

Use this form (instructor login required) to submit a link to the intended course and your documents of 20 or more questions for CATL to convert and upload. Note that depending on the volume of requests, it may take up to a week for CATL to process your document. Submitting an incorrectly formatted document may result in additional delays in the processing of your request, so please read the formatting guidelines carefully.

Once your request has been processed, we will upload your exam directly into your Canvas course in the Quizzes area. The confirmation message that the exam is available will include information on how to finish applying settings and making the exam available to students.