Backstage: Content

Students have now access to an unprecedented amount of content, including Wikipedia, a wide range of massive open online courses (MOOCs), Khan Academy, YouTube educational channels and other open educational resources (OERs). Providing an appropriate amount of quality content is therefore one of the key backstage requirements.

Complementary reading materials may be used, but the content available on Canvas will cover the full learning needs of the class. In order to promote the active role of the students, to ensure flexibility for those that may not attend on-campus activities, and to limit the amount of work needed to create it, all my Canvas pages comprise essentially two main types of content: Presentations and discussions, the former embedding short video lectures, and the latter proposing exercises to the whole class.

Creating videos is far from trivial, as experience has painly shown me — I have created more than one hundred videos since 2013 (listed in appendix #2), and in spite of problems that haven’t yet entirely disappeared in the modern versions, the earlier works deserve to survive as examples of a diversity of problems that must be avoided. As it may be expected, the number of times a video is viewed tends to increase during its lifetime — even if a video is no longer embedded into a course page, Google and other search engines may still bring in new viewers. In spite of the shortcomings that I identify in the earliest videos (e.g. too long, poor audio quality), it is particularly interesting to notice that a small set of them posted from 2013 to 2015 have exceed one thousand visualizations, one of them having even exceeded 11.000 views (the views indicated by YouTube for each video are also included in the list shown in appendix #2).

The videos embedded in presentation pages are accompanied by the slides and script that were used for their production, and optionally also by complementary materials and lab work requirements. Video scripts aren’t just useful to facilitate recording, since they are later uploaded to YouTube and used by the platform to insert user-provided subtitles. Hearing-impaired viewers can therefore also watch the videos, since everything said is also available in text form as shown below.

Besides being used to deliver theoretical content, Canvas presentation pages are also used to specify coursework assignments, as illustrated below. Although visually identical, lectures belong to a group of reflective thinking activities and are mostly used in standalone mode, while coursework assignments support active learning activities designed for collaborative group work.

The second main type of content (besides presentations) consists of discussions proposed as an asynchronous collaborative activity to the whole class (assignments address groups of 3 or 4 students, discussions address the whole class). As shown below, Canvas provides a box at the end of the page where students can post a reply. All replies, as well as teacher comments, are visible to the whole class, and remain available throughout the duration of the course.

It would be interesting to offer the full set of learning materials freely as open courseware, and it is possible to do so through appropriate course settings in Canvas. However, the students might be uneasy to contribute to discussions knowing that their posts might be read by anyone. For this reason only the content of the presentation pages is made available in the web through an open courseware Google site that is presented in appendix #3.

Read next — Backstage: Planning