Category: CTL

Playing in PebblePad

Join the Husky Folio program director on March 11th for an opportunity to practice using the powerful potential of PebblePad, Michigan Tech’s new ePortfolio platform under the Husky Folio initiative. This session is your chance to dive in and practice creating reflection templates and workbooks for your courses or even a personalized ePortfolio highlighting your unique experiences and accomplishments. Whether you’re experienced or just starting out on the platform, this is your chance to connect with colleagues, exchange ideas, and explore how PebblePad can be used. Bring your enthusiasm and prepare to learn a new way to engage learners.

For questions or to request accommodations, including dietary, please feel free to contact the CTL at ctl@mtu.edu or (906) 487-3000.

• REGISTER HERE

Building an Essential Ed Experience: (Re)Designing Your Course to Become an E3

Date: March 4, 2025

Time: 12:00 p.m. until 1:00 p.m.

Location: MUB Ballroom A

Interested in designing and teaching an Essential Education Experience (E3)? Join E3 leadership and fellow instructors for a course redesign workshop. E3 courses should prepare students for an ever-changing, dynamic, and diverse world by increasing social awareness, global understandings, and/or cultural competencies through hands-on learning. Students will apply their learning toward a project or activity that engages with community beyond the traditional classroom.

This workshop will cover the basics of E3 requirements and provide participants time to workshop with others an existing or proposed Essential Education Experience course, while learning more about practical tools for transforming their own courses into E3s. Faculty who are interested in E3 courses but don’t have a specific course in mind yet are welcome to attend and can expect to gain insights that will aid in future course development.

For questions or to request accommodations, including dietary, please feel free to contact the CTL at ctl@mtu.edu or (906) 487-3000.

• REGISTER HERE

Have you been frustrated with how rubrics work in Canvas? Are you interested in trying out some new rubric features? If so, you can enable the first round of enhanced rubric features (phase 1) in your courses this semester. Canvas enhanced rubrics introduces a new, user-friendly interface paired with enhanced functionality to improve your grading workflows. Key updates include:

• Drag-and-Drop Functionality: Allows you to easily reorder ratings or criteria to suit your rubric design.
• Copying and Duplicating Criteria: Save time by duplicating frequently used rubric elements.
• Customizable Ordering: Choose between “low to high” or “high to low” arrangements for rating scales.

These updates should simplify rubric creation but also ensure consistency and fairness in evaluation.

During the first phase of the Canvas Enhanced Rubrics project developers have focused on providing educators with tools for easier rubric organization and more intuitive marking. By streamlining the grading process, these improvements can support equitable evaluation and save valuable time. Future updates will expand these features further, enabling student self-assessment and other enhancements to promote deeper engagement with learning.

If you’d like to try out enhanced rubrics in your Canvas course(s) you can enable the feature in course settings. From the feature options tab click to enable the enhanced rubric option (see screenshot below).

Canvas considers enhanced rubrics a feature preview option, which means it’s under active development and allows early adopters who opt into the feature to provide the Canvas Community user group with valuable feedback to help improve the feature. This Canvas guide provides additional details on managing enhanced rubrics.

Contact the CTL (elearning@mtu.edu, 487-3000) if you have questions or need additional assistance with Canvas enhanced rubrics.

Are you looking for a cleaner and a clutter free Canvas course? Our newest application, available only to instructors, is integrated with Canvas is TidyUP from Cidilabs! TidyUP scans the course looking for content that is no longer relevant, duplicated, or could not be accessible to some students; this content must be in use by being embedded or linked to a page in your Canvas course. A great use for this application is if a course is repeatedly copied from term to term and streamlining the content, files, folders files is needed.

The first step is to get Tidy Up in your Canvas course navigation menu. Choose Settings, Navigation, and scroll down and click the More Options (3 stacked dots) and choose Enable; choose Save when you’re done.

To get started, select TidyUP from your Canvas menu and that brings up the initial splash screen. Scans can be All content or Custom depending on your desired outcome.

Here is an example of an All content scan using my Canvas sandbox:

From these results I would be able to begin working with my Canvas course content!

For more information and training videos, see Cidilab’s TidyUP videos on their support hub!