Preparing For the Transition

Pedagogy Tips & Updates from the Pedagogy Group of the LMS Transition Team

Review and Refine: As you are preparing your Blackboard materials (content, assessments, activities, etc.) for summer and fall, consider ways in which you can eliminate materials that you no longer use. Reduced content can streamline the conversion processes and reduce the reviewing and clean-up you will need to do in the new system.

Blackboard/Canvas Comparison Guide: Interested in some differences between Blackboard Learn and Canvas? Feel free to check out this Blackboard/Canvas Comparison Guide.

Free Resources in LinkedIn Learning: Faculty have access to premium content in LinkedIn Learning, which has a tremendous library of courses and videos on several topics, including Learning Canvas.

Tracking What's Working with Your Eye on Redesign: As you teach your courses in the coming semesters leading up to the migration, keep a Word document on your desktop and make notes about things that are working well, things that might need improvement, and things you might want to add/delete/modify in your courses. These notes will constitute the bulk of a (re)design plan you can use once the course is in Canvas.

Quality Matters (QM) Rubric: UHD colleagues, through the CTLE, have recommended that UHD faculty use the QM for best practices in an online course, but this resource also is relevant for any courses which engage students through virtual tools.  Use this tool and the transition period to reconsider and update your course designs! You will be hearing a lot more about QM as we move forward! Although you can definitely reuse content from previous courses once it's all moved into Canvas, it's also certainly going to be time to reconsider your designs (even in the smoothest of migrations, things will most likely not look and work as they did before). Preparing for a new semester in every new instance of a course, no matter the modality, is an opportunity to make the experience better for your learners and for you, the facilitator. But where do you begin? A good place might be to consider a rubric like the Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric (6th edition). How many of the standards can you check off?

CTLE Consultations, Resources, & Workshops: The CTLE can also help with consultations and resources to strengthen your (re)design. Contact them at ctle@uhd.edu.

Contact the TTLC for technical support when you are ready to migrate at 713-221-2786.