Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: So in case you didn't see it,
conveniently I carry a photographer with me.
You can see the guy in the middle there, overly
competitive, counting the competitors, seeing what he
has to do to try to win that.
ANNOUNCER: I'm just going to start you with
one, two, three go.
And you guys go as fast as you can.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: And they're off.
ANNOUNCER: One, two, three, go.
And they're off.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: And it's a wipe-out.
And I go down again.
Needless to say, I was not the winner of that.
I was kind of the winner though of a nice trip to the
ER room, where the doctors said, you know, we get lots of
broken collar bones, but this is the first one they knew of
from a potato sack race.
So, I think it was entertaining for them.
I'm no doctor but it doesn't look real pretty up there.
We'll find out next week more.
So that was my exciting, exciting evening there.
But, back to the real topic of the talk here.
The Linked Observer Role, this is something within Canvas
that I've actually been fond of, been looking to try to
implement, since we first got Canvas.
Something I've had a little bit to do with
other LMS's as well.
CARTOON FEMALE: Rick, don't you think a story would fit in
well here for your presentation?
I always like hearing you tell stories.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Didn't I just tell a story?
Yeah, I suppose.
Do you have one in mind that I could tell?
CARTOON FEMALE: Why, yes.
I thought the one story about the basketball team would fit
into this presentation just swell.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: You know, actually, I think that
would fit in just nice.
Do you happen to have a slide for me about story times, that
would fit in real well?
There we go, Story Time, Story Time with Rick.
2006, 2007, I worked at a previous school, a community
college in Iowa.
I was approached by the women's basketball coach, and
asked if I would do kind of an orientation session for the
new freshman basketball players.
I was like, OK I don't get a chance to work with
students very much.
So I did.
Gave them the rundown of the LMS, how to check their
grades, register for classes, all that jazz.
And, at the end, the coach then says to the players, now
remember I need you to email me all your usernames and
passwords, so I can get in and check on you.
CARTOON MALE: Doesn't sharing passwords and [INAUDIBLE]
policy, if you like.
Everything?
I mean, that is just a terrible idea.
Did you tell him right then and there that he should not
be asking the players for their passwords?
Did you?
Did you?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Really, you're going to lecture me
about passwords right now?
Can I continue?
Please?
CARTOON MALE: Very good.
Carry on, sir.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Needless to say, yeah, I was a little
flabbergasted that he was asking for passwords.
That's something you don't do.
And, sorry I don't remember if I confronted him or not.
But, I do know that I thought about it a lot, and I talked
to some other folks.
And it turns out with athletics, a lot of times
coaches, or other interested academic professionals, need
to know exactly how the players are doing.
So it was legitimate need this coach had to be able to find
out are the students attending classes?
How are their grades?
It was not an appropriate way to do it though.
Well around the same time, one of the men's assistant
basketball coaches came up to me and said, hey we'd like to
be able to monitor our players grades.
Is there anything built into the LMS that can do that?
And at that time, we used a different LMS, we used ANGEL,
at that school.
And there was, there was something called a Mentor
Inside Account Window.
So, we set it up for him, and it worked really well.
In fact, it allowed him, as a coach, to go in and monitor
students' progress, see their grades, see their attendance.
And at the end of that semester, the head men's
basketball coach actually stopped me in the hall and
said, hey, you know what, that was great.
We actually had the best GPA ever with our basketball team
because of what you did, or because of what you enabled.
And we actually had a write-up about it from ANGEL, about
what we accomplished.
Just a few of the bullet points, as I said, that fall
2006 team had the highest GPA they'd ever had.
The coaches used to always have to request status updates
from the teachers, the professors, that literally
went away, because now they could just go in
their and check it.
So that was a win for the professors, it was like, wow I
don't have to fill this thing out anymore.
And there was a better communication between the
coaches and the instructors.
So it really was a good situation there for us.
Now when I moved to Creighton, we were using ANGEL, and we
implemented the same thing with Athletics, and with
Student Support Services.
It wasn't just Athletics, we also had Student Support
Services, English as a Second Language, actually that
program used it.
Same thing at Creighton.
But as I'm sure many of you wound up having happened a
year or two ago is you found yourself searching for a new
LMS, that happened to us when ANGEL was end of lifed.
So I asked around to people utilizing this tool, how
important is this tool for you?
And they all said, you know, it's an important tool, but
it's not the most important thing, but keep it in mind.
So when we were looking at LMS's I was very pleased to
find out that Canvas did have such a role.
In their system it's referred to as a Linked Observer Role.
So with that, I'd actually like to show you a little bit
how it works if you haven't seen this before.
OK, so I'm in here, in just a regular course, and it can be
set up by any individual, any instructor in the course can
actually do this and grant someone author access in their
course, or excuse me, observer.
So as the instructor, if I go to my Settings, and then I'm
going to go to my Users, and just add a user, like I'm sure
most of you have probably at least seen at some point.
So let's go to Users, we're going to add a user.
And for Role, instead of students, or teachers, I'm
going to pick an observer.
OK, so someone named Tobias Nouns,, and that's a real
name, he really does exist.
We're going to add Tobias to the course, and there he goes.
He is now an observer.
Now like this the observer role, I like to say it's just
like a student role as far as access, but they don't show up
in the grade book.
So by itself, it is a nice way to put someone in the class
just to have access to course materials.
But if we want Tobias to be a Linked Observer, in this case
to be able to view information for Kathy Craig, my one
student in here.
These are all fake students, well their real students,
Kathy's sitting back there, but they're fake grades and
stuff, just so you know.
I need to do one more step to link Tobias.
So now I'm going to go to my little Settings icon here, and
there's an option that says, Link to Student.
OK, and I can start typing in Kathy's name, select her.
I can add as many students as I want to, in this case I only
have one, so we'll do that.
And now what we're going to see on the roster, and what an
instructor would see on the roster, is again, that there's
an observer in the class, and they're going to see exactly
who that observer is observing, who
they're linked to.
AUDIENCE: Is there a way to link the entire class?
Or would you have to add each individual student?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: You would add
each individual student.
Now if they're monitoring the whole class though, you might
make them a TA in the class, or a designer role, because
those they can see the whole class.
What I'm really more showing is where you're observing just
an individual student.
Because, again, it might be a relationship where it's an
athletic advisor to an athlete, or
Student Support Services.
So let me now jump over and I'm going to go to a different
web browser, to where I am Tobias.
And since we did a manual addition to the course, Tobias
is going to have an invitation show up, and actually two,
because I added him and then I made him an observer.
Thankfully, he just has to accept once, I believe.
So, Tobias would accept this, and now--
let's accept it again, I guess.
The way it works for the observer, they could go into
the course, but what's better is they go to Grades.
And there's going to be a new section showing up for them
that shows linked students accounts.
OK, so we just have one showing right now, one
student, one course.
He can see that course, he can see the overall grade
as it is right now.
If Tobias were observing five students, and each student had
five classes, he'd see 25 individual links, one for each
student for each class.
It's ordered by student so you'd have all five classes
for one student right in a row, you'd
see the overall grade.
To get more information, you can actually click on that
then, and it's going to take me into the course and Tobias
can now see everything the same way that Kathy sees it.
So he can see all of Kathy's grades, he can see all of
Kathy submissions, but what I can't see is the grades of
other students in the class, because I'm not really
authorized to, I'm only authorized to see Kathy.
So you can see in the grade book, grades are there.
If I show all details, you're going to see comments from
assignments are showing up in there.
I don't need rubric assignments in here, but those
would show up as well.
I can even go in, where is it, here we go, I can even go into
individual assignments and see the assignment.
If I clicked on that, I'd be able to
see what was submitted.
And that will come up important a little bit later.
Questions on that so far?
What that allows someone to do with that role?
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: So, to view multiple courses per student do you
have to go in as an observer in each
course, is that correct?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Yes.
AUDIENCE: And can that be done from an administrative level?
Or does that have to be done per the instructor?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: We'll get to that.
One more question real quick, then I'll go on.
AUDIENCE: Can observers see peer review comments, or just
reviews from the instructor?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: They should be able to see the peer
review comments, as well, because they can see exactly
what that student sees.
So if Kathy can see the peer review
comments, so can the observer.
OK?
AUDIENCE: What about discussions?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Yes, discussions too.
Now discussions is one area where you can see information
from other students, because just like a student in the
class can see other students' postings, the observer would
see the other students' postings as well, wouldn't see
their submissions for assignments, or grading.
Yeah.
AUDIENCE: If the linked observer is like a student
role, can they communicate to the students that their
observing on Canvas?
So if they see a student's test score is low, can the
observer then send them a message through the Inbox?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Through the Inbox, yes.
There's not really a default interface right here, but
through the Inbox, yes, they'd would be able to pull them up
right there.
AUDIENCE: What about notifications?
So, if you've got these coaches and they've got all
these students in all these classes, and they're the
linked observer they're going to get shelled with
notifications.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Give me a second, I'm
going to address that.
That's fine, that's great questions.
Let me go ahead and go on at this point, and show you a few
more considerations.
Because actually a couple came up with the next thing I was
going to talk about.
Presentation mode.
So I mentioned, at Creighton we have 280,
approximately, athletes.
So if we've got one academic advisor, and each student
takes five courses that's roughly 1,400 or so
enrollments I'd have to do manually, like I showed you,
plus there's two advisers, so you have to almost double
that, and then we've also got Student Support Services,
we've got students who are on probation, it's a lot of work.
So, we should automate it, and it can be done.
Basically, the two areas at Creighton where we talked
about doing this is, again, Athletics and
Student Support Services.
Both of those programs those students are marked inside of
our student information system in banner, so we
know who they are.
So it was easy enough then to have a programmer simply get
that information and add them to our daily enrollment files
and have it done automatically.
One big advantage, well it's easier, the other big
advantage is the observer doesn't have to go in and
accept all of those enrollments, it just happens,
they're enrolled.
OK, does that make sense?
If you've seen the enrollment files before, basically the
observer their user ID goes over
here, the role of observer.
And then this is the ID of the student that
they're linked to.
So again, it's pretty easy just to dump that right into
the actual upload file.
Now a couple things I want to point out here, that we
thought about when setting this up.
First of all the appearance of observers on the roster.
You noticed when I showed you that on the roster, when you
add them as an observer, the instructor's
going to see that.
OK, and they're going to see observer, and who
they're linked to.
Well, my wife works at another college, she uses Blackboard.
And I like to kind of run things by her sometimes to get
what I call, the faculty freak-out factor.
And I said, how would you feel if all of the sudden some
person showed up on your roster, you had no
idea who they were?
And she's like, I wouldn't like that, I'd want them off
there right away.
So one of the things that we considered on this is, with
our observers we used a different
naming scheme for them.
So it has their name, but then we put in parentheses, for
instance, Athletics Academic Advisor or Student Support
Services Advisor.
That way when faculty see that they know who this Lisa Chips
person is, or whoever the case may be.
OK, Notifications for the Observer.
Someone already pointed out, does the observer get
notifications?
They do.
OK, so, you've got those 1,400 enrollments for an instructor,
and if the instructor averages one announcement per week,
that's a lot of notifications.
So the second consideration we did, we created a separate
account for these observers to use, not their main
one they would use.
Now in the case of who we were talking about, who we were
setting up, they weren't actually teaching at this
point or taking classes, but they might down the road.
So they need to be able to control their actual
permissions for teaching and being a student differently
from the observer ones.
So this way they could go in there, turn off those
notifications, they don't want to get them, or manage them
however separately from their other work.
OK?
One more thing, the last other thing you need to consider is
permissions.
And when I say permissions, I don't mean inside of Canvas.
I mean, is everything kosher as far as these individuals
having access to the student records?
In the two cases we were looking to implement, all the
athletes have signed things away that say, we give access
to all the coaches and academic advisers to all of
our grades.
OK.
Student Support Services, same thing.
They sign a contract to apply for this, and
it's written in there.
That was something that in IT we didn't
want to have to monitor.
We wanted to make sure those programs had the right things
in place so they were doing it.
In those cases, we already had that.
Did you have a question?
AUDIENCE: Just around the notifications, do you create a
separate observer account for each individual student?
Or do they get a common account?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Not for the student, for the observer.
AUDIENCE: Do they get a separate one for each student
they observe?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: No, it's just one account.
AUDIENCE: --for all--
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: So for instance, Tobias Nouns was the
observer here.
We would create one separate account for Tobias Nouns,
where we would say, Tobias Nouns, Athletics Academic
Advisor, or whatever.
And that one account would be tied to all the
students he's observing.
CARTOON FEMALE: So Rick, you told us about how things work
with that other school, but how about at Creighton?
Are you going to share with us how well the
system works there?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: And I'd really like to, this would be
the ideal spot where I would tell you how great this has
been at Creighton.
But as it turns out, I was delayed in kind of
setting this up.
I've been kind of nervous about it, partially because,
again, you see what faculty are going to see on there, you
don't know how things are going to work.
So we took it to, we have a group called the Academic
Technology Council, to kind of basically run it by them, get
permission.
We already had the stuff going to get all
the things in motion.
And there were some concerns.
So, someone was told to look into it, and then they passed
it to someone else, who passed it to someone else, who
finally formed a small committee of 25 people, who
finally had a meeting this last Friday, where I was
finally able to actually present this
and show it to them.
And they had some concerns, and a lot of
them were very valid.
Some of the problems that were voiced by the groups on there,
they thought the scope was too big.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: I'll get to that in a minute.
There was concerns about HIPAA, and privacy.
That came in particular from our nursing department, OK.
There was concern that nursing students turning in papers
that may have patient information on it, since the
observer can actually view the submitted
papers, that's a concern.
And that's valid.
Another one about privacy that was voiced, what if the
student, their observer, they work with this person in
Student Support Services, and the student in their paper
they say, oh I've met with so and so, and it was just
terrible, and blah, blah, blah and they're not helping me
through my academics at all.
And that's meant to be a private conversation to the
instructor, and then the observer can read it.
And another one, again related to the scope is too big, the
representative from Athletics, she was saying that in the
past, she had maybe five out of those 280 students who were
problems, so to speak, that she would actually want to go
in and monitor.
So again, the question was raised, instead of blanket
covering everyone, why not do those five.
So, needless to say, we haven't implemented yet.
Not necessarily back to the drawing board, but thinking
about things again here.
The results then, like I said, I don't have really any.
One of them is, Athletics just decided, OK, you know what,
this is a little bit too much problem.
Let's just pull out right now.
Take us off of this.
Thanks for helping us out, but it's not going to work.
Student Support Services, in the past, they
have about 180 students.
They're traditionally students who are maybe first time
college students, ones that don't have a strong academic
background.
In the past, they would email all the instructors for
courses that their students were in.
Well now, they also need to email and notify the Deans of
all those colleges.
So we've actually, this whole process, trying to make this
work, I gave them another layer that they have to jump
through now.
And they're supposed to seek permission, if they get
permission from the instructor, then I can set
them up, which means I'm probably doing that manual
process I showed you at the beginning.
So, some suggestions I have, and I don't know if there's
anyone from Instructure here, I hope, but maybe not.
I suggestions for Instructure, a little bit about this.
First of all, I didn't even mention this, but the
Attendance Tool-- has anyone played with the
Attendance Tool yet?
It's been out in real release for about a month now.
One thing that I think is really lacking there, students
can't view their own attendance records.
They can see their grade for attendance, but they can't see
what days they missed.
As such, the linked observer can't see
the attendance either.
From my experience with the other LMS I used at the other
school, with Athletics
attendance was hugely important.
Because you need to know if that person was in class to
know if they can play in the game Friday night.
Also, Student Support Services, or if you had a
student who is on probation, one of their probation
agreements might be that they're attending class.
So that information needs to be available to both the
students and the linked observer role.
We need more control, I think, as administrators, over what
this role can and can't view.
The people in this committee, one of the things they said,
they didn't have trouble with seeing the overall grade, they
didn't have trouble seeing the grade book.
It was what was beyond that.
It was seeing the actual submissions.
So simply by ratcheting down that control some, so that we
could limit it at that.
That would be a big help.
Although to be honest, with that committee, even when I
said, if we get that, can we implement?
I still didn't get a yes.
But that's definitely a step in the right direction I think
to get us closer.
But on the same token, I wouldn't want that to be the
only way to do it.
Because in many cases it really is valid to have that
observer be able to get in there, in certain schools
that's going to be a valuable tool.
Suggestion Box for Schools.
If this is something you're thinking about, learn from our
experiences at Creighton.
First of all, go slow with it.
It took me awhile to even get going with this, partially
because I was trying to think through these scenarios.
And even if with my thinking through them,
you can see my results.
So don't try to rush into something like this.
That faculty freak-out factor I talked
about, it's a big deal.
The interesting thing is, all the faculty I talked to about
this, because there were a few we piloted, actually the ones
I talked to weren't concerned.
In fact, one was concerned we weren't giving enough
information.
But, you never know.
Know your Institution.
OK.
You all have a good idea of what the pressure points are
at your school, what some people are going to allow,
what some people aren't going to like.
In this case, in hindsight, if I were doing this again, I
probably would have left Athletics off the table for
the first run of things.
Different institutions, different opinions about
Athletics, are we treating them with
extra care, and whatnot.
OK, whatever the case may be, politically it may have helped
the process to not start with them.
Second thing, I work with the Information Technology
Department.
OK.
Some folks don't like the Information Technology
Department making suggestions that affect academics.
So if it would've been someone else making the pitch, other
than me and my department, we also may have
had different results.
And those are things to think about, I mean, they're just
hard realities, but you can do things with that, and get
other people to be advocates to help you.
Find a Good Starting Point.
This goes back to when I said, I
wouldn't start with Athletics.
Again, Student Support Services was a great one, that
I really feel bad.
I actually gave them an extra hoop now, going through this.
But they're ones that, right now they can already see the
midterm grades, but midterms is too late to intervene with
a student if they're having problems.
So this is where that role really could have provided
some extra help for those students.
And lastly, Communicate.
And it's not just communicate, as in you telling people what
you're going to do.
It's talking, it's two-way communication.
I like this slide, the musicians, when they're
performing here, they're communicating to each other.
Working off each other and perform.
The same thing, communicate with your faculty, communicate
with your administrative people, to really work out a
plan that's going to work if you're going to try to
implement something like this.
Now, after the events of last night, and actually yesterday,
there's also thoughts, is this really a good idea to do this
linked observer role?
I'm still very much a supporter.
I think it's a great tool.
And it really is a tool, that can be used.
Let me just step back for just one second, back to my
experience at the previous college.
Remember I told you the men's basketball team, they had the
highest GPA ever.
Was it because I implemented this thing from the LMS?
It wasn't.
It was because they had an excellent assistant coach who
knew his job to watch the academics for the athletes.
All we did was provide him a tool.
OK.
So is this a great tool?
I still think it is.
But there are other tools.
There are ones, the talks I'd been to yesterday, a lot of
them on APIs, and different things you can run with
reports, I have different thoughts now.
Maybe instead of having the advisors go in and look at the
students, lets generate some reports on those students.
Get that information to them, using some other custom ways.
And then have this role maybe again for a select case.
I talked about the five problem athletes.
Again, when that comes up, we clear the channels with the
faculty, with the department deans, we get them in for
further observing.
So I'm not done with this project yet.
I definitely have some new ideas going forward.
I still think it was a great idea, maybe not this.
But the linked observer.
And that's where we're going to move forward with this.
So, thanks.
And any other questions, be happy to answer them.
Yeah?
AUDIENCE: I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but can
you talk a little bit more about how the academic support
people were planning to use the linked observer role.
Once they used it, what was their course of action to
support the students?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: In many cases, it wasn't a blanket
they're looking at every student.
But for instance, if I had the spring semester data, which
actually had a lot of students, they could glance
down the list, say three weeks into the semester.
Look for the students that maybe has a low grade, look
for a 70, or 60, or even some 30s, in there.
Then you can go in there and see what happened.
Did they bomb on the test?
Did they not turn assignments in?
Then they would have regular meetings with students in the
Student Support Services program.
That was part of their agreement too, is I think they
had if it wasn't weekly, at least monthly meetings, they'd
be prepared to talk to that student.
You can talk to students all the time and say, so how are
your classes going?
Oh, good.
You don't know what good means.
And sometimes the students may not be aware either.
Oh really, I missed those things.
So that was their thought at least in
Student Support Services.
AUDIENCE: Did you think about an account level creating a
custom role that would maybe provide a more expanded,
substantive, being able to view, as we discussed back
earlier, being able to view the grades maybe based off of
like a TA role, but a really stripped down TA, and then--
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: There are possibilities like that.
But the problem with that is as soon as you doing an
account level role, you're giving the person access to
all grades in that course.
And, really, we're trying to narrow that scope, because
they legitimately, the support folks don't have rights that
they should be viewing everyone's grades.
OK.
AUDIENCE: I really wanted to know how you inserted all this
additional information in your talk after spending the night
in the ER, having one workable hand.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Yeah, you like that?
It's so easy to add people to the course.
Even a person with a broken collarbone doing a
presentation can add them to the course.
Yeah, I'm a nerd, I guess, so I do these things.
AUDIENCE: With one strategy, I know this wasn't the only
issue, but did you look at, or the faculty that were pilots,
who willingly piloted this, who were interested in this,
did the grade points in their classes increase?
Did the completion rates for students increase?
Would that be something that you think might encourage
other faculty to give this a shot to allow access like
this, if it would help their students?
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: Like I said, from Creighton I don't
have any data about that, because our pilot was very
small on that.
And again, when you're not looking at a whole class, you
just look at individuals, it's a little harder to do that.
My best anecdotal evidence goes back from the other
school where, again, they said the whole basketball team's
GPA was the highest ever.
Unfortunately, also, sometimes Athletics examples aren't the
best ones for some faculty members.
So, no, that would be a great way though again if we could
get some of those.
And like I said, we're going to still continue this on a
smaller scale with probably just Student Support Services
where they do get some agreement.
And we'll monitor that.
And it may be that after a few semesters of this people are
more open and we can do a better implementation with the
full automation and everything.
AUDIENCE: For our athletes we get like an e-mail from them
and we have to go to a website [INAUDIBLE]
for me as a faculty member is a pain in the ***.
But, what I'm thinking is that this might be pretty useful at
taking a tactical instead of a strategic approach at the
departmental level.
We get a lot of student athletes in our program and so
that might be something that we could implement with
faculty buy-in at the departmental level as a way to
improve our retention and graduation rates as well, with
both Student Services as well as the Athletic department.
And I guess you would just have to clear that through the
dean, and make sure everything was copacetic, because that
could really improve and make my life easier as a faculty
member if we moved away from this.
RICK E. MURCH-SHAFER: And that's a good point.
When I had the spring data, just in our test system, I
would notice that a lot of the students, you would see them
kind of clustered in some of the same courses.
So I think its both with Athletics but also in Student
Support Services, they were naturally taking some of the
same courses together.
So I keyed in on a couple key instructors to make their
lives easier, in little respect, that would be a great
suggestion there, so thanks.
I just realized I should be repeating the questions but
too late now.
Any more questions?
OK, well thank you very much.