Do you use collaboration in your classes? Do you find that peer interactions boost learning? Do you wish there was an easier way to manage peer learning? FeedbackFruits, a new Canvas-integrated tool at the University of Minnesota, may be able to help.  Why peer learning? Research indicates that peer assessment is effective, leading to gains in both meta-cognition and transferable skills (Topping, 2017). Further, it’s been found that online peer feedback may be even more effective than offline or in-person peer feedback (Jongsma, Scholten, van Muijlwijk-Koezen & Meeter, 2022). In practice, however, instructors find that the logistics, planning, and facilitation of peer learning are challenging. At UMN, instructors and staff have long acknowledged that while they wished to use peer learning strategies, the available academic technologies were often making the process more difficult. The urgent need for improved collaboration learning tools emerged out of a process to identif...

Do you use media (video and audio) in your courses and share them with your students via Kaltura in Canvas? Did you know it is possible to search inside Kaltura media? A keyword search of all the videos in a course's Media Gallery allows students to quickly find content they need to review. Content Kaltura Can Search Captions and Translations All media added to Kaltura receives auto-generated captions. A keyword search scans captions and delivers timestamped results. Click the timestamp to jump straight to the relevant point in the recording. Similarly, it’s possible to search within translations. Slide Text and Chapter Contents A keyword search finds text in “chapters” within media in Kaltura. When videos are created using Kaltura Capture while doing a screen capture of a PowerPoint presentation, text in the slide deck is added to chapters in your media in Kaltura, which allows viewers to find specific passages in the recording more easily. Kaltura Unified Results Whether your k...