Hello readers, On behalf of the teams that contribute to the Extra Points blog, we want to extend a sincere thank you for being such an engaged community of readers. We directly support the University of Minnesota’s teaching mission, and this blog has been a terrific space to share information and highlight current topics. Our goal is to ensure the content we create is timely, relevant, and useful for your work. To do that effectively, we believe the most important voice in the room is yours. In this post, we are asking for your guidance: What do you want to learn about or discuss next? Your challenges, curiosities, and innovative ideas are the best source of inspiration for our future posts. Your feedback will directly help our teams plan and write articles that address the real-world needs of instructors and staff. What topics or formats would be most valuable to you? To get the conversation started, here are some of the types of articles we often write. Are there specific topic...

  In June 2023, approximately 130 teaching and learning professionals gathered at the AT SHAREcase . During 2 days of presentations and discussion they explored the conference theme: expanding collaboration across diverse work, school, and social environments: the evolving role of ATs/IDs. Along with colleagues across the UMN system, many staff members in ATSS and AT Tools presented at the conference. This post contains descriptions and resources from their sessions. Make My Course Accessible: A cooperative pilot project In partnership with colleges and departments across the UMN system, Academic Technology Support Services (ATSS) started offering the Make My Course Accessible Initiative. This session highlights many details we learned about the process and showcases Faculty from the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences CFANS), and Psychology department on how the initiative helped to advance accessibility in Canvas course content that benefits students and ...

Co-authored with Mariam Tahir and Jeff Weber This is the first in a series of posts that describe how the Academic Technology Services team is partnering with the Carlson School of Management in order to learn more about student perspectives on learning data and accelerate the adoption of learning analytics. We invite you to follow our journey and find out what happens next! In early 2023, the Academic Technology Services team sponsored a capstone project with the Carlson School of Management for the undergraduate Information and Decision Sciences Department. The capstone project, called “Learning Analytics: The Student Perspective,” offered a unique opportunity to have students engage their peers on the topic of learning analytics and then submit recommendations based on their findings. This post describes the goals of the capstone project and the recommendations offered by the participating student teams. We will also describe some next steps that we are actively exploring. What is ...

This is the second post in a two-part series on effective messaging in support of teaching and learning.  The University of Minnesota has piloted ECoach, a platform that provides timely nudges and messages to students, for three semesters. ECoach gives students advice on how to get through challenging classes, empowering them to make positive actions: “It helps you reflect on past assignments and change things for the future.”  The ECoach support team gathered information from students about ECoach messages, including tone, timing, and content. In this post, we will consider how instructors can apply these lessons in any Canvas course site. We will review how to: foster a growth mindset, craft a successful message, create an effective communication plan, and use Canvas to deliver the right message at the right time.  Foster a growth mindset Students have to know that there's a path forward, and often, they need educators to help them see and move down that path....

This is the first post in a two-part series on effective messaging in support of student learning. Do students benefit from prompts that offer study tips and reminders? Can these prompts lead to student success? These are questions the University of Minnesota has been exploring through piloting ECoach, a tailored messaging system developed by the University of Michigan that supports students by facilitating one-on-one communication and coaching. Leslie Schiff, Associate Dean in the Office of Undergraduate Education, was motivated to bring ECoach to the University of Minnesota to explore the tool’s potential to personalize the education experience in large gateway classes. In Spring 2022, the University of Minnesota completed the 3rd semester of a pilot. To date, 3,141 students enrolled in intro-level Chemistry, Biology, Economics, and Philosophy classes have participated in the ECoach pilot. How does ECoach work? Instructors work with the ECoach support team to identify goals for thei...

Canvas course sites produce data related to student interaction. This information can be helpful in addressing instructional questions. Understanding, interpreting, and using learning data is most valid when it is used in conjunction with other contextual knowledge, including a deep understanding of course content, teaching style, and relationships with students. For example, the image below is from the New Analytics tool in a Canvas course site. Grades for course assignments for the entire class are represented by blue dots; grades for Section 001 are represented by green dots. In this way, the New Analytics tool usefully helps the instructor compare grades across sections. We see an interesting anomaly: notice the green dot at the very bottom of the graph (circled in red). While students in Section 001 have otherwise outperformed the class as a whole, on this assignment their collective grade indicates 0%. What is happening here? New Analytics Average Course Grade Dashboard When we...