Profile and Personal Settings
When you're leveraging an online learning platform for teaching and facilitation, your instructor persona is an extension of your academic brand. Keeping a current profile and updating your user settings is part of maintaining your image.
What Should I Put On My Profile?
Students may access your profile to learn about you and connect with you during the semester. Here are a few ideas of things to include in your profile:
Photo
You have the ability to change your profile picture. Put a photo that best represents you.
Display Name
By default your display name will be your first and last name - which can be very formal. Update it to align with how you'd like to be addressed. Professor Smith or Mrs. Beasley.
Title
Add an official or unofficial title. For instance, Faculty in Dept. of Public Health or "Teacher of all things science".
Contact information
By default, Canvas messaging system (inbox) will always be listed under 'ways to contact me'. However, you can include other services like your LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, Skype ID, Facebook profile, Delicious or Diigo sites.
Bio
This would be a great opportunity to include a brief bio about you or your teaching philosophy or academic background. You can also post your office hours and phone number in this area, as well.
Links
Do you have a faculty page? Department website? Academic blog? Personal website? Why not feature them under the links section?
Videos
Videos are a great way to increase instructor presence. Video can be an engaging venue for presenting information, but can also work to build community. Instead of simply uploading lecture presentations with a voiceover, consider making a video of yourself introducing the course and allowing students to get to know you. You can even make videos throughout the course introducing or concluding units, or highlighting other points of interest that show a little bit of your personality and make the course more enjoyable for students. Consider filming these videos in a more personal location, such as your home or a quiet park. Videos can easily be made on TechSmith Relay, or even recorded on a smartphone and uploaded directly into Canvas.
Social Presence
Engaging students with one another is a highly effective method of building a community presence in the course.
Discussions
At the beginning of the course, you could include your personal introduction video as the description of a discussion and encourage students to do the same, either by having them submit a 1-2 minute introduction video of themselves or writing a discussion post with images attached. An open discussion can also be made, so that students can post questions and engage with one another throughout the duration of the course. Discussions can also be a great place to hold ungraded group work, such as think-pair-shares, and brainstorming activities.
Collaborations
Students can use the collaborations tab of the course to work together on ungraded efforts. For example, students can create a collaboration to design a midterm or final study guide, or as a place to brainstorm ideas and share helpful articles and resources with one another.
Communications
Canvas offers a number of ways for students and teachers to communicate, including announcements, discussions, chat, and inbox. Encourage students to use these tools, not only to ask questions of the professor, but to engage with each other as well.
Cognitive Presence
Student collaboration can be increased when it is done formally through group work. Brainstorms and discussions that occurred informally in discussions or collaborations can be used as starting points for students to create groups around topics of interest and create a project for grading. Students can work together on a document through collaborations, so it is not necessary that they meet in-person if the course is fully online. Collaborations allows for access to One Drive and Google Docs, so students can create documents, presentations, or spreadsheets. Additionally, video projects encourage students to take advantage of the technology available to them.
Additional Resources