LDT400x Week 1

Minicourse Features

My course, Be Your Own Herbalist, will incorporate the following elements and perhaps some others:

Video Lectures: Video lectures with transcripts will provide the core of the training.
Interactive Quizzes: A few brief interactive quizzes will help cement knowledge.
Discussion Forums: Discussion forums are not a big part of the demo course as you need students for that, but since Canvas has that built in, I will set up some demonstration discussions.
Readings and Resources: The course will provide a few readings and resources on herbalism for students.
Assignments and Projects: Assignments and projects will be practical, such as making an herbal tea.
Case Studies and Scenario-Based Learning: A few case studies will be provided to help students learn how to choose herbs for different conditions.
Multimedia Presentations: An interactive course module with branching scenarios has already been developed.

Chosen LMS: Canvas

I have chosen Canvas by Instructure as the LMS for this course. First, I have experience using Canvas as a graduate student and I am familiar with how it works on the student level. I also have experience setting up classes Google Classroom but from that experience I know how limiting it can be. I am also using Canvas to get real-world experience in an LMS that is heavily used in higher education, since that might be useful when I apply for instructional design jobs.

Ability of LMS to Support Content Elements

In my review of the Canvas back-end, I found it will support all of my learning materials, because it offers rich text display options as well as full embedding of other objects such as videos or my interactive course module. Canvas also has the ability to create interactive quizzes and discussions. Some of the features Canvas offers are actually overkill for my needs but will be good to explore in case I apply for a job requiring Canvas skill.

I will note here that the graduate courses I am taking right now at another school use Canvas poorly - they don't use the embed function for PDFs and videos but put everything in links, making the user experience more complex than it needs to be. Also, they don't utilize the text display functions to make the text more appealing to read and forgo images entirely. The courses have been imported from Blackboard, which is perhaps why these issues exist, but the UX problems speak to the need for instructional designers to improve online college courses.

Training Resources

I actually prefer to learn new technologies by just digging in myself and poking around. So I will only use training resources if there is a problem I can't figure out how to solve on my own. For example, I wanted to know how to embed YouTube videos in Canvas and found in their help section that you can add a YouTube plug-in to make embedding easily. Here are some other resources:

Canvas Knowledgebase
https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas/ct-p/canvas

Instructure (the company behind Canvas) has an extensive knowledgebase to help teachers and instructional designers understand how to use Canvas.

YouTube Training Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk1HqZ0OJDM

Canvas SMEs have posted a number of free training videos available on YouTube, such as the one linked above.