Summary
Distinguished Adjunct Professor Ingo Holzinger, Course Coordinator for MGMT 5150 Skills for Leadership and Director of the Strategy Field Study explains how Canvas allows you to message students who scored within a certain grade range overall or on a particular assignment. One application is to message students in the middle of the semester to advise them on their current participation mark and steps they might take to improve in the second half of the semester.
Video Transcript
I am Ingo Holzinger. I am the course director of Management 5150 Skills for Leadership and the director of the Strategy Field Study.
I’ve been using online platforms for a long time. I was one of the very first users of Canvas. As soon as the platform was up, I volunteered to be included in the pilot. One thing that I really like about Canvas, and it enabled me to do something that I used to do that I really believe in, is that it give students midterm feedback on their course participation. I used to use index cards. This was 10 years ago, I used to do index cards. Now this took a lot of time. If you have 50 students, 100 students, I gave up on it although I really believe in the value, I gave up on it because it just takes too long. It took too much time. Canvas allows me to do something very similar, much easier.
So once we have arrived at midterm what I do is I draft three separate messages. One for the students who fall into the ‘A’ range, one for the students that fall into the ‘B’ range, and one for the students that fall into the ‘C’ range. They address different topics. The message to the ‘A’ students would encourage them to keep going. I might mention that I don’t call on them as much anymore because I know what they have to contribute. The students that fall in the ‘B’ range I would encourage. “Good job. ‘Keep it going. If you’re not satisfied with the grade here are a few things that you can do.” For the ‘C’ range I might mention “okay you’re probably not satisfied with this grade, here are a few things you can do. If you want to talk to me about how you can increase how you can improve your grade please make an appointment.” So once I’ve drafted these three emails, these three messages, I can send them through the Canvas communication system individually to each student by just sending out one message. So the students don’t know who else gets the same message but I don’t have to write 50 different messages I only have to write three. And now I’m able again to give mid-semester participation feedback which I really believed in which I used to do but had given up on because it was so much work.