Summer 2023 Ed Tech Newsletter

I hope your summer is off to a good start. I wanted to give you a mid-summer update to let you know about a few key bits of Ed Tech Information. There are several Canvas updates as well as updates to other ED Tech tools, workshop and training opportunities, and new policies to keep in mind as you prepare for the fall semester and beyond.

Canvas Information

Fall courses are ready

Fall 2023 courses are now ready in Canvas. If you notice that you don’t have a fall site for your course let me know and I can help you get access to your site. Here’s a quick list of things to consider when setting up your Canvas course.

Top things to do:

If you’re unsure how to accomplish any of these items you can learn more in the resources linked below. As always you can reach out to me for a consultation to learn how to get the most out of your Canvas course as well.

Additional Resources:

  • If you are interested in incorporating the Law School Theme, which provides a nicely designed template that implements course design best practices, then I also recommend checking out my guide for importing the Law School Canvas template.
  • Use my “before you publish” guide as a reference as you’re preparing your Canvas sites for the coming semester.
  • Setting up a syllabus-only site – This video covers setting up a bare essentials Canvas site. If all you’d like to do is post your syllabus and make sure your students have access to it then you can watch this video to learn how.
  • A quick guide on publishing all of Canvas’ content options – If you’ve ever been confused about whether or not something you’ve added to Canvas is published and available to your students this guide will help clear up any confusion.

You can find more helpful tutorial videos on the BC Law Ed Tech YouTube page. You can also watch previously held workshops covering various Canvas and course-related topics here.

Canvas Software Updates

There have been several updates and improvements over the last few months in Canvas. Here are some of the highlights:

Panopto Information

Changes to lecture capture procedures

This is a reminder that the procedure for scheduling Panopto lecture capture recordings is changing. Rather than automatically scheduling lecture capture-enabled classrooms as has been done in the past you will need to opt-in to schedule your class for the semester. Keep an eye out in early August for more information about how to opt in and have recordings scheduled.

Panopto software updates

Panopto made a slight interface update in the past month. All of the actions you can perform on a video have moved to the video thumbnail as seen below. Now if you need quick access to share a video or change its settings you’ll do so by first hovering your mouse over the video and then clicking on the appropriate icon as seen below.

Video options to share, access settings, and complete additional actions after hovering over a video in Panopto.

I just finished my first summer workshop on how to write better prompts for AI tools. You can find the workshop resources along with the rest of the summer’s schedule on the dedicated Ed Tech Summer Workshops page. I hope to see you in one or more workshops throughout the summer. They will all be recorded and made available on the same page once the workshops are complete.

Excellence in Teaching Day

If you missed the opportunity to attend Excellence in Teaching Day, the Center For Teaching Excellence has posted the keynote talk by Josh Eyler, “How Grades Limit Learning and Impact Student Wellbeing.” You can find the keynote and recordings of other breakout sessions on the ETD webpage.

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

The U.S. Copyright Office has recently held several listening sessions as they discuss the future of copyright and AI-produced content. You can listen in on the sessions and find out more at https://www.copyright.gov/ai/.

Teaching and Artificial Intelligence

In an effort to consolidate the many resources available and help you form your own opinions about how you may want to discuss the use of AI in the classroom I’d like to share two recent workshops I found incredibly helpful.

The first is from a company called Alchemy. The workshop discusses trends and strategies other universities are considering when it comes to using AI tools. It also covers practical applications including several prompting guides as well as ethical considerations.

Next is a recent workshop from Lexis about their new AI-powered research tools. This is a glimpse into the future of how AI language models are set to be even more impactful as companies increasingly train models on their internal domain expertise, resulting in highly accurate and specialized models. This convergence of business intelligence with AI will unlock a new era of powerful and tailored solutions. I think this is a great example of one such solution.