Office of Instructional Innovation

Strategies for Supporting Absent Students

With the increase in on-campus teaching and learning, we’d like to pass along some suggestions for negotiating student absences. We recommend that you continue maintaining flexible attendance policies and consider options other than lecture capture for students who miss class. Combining the use of student note-takers and a single five-minute video recording per class session, here’s an approach that’s quick, easy, and effective.

• Strategies for Supporting Absent Students
• Related: A Quick Panopto Tour

Designed to prepare instructors to teach online and hybrid courses, this collection of 15-minute self-paced modules provides an excellent starting point for those who are new to these approaches. Topics covered include:

• Organizing Online Learning Experiences,
• Building Online Community,
• Presenting Information (Live) Effectively Online,
• Facilitating Discussion Online,
• Scaling Online Instruction, and
• Assessing Learning Online.

Camp OI2 is available for any member of the UT-Austin community. Participants receive virtual badges for the successful completion of each module.

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The Digital Literacy Repository is a collection of resources for anyone interested in learning how to smartly navigate the digital age.

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Working groups provide opportunities for instructors to share successes and innovations, troubleshoot teaching challenges, and engage in a collaborative learning process to become even better teachers and users of educational technology. The groups are small, personalized to your interests, and typically meet once per month. Each group is facilitated by a staff member from the Office of Instructional Innovation. 

Contact OI2 to join.

All You Need to Know about Canvas Gradebook

The Office of Instructional Innovation invites you to join us for a workshop about the Canvas gradebook. We will start with a quick Q&A session to address questions submitted by instructors. Next, we will discuss different ways of setting up a gradebook, dropping the lowest score, entering extra credit, viewing a gradebook in different ways, and other topics that might interest you. 

Canvas Blueprint Courses

Canvas Blueprint courses are templates that can be used to manage multiple course sections that have similar content. They can also be used when multiple instructors need to teach various sections of the same course. Join us to learn how to use the tool to manage your course effectively and how to push out specific content to associated courses.

University Canvas Adoption Policy and Ally Accessibility Platform

The Office of Instructional Innovation has a workshop opportunity that will focus on two topics. First, we will discuss the university’s Canvas Adoption Policy and steps that you can take to prepare for the policy’s rollout in Fall 2024. Second, we’ll spend some time exploring the Ally Accessibility Platform, which is a tool enabled in all Canvas courses that helps you make your digital course resources more accessible, inclusive, and useable for all students.

Effective Student Feedback

Effective feedback can help students understand their progress and guide them to improve their work. This workshop will cover different ways of using feedback in the teaching process and how different tools can be used to integrate feedback in teaching.

Learning Outcomes

This workshop focuses on developing and using high-quality learning outcomes in your courses. The workshop will equip you to create meaningful learning outcomes, align assessments with learning outcomes, and use the learning outcomes feature in Canvas to track student performance. Developing learning outcomes is essential in designing effective courses, so we hope you’ll join us!

Created to help new (and current) instructors effectively prepare for their courses, this guide includes various resources related to policies, course preparation materials, instructional technologies, and more. The guide can be explored comprehensively or selectively as needed. Here is an outline of the content detailed in this guide: 

• Adding students to your course 
• Using Class Info Pages (CLIPS) 
• Supporting students with accommodations 
• Designing your syllabus 
• Reporting behavior concerns 
• Navigating Canvas 
• Using Zoom 
• Incorporating Panopto 
• Integrating Poll Everywhere  

The New Instructor Guide is available for any member of the UT-Austin community (e.g., professors, assistant instructors, teaching assistants). We especially encourage new instructors to check out the guide as they map out their courses. 

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