CIDI September 2022 Newsletter
September 2022 Newsletter
Welcoming Gretchen Blackburn
Gretchen Blackburn has joined our team as a new full-time Instructional Designer. Gretchen comes having already worked extensively with USU faculty, delivery methods, and tools when she was a part-time team member from 2018 to late 2020. We're very excited to have her on board.
Updated Departmental Assignments for Designers
Now that we have a new designer, we have revised our departmental assignments. Gretchen will be the new lead designer for AVTE, APEC, ASTE, OPDD, AS, MSL, MATH/STATS, and ECN/FIN departments. We have made some additional reassignments of lead and secondary designers as well. Please see our Instructional Designer by College page to find your department's assigned CIDI contacts.
Still CIDI, But With a Subtle "I" Swap
As CIDI joins the new Division of the Executive Vice President, we feel the time is right to adjust our office name slightly in a manner that better reflects our instructional-design services. The acronym CIDI remains, but our name is changing from the "Center for Innovative Design and Instruction" to the "Center for Instructional Design and Innovation." This subtle swapping of "I" words also aligns our title with those of similar offices at other institutions.
Ongoing Fall Workshops
In addition to one-on-one consultations, we continue to offer workshops on a variety of topics. See our full workshops list at teach.usu.edu.
Quick Tip: Online Course Quality Rubric
If you are teaching online or posting much of your content online, be sure to check out CIDI's online course quality rubric. It serves as a useful checklist to make sure you have included the syllabus, organizational, and teaching elements that will help your students have a good learning experience.
Technology Updates
- Canvas Course Search: This fall we added the Atomic Search tool to Canvas. This allows you and your students to search for course content by keyword, thus making important content easier to find.
- Immersive Reader Format: For years now, students have been able to download content from Canvas in alternative formats, such as HTML, audio, epub, electronic braille, and more. Now Microsoft's Immersive Reader format has been added to the list of possibilities. The Immersive Reader format adds tools to improve content readability for readers of all ages and abilities.
- Optional Assignment Enhancements in Canvas: If you have not already enabled the new Assignment Enhancement features for students in Canvas, now may be a good time to do so. Most notably, the assignment enhancement features make SpeedGrader annotations and rubric results more readily apparent to students. To enable Assignment Enhancements, go to your course settings and then to the Feature Options tab. Change the state of the Assignment Enhancements - Student feature to enabled.
- Summer's Turnitin Update: During the summer, we implemented an update to the Turnitin integration with Canvas. If you have copied content from a course that used Turnitin previously, you will need to enable Turnitin again for every assignment that needs plagiarism checking.
Contact CIDI
For on-demand support with teaching technologies, contact CIDI at cidi@usu.edu, via chat, or at 435.797.9506. Schedule an appointment with an instructional designer to get help making your courses more engaging, usable, and accessible.