hello everyone my name is Cassandra
Volpe Horii. i'm the assistant vice
provost and director of the center for
teaching learning and outreach at
Caltech and i'm bringing you this brief
tour of instructional technology at
Caltech to help faculty instructors and
TAs get to know our available resources.
In the next few minutes, i'll share my
top three highlights
One: instructional technology and
learning. Instructional technology at
Caltech offers choices in recognition of
the great breadth of disciplines,
learning outcomes, and approaches at our
institution. My best advice for those of
you with teaching roles is to take a
moment and consider your learning goals
for students and then match your use of
instructional technology to supporting
those goals. Technology like the Canvas
learning management system can help
organize and sequence course materials
in one place so that students
instructors and TAs alike can focus on
more challenging and substantial
discussions, problems, and projects.
If you're looking to lower barriers to
students asking and discussing questions
then using an online discussion forum or
course-wide question and answer tool
might be especially helpful.
Digital tools can also help course teams
collect student assignments and provide
timely meaningful feedback. I hope you'll
find Caltech supported tools useful and
that you'll feel free to experiment with
new applications and approaches in
support of student success
Two: Canvas.
Caltech uses Canvas as its learning
management system. It's our hub for
online materials and for all things
course related.
Caltech asks that each course in Canvas
be populated with the following minimum
required content to make sure students
have the information they need
1, a syllabus with course policies 2.
a course schedule with due dates which
may be part of the syllabus and 3.
links to any other websites or resources
students will need to use.
At Caltech, Canvas course sites are
created and synced with the official
Registrar's office data multiple times
each day. That includes the course sites
themselves as well as the instructors,
teaching assistants and students
associated with them.
Instructors and TAs can access courses
for upcoming terms about six to eight
weeks before the quarter begins and will
find a streamlined template applied to
their course site. All aspects can be
edited with your custom course materials.
Students get access to courses one week
before the term begins as long as
instructors or the head TA or
administrative assistants working with
the courses have published them. Side
note to teachers: yes you do have to
publish your canvas course for students
to get into it.
Instructors and TAs are automatically
enrolled in the Getting Started with
Canvas course in Canvas and the
introduction provides a helpful course
preparation checklist as well as a
checklist for concluding courses and
other useful guides and details about
our institutional settings and canvas
functionality.
Highlights of Canvas include a flexible
home page for sharing essential course
information, a built-in and customizable
syllabus template, a modules area for
organizing course content by units or
weeks where you can add all types of
materials (readings, assignments,
discussions, videos, and more),
embedded course reserves from the
Caltech Library,
a special video and multimedia tool
called Canvas Studio with extra storage
for larger video files, and built-in
tools for assignments, grading
discussions, and more.
You can even hide tools you're not using
in the course menu and reorder the menu
to feature most used functions.
Finally, Caltech has 24-7 support for
Canvas available through the question
mark icon within the application online.
For Caltech specific questions you can
also email canvas@
caltech.edu for assistance.
Three: other supported tools
Caltech maintains several campus-wide
licenses to applications that extend and
expand the built-in functions of Canvas.
While this list might change, here are
some highlights as of September 2021.
Zoom supports video conferencing as well
as recording. Every faculty member,
instructor, and TA receives a Zoom Pro
license for teaching.
Gradescope is a specialized assignment
submission and grading application
tailored to the needs of quantitative
and coding assignments and helpful for
courses with multiple graders. It allows
the use of shared grading rubrics to
make feedback both meaningful and
efficient.
Course Q and A forums like Piazza create
streamlined searchable latex and code
enabled discussion spaces and are
popular with larger courses.
Google workspace offers collaborative
documents forms and communication tools
that can be shared with anyone with
access.caltech.edu credentials and was
set up especially to support teaching
and learning.
You can also find applications used for
both research and teaching like
Microsoft Office, Matlab, Adobe and many
more through the IMSS site licensed
software interface available
through access.caltech.edu.
The instructional technology team is
always looking for new tools that could
improve learning and teaching.
Please contact us at canvas@caltech.edu
to find out how to request that a new
tool be evaluated and considered for
future integration into Caltech's
instructional tech ecosystem.
Some specialized tools might remain
outside of campus-wide licenses and
that's okay. Just keep student privacy
and security in mind when using other
websites and tools. You can find out more
at teach.caltech.edu
and please reach out with any questions
you might have.
I hope this brief tour has been
informative. Teaching continuity
information including online technology
and tools are collected at the
teach.caltech.edu website.
Several groups at Caltech work to
support instructional technology
including the Center for Teaching,
Learning, and Outreach, Academic Media
Technologies, and Information Management
Systems and Services.
These groups also collaborate closely
with the Registrar's office, Deans,
Divisions, Provost's Office, Assistant
Vice President for Diversity, Equity,
Inclusion, and Assessment, and other areas.
Happy teaching and learning everyone!