Our developer Gásten was both a student and a teacher and is now working as a developer at Drieam. Like all of our colleagues Student Engagement is close to his heart.

Wikipedia tells us that Student engagement occurs when "students make a psychological investment in learning. They try hard to learn what school offers. They take pride not simply in earning the formal indicators of success (grades), but in understanding the material and incorporating or internalizing it in their lives.

We talk about LTI (Learning Tools for Interoperability) a lot over here at Drieam. If you don't exactly know what LTI means or you are wanting to get a refresh please check out our previous blog "what is LTI".

We asked our developer and scrum master Gásten to put on his "developer hat" and share some valuable insights on Learning Tools for Interoperability. From privacy by design to end-to-end tasting and mapping out use cases. All of that, and more in the video below!

Quizzes in Canvas are assignments that can be used to challenge student understanding and assess comprehension of course material.

The quiz tool is used to create and administer online quizzes and surveys. You can also use quizzes to create exams and assessments, both graded and ungraded. First of all there are 2 types of quizzes in Canvas; 

You can use surveys to receive feedback from your students or give them some extra points by responding to a survey but there are a lot of ways to use surveys and benefit from the response.

With numerous options in surveys and quizzes let's start off bij explaining the difference; Quizzes and Survey uses the same technology except that Surveys do not have right or wrong answers and can be submitted anonymously. Quizzes are automatically scored by Canvas (except for text answers) and can be used to assess students' understanding.

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) is a standard developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium, which allows courseware and learning tools from different vendors to be launched within a learning platform, often an LMS. The LTI integration allows the student to move seamlessly from one tool to the other, with minimal effort from instructors or students.

The primary use of LTI allows the seamless connection between a web-based tool that is outside of the learning platform. LTI provides the mechanism that allows users (such as a student) to navigate among various tools while maintaining a high-level of security for passing data about the user, the place they come from, and their role (e.g., faculty, student, TA, etc.).

Whatever Learning Management Software you are using there are always updates from time to time. In todays video Gásten will be taking us through the latest updates in Canvas LMS.

About Canvas LMS and Drieam
Canvas LMS is built to make teaching and learning easier for everyone, from the littlest learners to college faculty to business leaders. Drieam on the other hand is dedicated to enabling higher education, commercial training providers & business schools to deliver the ultimate learning experience with Canvas. We do this by leveraging the best software in the world, including our own solutions. All seamlessly integrated.

The classroom environment must evolve since our world gets more and more complex and ever changing. Students must learn to take initiative, become the owners of their own learning success and progress and be able to learn more self-directed than ever. But it is not only up to them: Teachers as well should provide a learning environment that encourages them to take ownership and put the student into the driving seat of their learning process. There are a variety of instructional choices for universities and teachers to choose from but the big question is how student engagement and ownership can both be increased and how EdTech Tools like digital portfolios can provide a solution for that.

There is gold in student data, if you use data effectively you can improve enrollments, increase retention and keep alumni more engaged with your institution.

Why do people not do that?
The main reason is that there is not a specific focus on the data or there is no data people can easily access because it’s all in different systems. For example, marketing is inviting new students for specific events by using Hubspot, your current student data is stored in your Learning Management System. The main issue? These systems usually don’t communicate with one another.

From our point of view the solution isn’t to put everything in one big system because that would make it less easy to adapt for users and would take a lot of time… Our advice? Thomas will take you through the proces in the video below. 

Online Program management (or OPM) help you manage the infrastructure that is needed for online learning and manage all the tasks involved.

First of all, what is an OPM?
Well Online program management (OPM) providers are a growing segment of service providers that work with colleges and universities globally to take new academic programs online. OPM providers offer a suite of services either as a package or on a fee-for-service basis.

This helps you to focus an delivering the high level of education you need to. Reducing time to market is one of the greatest pros off course and you will decrease your marketing and sales cost.

But is it actually cheaper? One of the big things is that OPM’s usually take 50% of the tuition revenues they enroll for online programs… and besides that what are the risks associated with working with a third party system?