Improving Student Success by Increasing Interactivity and Active Learning Opportunities

This course was redesigned using Canvas.  The goals of the redesign were to address the bottleneck issues, improve the pass rate in the course, draw new majors to Anthropology, and retain declared students.  Student readiness issues, primarily time management and self motivation, were addressed by using the calendar feature in Canvas to help students ‘see’ due dates and upcoming assignments.  In addition, a mobile app that allows the instructor to send text reminders to students was embedded into the course.    To help motivate students the course redesign includes online videos and interactive assignments. Students have reported not completing assignments that require them to leave Moodle and create an account or complete work on an outside platform such as Blogger. During the redesign these assignments were built directly into the Canvas course so that students do not need to leave the learning environment in order to access them. Students are able to download the Canvas app on to the phones and/or other mobile devices and access course materials from anywhere.  Additionally, they can participate in class discussions and easily upload course assignments using this app.