Professional Development

*previously titled Canvas Mastery: A Comprehensive Canvas Course

Are you an MSU instructor wanting to learn the ins and outs of Canvas? Take this course to gain fluency with the learning management system used by MSU.

This self-paced course is made for beginning to intermediate Canvas users. You will be guided through 5 modules in Canvas to learn everything from managing your notification settings to building modules, all the way to SpeedGrader and creating groups.

Browse the course to find Canvas topics you want to learn about or complete all of the module requirements to earn a Certificate of Completion. Please note: unlike our other self-paced courses, this course may require an average of 4-7 hours to complete all modules and requirements.

Learn about how to apply accessibility standards when creating your course content and lecture videos. This self-paced course will introduce you to basic accessibility definitions and ADA accessibility requirements and will provide actionable steps toward creating an accessible online course. Examples and demonstrations will show participants how to meet minimum ADA accessibility requirements within their own courses.

Ensuring accessibility is an essential prerequisite for both online and in-person courses at Mississippi State University. This self-paced course serves as an extension of the initial Course Accessibility program, offering supplementary insights and resources for faculty members engaged with Mississippi State University students. The topics covered in this course include color contrast, Webex assistant, audio-video transcription, and crafting accessible documents. Through this course, participants gain comprehensive knowledge and tools to enhance accessibility in their courses and cater to the diverse needs of MSU students.

This self-paced course will guide you through the principles of gamification, specifically related to the online learning environment. In this course, you will learn the process to create gamified learning activities while also being introduced to a few gamification applications and tools. This course is intended to introduce learners to the elements of gamification along with the process to create fun, interactive, engaging, and most importantly effective learning experiences.

Every good course begins with good learning outcomes. Learning outcomes provide students and faculty with a shared goal and language to talk about the learning happening in a course and how students will use the acquired knowledge once the course is completed. This self-paced course provides a step-by-step guide to how to construct S.M.A.R.T. learning outcomes as well as guided practice so that your learning outcomes reflect the knowledge and skills you want your students to carry with them beyond the classroom.

This self-paced asynchronous course will introduce you to basic Canvas Studio concepts, while also preparing you for more advanced topics in future courses. Once you finish this course, you will be able to add or record a video in Canvas Studio, trim dead space from the beginning and end of a video, add and edit closed captioning, and integrate it into your course for your students.

Active learning is a student-centered approach intended to engage students through new information, ideas, experiences, and reflective dialogue. In this self-paced course, we will L.E.A.R.N how to implement active learning by Leveraging prior knowledge, Explaining new concepts, Activating using activities, Reflecting on learning, and Nurturing new strategies.

This self-paced course is designed to help you learn about the difference between gamification and game-based learning and then to assist you in determining what type of game-based learning could be integrated into your course planning and development. This course is an introduction to basic concepts and common effective elements of game-based learning. At the end of this course, successful participants will be able to define and identify the difference between game-based learning and gamification, select components that can be applied to their own courses, and create an action plan for a course that uses game-based learning.

This self-paced course is intended as an introduction to utilizing low-stakes assessments to increase student understanding of course content. Low-stakes assessments can be developed in a variety of formats through many different tools, be graded or non-graded, and be a safe space for students to actively engage with course content. While low-stakes assessments can be used on their own to target specific information, they can also be utilized as a scaffold for high-stakes assessments, providing more opportunities for knowledge integration for students and easier checkpoints for faculty. This course will introduce faculty to the concept of low-stakes assessments.