For managing course materials, UCLA uses a Canvas-based application branded as BruinLearn. I don’t love it! Everything takes too many clicks to accomplish, it’s ugly, and I hate its built-in student-surveillance features. I tend to create a WordPress site for each class I teach, using BruinLearn mainly for submitting assignments and hosting material that’s not freely available on the web. Technically, I think I could accomplish with BruinLearn most of what I do on WordPress, but it would be an enormous, unwieldy pain.
However! Every once in awhile I get wind of a BruinLearn feature that actually sounds useful, so a few months ago I combed through the list of tools to see what I might use. I don’t like a lot of the BruinLearn apps. A lot of the tools emphasize surveillance or plagiarism-detection and other…cop shit, which is not how I like to teach. There’s also a rising number of AI tools (who asked for these?) and a lot of proprietary textbook material. But here are a few BL tools I’ve incorporated into my teaching relatively recently.
(Confusingly, help documents often refer to these externally authored apps as “LTI tools.” LTI is a standard companies use to integrate their software with course-management systems, but I can’t imagine that many faculty know or care about this.)
Helpfully, the BruinLearn Center of Excellence (why is it called that) broke all its links to help documentation recently with a website redesign. Right now, Google searches for specific tools all lead you back to the main support page. So I’m having trouble linking to UCLA documentation about these tools. Maybe by the time you read this they’ll be easier to find? We live in hope.
Take attendance right from BruinLearn
I’ve recently started taking attendance again. In theory, students are adults who will come to class if it’s valuable for them, so it’s my job to make it valuable. In practice, I don’t think it’s quite that simple; we all need extrinsic motivation sometimes. I know it’d be good for me to go on a walk, but it really helps when someone nags me to get off the couch. My attendance policies are pretty generous, but I have found it useful to give students an external incentive to be there. Plus it helps me learn students’ names and I often use it to solicit answers to getting-to-know-you questions.
Anyway! Did you know we have an attendance tool within BruinLearn? No? That might be because it’s not enabled by default and also the documentation alternately calls it Attendance and Roll Call (its brand name), apparently at random.
But we do, and it includes students’ photographs, which is nice. To enable it, you have to go into your course’s settings and include it in your site’s sidebar. I’ve previously really struggled with taking attendance consistently, forgetting to do it or misplacing documents, etc. The built-in tool is helpful because students can see whether they’ve been marked absent and let you know if you’ve made a mistake.
There’s also a seating chart function, but I don’t really understand that–are there really college instructors who assign seats? Weird. Also, why?
Build student groups using criteria
I’m never really sure how to assign students to project groups. I want them to work with unfamiliar classmates because meeting new people is Good. But I also want them to have an element of choice.
We have access to a tool called Peerceptiv that advertises itself as an all-in-one solution for student group formation and assignments. It has various functions that make it possible for students to grade each other on group performance. I understand why you’d want to do this, but it’s always struck me as creepy, so I don’t use those.
I have, however, used its “group formation” function, which allows you to create questionnaires. After students answer the questions, the tool slots them into groups based on the relative importance of each criterion. By default, it asks students about their schedules, which I like.
It also has some tools for peer review, which might be helpful. I haven’t had occasion to use those.
I cannot even begin to get into how to set up a Peerceptiv group-formation process in BruinLearn; it is hellishly complicated—BUT POSSIBLE.
Allow students to sign up for time slots
I often ask my students to do things like lead part of a discussion, and it’s always kind of a chore to sign them up for these activities. There’s an “appointment” tool within BruinLearn that allows them to pick time slots, and you can set the number of students it’ll accept for each slot.