Last spring, UIUC announced that we were moving from Compass2g (Blackboard) to Canvas this academic year. So, I've been exploring Canvas over the summer and decided to jump in and move my course to Canvas this fall. My plan is to share tips about developing courses in Canvas along the way.
Since I have to manually move my content, my goals for this semester are to have a paperless lab and the content is also accessible for all students in my lab. For the latter, I am going to draw from the UDL guidelines and the IT Accessibility 101 course provided by the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services at Illinois.
My first course in Canvas will be BIOE415: Biomedical Instrumentation Lab. I'm organizing each lab into a module with background information and the experiment instructions. Therefore a lot of my content is getting transferred to pages that are just webpages and you can edit the HTML if you know what you are doing.
My first tip is about how to add figure captions to images on pages in Canvas. It is easy if you know HTML, but not if you are trying to search for how to do it on Canvas pages.
Even though all of the WE Local conferences in North America were canceled, the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) still recognized several people with WE Local Awards. I was presented with the WE Local 2021 Local ELiTE (Emerging Leader in Engineering and Technology) Award. This award honors engineers who have been actively engaged in an engineering or technology profession and have ten to fifteen years of cumulative engineering experience and consistent SWE involvement including both formal and informal leadership roles.
At WE20, I shared how lessons I learned as a project engineer applied to managing grants and research in academia. This session was recorded and provided as an on-demand session. I've included the slides here as well to make the links easier to access. The sessions from WE20 will be available on-demand for a full year, so you can go back and watch the recording if you are interested.
Read more: Applying Project Management Techniques in Academia
At WE20, Yanfen Li, Nicole Jackson, and I created an on-demand session with answers to frequent questions about an academic job search. We weren't able to cover all aspects of the job search in detail during the 30 minutes. However, the slides are provided below and we will be hosting a follow-up Q&A on November 19 on Zoom. If you are interested in joining this call (and possibly future calls), please complete this sign-up form. You may also join the SWE WIA Slack and ask questions on the academic job search panel. There are lots of SWE members who have experience with the academic job search process who are active on Slack.