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Student interaction plays an important role in learning and overall sense of community. Whether you’re teaching fully online, blended, or in-person, you might consider developing space to support such interaction in your digital classroom. Canvas has many tools to help students digitally interact.

Groups

Student interaction plays an important role in learning and overall sense of community. Whether you’re teaching fully online, blended, or in-person, you might consider developing space to support such interaction in your digital classroom. Canvas has many tools to help students digitally interact.

Groups Overview

    • Create student groups to use with Canvas Discussions, Canvas Assignments, and Canvas Peer Reviews.
    • Create student groups randomly or manually, or allow individual signups.
    • Have student group members create and edit their own Canvas pages.
    • Have students create their own groups in your course (if enabled).

Peer Review

    • Facilitate students reviewing one another's work and giving substantive feedback.
    • Allow students to serve as an audience for one another's presentations, performances, etc.
    • Assign peer reviews randomly, manually, and both within or among group memberships.
    • Have students use associated rubrics to leave peer feedback.

Collaborations

Collaborations Overview

    • Add a Google Doc as a collaborative document and share it with individuals or groups in your Canvas course.
    • Have students add their own Collaborations (if your course uses Collaborations). Student collaborations will automatically be visible to instructors.
    • Use Collaborations to co-create certain course elements (e.g. syllabus, discussion guidelines, rubrics).

Discussions

Students can:
    • Share learning resources with one another.
    • Teach topics or information to one another.
    • Help one another troubleshoot issues or answer content-related questions (e.g., course Q&A forum).

Integrating these instructional strategies and technology tools helps cultivate a safe learning community, foster peer interaction, and give timely and meaningful feedback by involving students in both doing things and thinking about the things they are doing.

Adapted from “Learner-Learner Interactions” in Start Here 102: Best Practices in Online Instruction, licensed CC BY 4.0 by Grace Seo, University of Missouri.