Author: Brandon

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Read, reflect, and reconnect this summer: Books with Harte presents Klara and the Sun

This summer, the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning invites faculty and staff to take part in a shared reading experience of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Designed with flexibility in mind, this program offers a meaningful opportunity to connect with colleagues, explore timely themes around artificial intelligence, and prepare for engaging community conversations in the Fall term.

Participants will receive a free copy of the book and can join us for a series of three biweekly Zoom discussions held between mid-July and mid-August. Each session will focus on a portion of the novel, culminating in a final conversation that reflects on the book as a whole and considers its relevance for teaching and learning.

A Flexible, Summer-Friendly Format

We know summer schedules can be unpredictable, so this program is built to accommodate varying levels of availability. In addition to live Zoom sessions, participants will have access to asynchronous tools that support ongoing engagement:

  • Perusall: A shared, interactive reading space where participants can annotate the text, pose questions, and respond to one another. The first session will include a brief, hands-on introduction.
  • Padlet: A collaborative space for sharing broader context; articles, media, author background, and related resources that enrich the reading experience.

Whether you attend every session or dip in as your schedule allows, you’ll be part of a dynamic, low-pressure learning community.

Why Klara and the Sun?

As the upcoming first-year common read, Klara and the Sun offers a compelling entry point into discussions about artificial intelligence, ethics, perception, and human connection. This summer series provides a space to explore those themes through a distinctly Harte Center lens; one that integrates critical AI analysis with thoughtful, interdisciplinary dialogue.

At the same time, participants will gain hands-on experience with several of the Harte Center’s supported academic technologies, including Zoom, Perusall, Canvas, and Padlet, in a low-stakes, supportive environment.

Join Us

Sign-up now! Space may be limited to ensure active discussion, so we encourage you to register early once the form becomes available.

Spend part of your summer reading, reflecting, and connecting—with a great book and a great community.

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New Quizzes: Enhancing Online Assessment in Canvas

Looking to refresh your assessments in Canvas? New Quizzes is the platform’s next-generation tool, designed to make building and delivering quizzes more flexible, interactive, and insightful—and it’s a feature option you can enable right within your course. With new question types like categorization and stimulus-based prompts, plus cleaner workflows and improved analytics, it opens up new possibilities for engaging students and understanding their learning.

If you’re used to Classic Quizzes, you’ll find New Quizzes feels familiar—but with more room to experiment. Classic Quizzes is still a solid, straightforward option, and contains features like anonymous surveys that are still missing in New Quizzes, but New Quizzes is where Canvas is investing for the future. If you’re curious about new ways to design assessments or want deeper insight into student performance, it’s definitely worth turning it on and giving it a try. Contact Brandon Bucy or Helen MacDermott with your New Quizzes questions (or really any of your Canvas questions!).

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Roll Call: Taking Attendance with Canvas

Attention faculty: are you looking for a way to manage attendance in your classes? The Roll Call Attendance tool in Canvas provides instructors with a simple way to track student attendance directly within your course site. With just a few clicks, faculty can mark students as present, absent, or late for each class meeting. The tool automatically records attendance and can calculate a running attendance score that appears in the course gradebook if you choose to use it. Because it is built directly into Canvas, Roll Call Attendance helps streamline record-keeping and makes it easy for you to monitor participation and identify patterns in student attendance throughout the term.

Want to learn more? Need assistance activating Roll Call Attendance in your course? Contact Brandon Bucy today!

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Professional Audio Equipment Available for W&L Video Projects

High-quality audio is one of the most important elements of professional-looking video production. Whether you are recording a lecture, creating instructional content, producing interviews, or assigning video projects for your classes, clear and consistent sound makes a significant difference in how your and your students’ work is perceived and understood.

To support high quality academic video production across the Washington and Lee University community, the Harte Center offers a selection of professional audio equipment that faculty, staff, and students can request for use in their projects. These tools are well-suited for a wide range of recording environments and experience levels, helping elevate the production quality of your videos without requiring specialized audio expertise.

Available Audio Equipment

We currently maintain the following audio gear, all available for request:

Sennheiser Shotgun Microphones (8 available)

Shotgun microphones are ideal for capturing focused, high-quality dialogue while minimizing background noise. They are commonly used for interviews, lectures, and narrative-style video recordings where clean, directional audio is essential.

RODE Wireless GO II Microphone Sets (8 available)

These wireless systems provide a compact, wireless solution for recording clear audio without restricting movement. These are especially useful for presenters who need hands free, or for interviews or film scenes requiring audio capture from two speakers at the same time. They are well-suited for both indoor and outdoor recording scenarios.

Sennheiser Boom Pole Sets (8 available)

Our boom pole sets allow microphones to be positioned just out of frame, providing professional-quality sound capture while keeping the focus on the subject. Boom poles are commonly used in interviews, demonstrations, and film scenes.

Boom Pole Stands (8 available)

For situations where holding a boom pole is not practical, boom pole stands offer stable, hands-free microphone placement. These stands are particularly helpful for longer recordings, panel discussions, or static interview setups.

Audio-Technica Studio Monitor Headsets (8 available)

Monitoring audio during recording is critical to ensuring clean sound. Our studio monitor headsets allow you to listen in real time, catch issues early, and ensure consistent audio quality throughout your project.

Supporting Professional Academic Video Production

All of this equipment is available to support professional-looking video production projects for academics and students across the W&L community. To request audio equipment or learn more about availability and usage guidelines, please contact Senior Academic Technologist Brandon Bucy via email at bucyb@wlu.edu. We are happy to help you determine which tools best fit your project and ensure you have what you need for a successful recording.

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Perusall Gets a Major Update!

Dear Faculty,

We have just updated our Perusall reading annotation app to take advantage of additional features and functionality.  To activate Perusall in your Canvas course, follow the instructions at Canvas Instructor Quick Setup.  Additional information regarding Perusall setup is available at Getting Started for Instructors.  

If you have used Perusall in the past, please note: 

  • If you were originally integrated into Perusall with LTI 1.1, the first time you launch into Perusall via LTI 1.3 integration, it will prompt you with a one-time “confirm merge” email. You will need to confirm the merge and relaunch to officially join LTI 1.3.
  • If you originally had a course through the LTI 1.1 integration, that content is still available in your account under “my courses”. You can also copy course materials from an LTI 1.1 course to an LTI 1.3 course.  For instructions see How do I transition my Perusall course from an LTI 1.1 integration to LTI 1.3?Links to an external site.

If you have any questions or experience any issues activating Perusall in your Canvas course, or want to learn more about Perusall, please contact Brandon Bucy.

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New Zoom YuJa Connector Makes Saving and Sharing your Zoom Recordings Easier!

YuJa and Zoom company logos being added together
 

ITS has just implemented a connector linking our Zoom web conferencing tool with our video capture and media management system, YuJa. Moving forward, all recordings made in Zoom will automatically import into your personal media space within YuJa for storage and sharing.

What does this mean for you? First off, you are no longer limited by the 30-day retention policy for recordings within Zoom. You can feel confident that any recordings made during Zoom meetings will automatically and seamlessly transfer to YuJa for permanent storage and retrieval. In addition, you can take advantage of many features within YuJa to autocaption, edit, clip, and share recordings with individual students, classes, external colleagues, or to the public. If you use the Zoom tool within Canvas to schedule your class Zoom sessions, resulting recordings will even automatically publish to your course channel, making them immediately accessible to your students from within Canvas. 

You can access your imported recordings by navigating to YuJa from your MyApps page or by clicking the YuJa link in any of your Canvas courses. Once in YuJa, look for a folder in your personal media area titled “Zoom Recordings”.

Questions? Want to know more? Contact Brandon Bucy or drop by my office in the Harte Center (Room 117, Lower Level 1 in Leyburn Library).

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FYI! Auto-captioning in YuJa will no longer be automatically generated!

Dear Faculty,

In order to accommodate the dramatic increase in usage for our YuJa video management service due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to adjust some of the default settings for video recordings and uploads to the service.  In particular, auto-captions will no longer be generated for all recordings and uploads by default.  

All videos added to YuJa still will have the option of auto captioning — it will just need to be requested by interested faculty on a video-by-video basis.  The request is made through YuJa and an email will be sent to you when captioning is complete.  

Instructions for requesting auto captions for a video are available at: https://wlu.box.com/s/4mwhkswgrgydhbsqnqa8ojm566resava.

We apologize for any inconvenience this adjustment may cause.  

Please email the ITS Information Desk at help@wlu.edu or call 540-458-4357 with any questions or concerns.  

 

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Sakai to Canvas – FINAL ROUND of Bulk Migration Requests is now OPEN

Dear faculty and staff,
 
Sakai is officially retiring on May 31, 2020.  Note that you will NOT have access to any Sakai courses or content after May 31, 2020.
 
We are now opening up our third and final bulk migration request to move your course and project sites from Sakai into Canvas.  Beginning now and continuing through May 4, 2020, you may request to have your course or project sites migrated from Sakai into Canvas by filling out the form available at https://go.wlu.edu/migrate.
 
At this point we are accepting migration requests for ANY needed course or project sites from ANY term.  Courses will be ready in Canvas by May 18, 2020.  You will be notified when your courses are available. This will give you time to check the final migrations for accuracy and completeness by the May 31, 2020 deadline.  
 
Note that you will not have access to any Sakai courses or content after May 31, 2020.  All materials you wish to save from Sakai need to be downloaded to your own computer or migrated into Canvas by that time.  
 
Please contact Brandon or Helen directly (bucyb@wlu.edu or x8651; hmacdermott@wlu.edu or x4561) or via help@wlu.edu to ask any Canvas questions or to request personal training.
 
We apologize for asking you to do one more thing during this unprecedented time of virtual instruction here at W&L, but rest assured there will be only a few more emails related to the Sakai-Canvas migration, as our year-long process finally comes to a close at the end of May.  
 
Many thanks for your consideration and support!
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Migrating Sakai Courses to Canvas – Round 1!

As part of our continuing transition from the Sakai learning management system to Canvas, ITS Academic Technologies is initiating our first round of bulk migration requests to move your course and project sites from Sakai into Canvas.  Beginning now and continuing through October 28, 2019, you may request to have up to 10 course or project sites migrated from Sakai into Canvas by filling out the Sakai-Canvas Course and Project Site Migration Request form.
 
This first round of migrations is intended to facilitate faculty in migrating content for their Undergraduate Winter 2020 and Law Spring 2020 courses into Canvas, although you are welcome to request course or project sites from any term.  
 
We will have two additional rounds of migrations to accommodate Undergraduate Spring 2020 courses, as well as any remaining courses or project sites that need to be migrated out of Sakai before it is retired at the end of June 2020.  
 
Please refer to the following bulk migration schedule for more details and deadlines:
 
  • First round: Requests due by October 28, 2019.  Courses will be ready in Canvas by November 4, 2019
  • Second round: Opens January 27, 2020.  Requests due by February 17, 2020.  Courses will be ready in Canvas by February 24, 2020
  • Third (and Final) round: Opens April 1, 2020.  Requests due by May 29, 2020.  Courses will be ready in Canvas by June 15, 2020
If you request to have courses or project sites migrated, you will be notified when the courses will be available in Canvas.  Please note that you must check your courses after migration to ensure that they are set up properly. While the migration pathway from Sakai to Canvas is robust for Resources, Assignments, Forums, Tests & Quizzes, and Lessons, there are a number of items and settings that will not migrate over and will require positive action on your part in Canvas to correct or address.  
 
You are also welcome to migrate your own course content from Sakai into Canvas at any time.  The first step is creating a sandbox course in Canvas to host your migrated content.  After that, you may follow these detailed migration instructions.  
 
For those of you beginning with Canvas, we have daily Canvas sessions scheduled for faculty during Winter Academy (December 9-13), and are also offering a 2-day Camp Canvas workshop during Undergraduate Reading Days (October 10-11).  As always, Academic Technologies staff will also be available at any time for one-on-one faculty training, migration requests, and support sessions.  
 
Please contact Brandon or Helen directly (bucyb@wlu.edu or x8651; hmacdermott@wlu.edu or x4561) or via help@wlu.edu to ask any Canvas questions or to request personal training.
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Please Welcome Canvas to W&L!

stork carrying a "baby bundle" with the Canvas logo

Woo-hoo! Canvas is Live!

You may now access the Canvas Learning Management System at https://canvas.wlu.edu.  Fall 2019 courses have been imported and are available for you to begin building out.  

During the 2019-20 school year, both Canvas and Sakai will be available, and you are free to use either platform until the end of Spring 2020 when Sakai will be retired. However, professors who wish to use lecture capture as part of their classes will need to use Canvas in order to do so.  Tegrity has been discontinued by their parent company, McGraw Hill, and we are employing a new lecture capture software called YuJa, which is available only through Canvas.

In preparation for the upcoming school year, Academic Technologies will be conducting numerous Canvas training sessions.  We have daily Canvas sessions scheduled for faculty during Fall Academy (August 19-30, 2019), and are also offering a 3-day workshop called Camp Canvas (August 13-15, 2019).  Participants in this workshop will leave with a thorough understanding of the new LMS and a Canvas course ready to go for the 2019-2020 academic year.  Additional training opportunities will be provided the week of August 5-9 for Law School faculty. As always, Academic Technologies staff will also be available at any time for one-on-one faculty training, migration requests, and support sessions.  Please contact Brandon or Helen directly (bucyb@wlu.edu or x8651; hmacdermott@wlu.edu or x4561) or via help@wlu.edu to ask any Canvas questions or to request personal training.

To view further details about the transition timeline, upcoming events, and migration/training resources, please visit our Canvas website at https://canvas.academic.wlu.edu. 

Many thanks, and welcome to Canvas!