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Areas of knowledge to study to become a learning tech power user

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What are learning technology competencies? They are skills that instructors running and developing courses in learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas should know to be highly successful. Studying these learning technology competencies can help you become a Canvas power user. They are about being knowledgeable in the university’s toolset of learning technologies. Here are some example areas of knowledge:

Designing online self-paced and blended courses

Running online courses in an LMS like Canvas or Moodle

Using Zoom for presentations

Uploading and managing lecture recordings to MediaSite and editing educational videos

Using Microsoft 365 tools

Using WordPress blogs in higher education and Extension outreach

Digital accessibility for courses, multimedia, and recordings

Managing surveys and forms in software like Qualtrics or MS Forms

This list of learning technology competencies links to my own posts related to the areas of knowledge and is loosely organized by Michigan State University’s Extension competency areas (Ed Tech Core Competences).

Using Qualtrics at Ohio State

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The Qualtrics U.OSU site has Getting Started with Qualtrics information.

If you will be using Qualtrics a lot, you should send a request to your department’s Qualtrics administrator to update your account from the trial version.

Qualtrics can be used to embed welcome surveys in Canvas courses. They let instructors know when a new student has arrived in a course.

Here’s a page about prerequisite training you should complete before using Qualtrics and training about Qualtrics related to your role.

Qualtrics can be a powerful tool for creating course evaluation surveys.

Using Moodle as a teacher

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Moodle is a popular open-source learning management system (LMS) used by schools, universities, and the Extension foundation online campus.

In many Moole instances, you can use your Google or Facebook login to create a new account in the Extension foundation online campus.

Once your account is confirmed by e-mail, you can use the search box to find the course that you’re interested in.

If your course has an enrollment key, enter that in the Enrolment Key box. Enrollment keys are useful if you want to limit your audience to just people with the key.

To be granted Teacher level access to a course, you can ask a Teacher in the course that you are working with or send a request to the Moodle Admin. Once you have access, you’ll be able to ‘Turn editing on for course pages’.

Once you learn to use one learning management system (LMS), like Moodle, those skills and concepts can transfer to using other LMS, like Canvas. Moodle and Canvas are some of the most popular learning management systems.

Here are some resources about learning Moodle:

What are MediaSite shared folders?

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Shared folders are a way in MediaSite for departments to share their recordings among several staff members. They provide a good way for backup access to an organization’s lecture recordings. It’s good to post Zoom webinars in MediaSite for longer term storage because by default, Zoom recording links only last 120 days. The Teaching & Learning Center has more information about using MediaSite.

What are MS Forms?

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MS Forms is a way to create web forms to collect information from course participants. Some extension courses use MS Forms as a way to request grading from an educator to receive a course completion certificate.

MS Power Automate can be used to setup conditions that email different educators, based on the participant’s response to the county field.

People creating MS Forms should try to follow university branding and accessibility guidelines. It would be a good practice to test the form with the WAVE tool.

Adding another Teacher to your course in Scarlet Canvas

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If you are an instructor in a Scarlet Canvas course, your Teacher role has the ability to add other Teachers to your course.

To add another Teacher to your course:

  • Login to your course and go to the ‘People’ roster.
  • Click the ‘+People’ button.
  • Enter a Scarlet Canvas user’s email address in the email address field, make sure they have a role of Teacher, and hit ‘Next’.
  • On the next screen, make sure it’s the correct person you want to add click ‘Add Users’.

If, for some reason, Canvas can’t find the user, it means they haven’t registered for Scarlet Canvas before. The user will need to create an account.

The ELT archives

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Blast from the past!

Exploring Learning Technologies was a group of instructional technologists and instructional designers at Ohio State who would meet monthly to talk about emerging technologies and popular instructional design tools. Here’s a list of archived ELT meeting information. Some include videos about the learning technologies discussed.

5/10/21: Take a Good Look Around with ELT
3/4/21: Flying High with ELT – covering working with drones
3/27/21: ELT: Power Automate
11/1/19: ELT: Getting Started with Adobe Character Animator
11/1/19: ELT: PowerPoint Unleashed
7/19/19 ELT: Getting Started with Web Annotation – covering Hypothes.is
6/21/19 ELT: Getting Started with H5P
4/17/19 ELT: Quality Assurance in Course Design
3/15/25 Podcasting Mini-Conference
2/7/19: A Closer Look at Transcription Services
1/18/19: Creating Video Discussions with Flipgrid – with Matt Yauk
9/4/18: ELT: Getting Started with the Padcaster
8/13/18: All Things Photography
6/11/18: ODEE Mixed Bag  – coving Turnitin, Proctorio, and the new Carmen Quizzing tool
5/18/18: ELT: All Things VR
3/28/18: A Closer Listen: Getting the Best Audio for your Project
3/28/18: Canvas Potpourri
3/8/17: Easier, Accessible, Better: Digital Book Publishing with Pressbooks
1/26/17: ELT: Getting to Know the Oculus Rift – at CETE at 1900 Kenny Road

Accessibility topics for developers and designers

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Here are some more developer-focused accessibility articles:

Here are some more designer-focused accessibility articles:

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro to make PDF output from design software accessible

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Various design software applications today offer amazing design features but sometimes fall short in supporting document accessibility in not producing tagged PDFs. Fortunately, we can use Adobe Acrobat Pro to check our PDFs for accessibility and remediate problems.

Here are some steps to take in Adobe Acrobat Pro after exporting a PDF from your design software:

  • First run the accessibility checker in Acrobat Pro by clicking ‘Prepare for accessibility’ and then ‘Check for accessibility’. A list of issues comes up in the accessibility panel on the right.
    Screenshot of the accessibility checker settings in Adobe Acrobat
  • Some design applications don’t produce tagged PDFs so in Acrobat Pro you’ll need to right-click on the ‘tagged PDF failed’ issue and choose ‘Fix’. After the tagging process, you’ll notice other issues in the PDF.
    Screenshot of where to launch the checker in Adobe Acrobat and the checker settings
  • For missing alt text issues, you can right-click on the issue and choose ‘Fix’. A box pops up allowing you to add alt text to each figure that is missing it. The alt text should relate to the purpose of the image rather than be a complete description of everything in the photo. Try to keep the alt text brief to around 125 characters. If the image is just a decoration instead of meaningful content, check the ‘Decorative figure’ box.
    Screenshot of fixing a missing alt text issue in the Acorbat accessibility panel results.
  • While a lot of issues have an easy ‘Fix’ option, for some more complex you’ll need to do some research about how to fix and may need to modify things in the tags panel. For example, you may see a ‘heading nesting failed error’ that will require finding headings in the tags panel and updating them to the appropriate heading level to fit the document structure. If a heading skipped levels to be an <H3>, you could change it to be an <H2> in the tags panel, fixing the issues.
  • If you encounter a PDF with a lot of complex tag structure issues, be sure to save a copy of your original document so if the tag structure gets broken you have a backup to start over with.
  • Save your remediated PDF.

You can learn more about PDF document accessibility and remediating PDFs in the PDF accessibility BuckeyeLearn courses. While you can remediate accessibility issues in Acrobat Pro, it’s best to fix issues in the original source document created by your design software if it supports correcting the issues. Companies are adding new features supporting accessibility in new versions of thier software. Check with your software vendor to see if they are planning to release new features supporting document accessibility.

Using U.OSU.EDU WordPress sites

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Updated on 2/14/25
This is an outline about the basics of using U.OSU.EDU WordPress sites to share with educators.

TOC

The U.OSU logo banner

Getting an account and logging on

If you have never used U.OSU before, you can use the ‘Sign up for U.OSU.EDU link at https://u.osu.edu/ to sign up for the service.
Then later you can use the Login button at: https://u.osu.edu/ to log into the U.OSU.EDU WordPress service.
The U.OSU login and signup buttons
If you need access to a specific group or project website, contact that site’s administrator to add you.
You will need to be signed up for U.OSU for an administrator to be able to add you as an author/editor.

Finding group websites in your list of U.OSU sites

Once you are logged into U.OSU, a ‘My Sites’ link appears in the top left corner of your screen. Hover over that menu to see the list of sites that you have access to.
A screenshot showing the location of the ‘My Sites; link.
Then click on the group website link to go that site and start posting.

Editing and adding posts

Posts are different from pages, as they can be categorized and tagged. The Teaching and Learning Resources Center has some more information about the difference between WordPress posts and pages.
To see the list of posts in your group’s site, click on the ‘Posts’ link in the link to the left of your screen.
To add a new post, click on the ‘New Post’ button.
A screenshot showing the location of the ‘Add New Post’ button.
Add a title for the new post in the Title field.
Add the body text in the rich text editor.
A screenshot showing where to add a title and the body of the blog post.
Choose a category for the post from the Categories pane on the right side of your screen.
A screenshot showing how to Choose a category for the post from the Categories pane on the right side of your screen.
Add tags for the post in the Tags pane.
Set a featured image in the Featured Image pane. The image will represent the post in search results.
A screenshot showing the Tags pane

— Using photos in a blog post

Images can also be used inline, in post by uploading them to the Media library and using the ‘Add Media’ button to place them. The U.OSU guides in the Teaching and Learning Resources Center have an article about uploading to a site’s Media Library.
When we upload a photo to the Media library we should be sure to add an alternative text description (related to the purpose of the image) in the field provided. Alt text should be concise at no more than 120 characters.
See the U.OSU Working with Images article in the Teaching and Learning Resources Center to learn more about consideration to think about when using images in posts.

Note that the Media Library has a 32 MB size limit for files uploaded. Use Photoshop or other image editing software to more appropriately size raw photos of use on the web. If you have a video you want to share as part of your blog post, it’s bet to upload it to a video hosting service like YouTube or MediaSite where larger file sizes are allowed. Be sure to check that your YouTube video has closed captions and a transcript for accessibility. YouTube or MediaSite will provide embed code to allow sharing your video in WordPress.
See the Creating audio and video playlists article or embedding videos article for more information about working with multimedia and U.OSU
The featured image, set in the Featured Image pane, will represent the post in search results.

— Linking to PDFS in a blog post

You can also upload PDFs to the Media library and link to them if you need to.
We should be sure to run the accessibility checker on our PDFs before uploading. Here’s some information about it in Acrobat Pro.

— Checking the accessibility of blog posts

Before publishing, we should check that our blog posts are accessible. Using the WAVE browser Extension to check blog posts is a great way to check accessibility issues as we are posting.
Here’s a General accessibility tips for blog post authors article with more information about blog post accessibility considerations.

— Resources to learn more about U.OSU.EDU

You can find more information about how to use U.OSU in Ohio State’s Teaching and Learning Resources Center.
There are also instruction guides related to using U.OSU.EDU in the Teaching and Learning Resources Center.