Cidi Labs Webinars

Mark Your Calendar!

Quality Matters and Cidi Labs Present: Instructional Designers and The Cloak of Invisibility- A Tale of Intention Hiding in Plain Sight

May 9th at 11am MT

University of Texas Arlington instructional designers Dr. Jessica Kahlow and Sarah Saraj were looking for a solution for QM Standards tracking and faculty training that seemed almost magical. Then, they stepped into the realm of course design superpowers and became QM heroes with Cidi Labs’ game-changing tools for Canvas. In this session, you’ll learn to harness your invisibility superpowers to help faculty meet various QM standards using DesignPLUS. They will discuss ways they use hidden key action items to enhance the usability of template pages. They will also discuss ways to expose faculty to DesignPLUS incrementally by using resource courses. Join us as we unveil intention hiding in plain sight!

EDUCAUSE Demo Day: Digital Accessibility Tools

May 21st- time coming soon!

Join us on May 21st to see UDOIT Advantage for EDUCAUSE’s Demo Day.

Cidi Spotlight: Homepage First Impressions

May 14th at 11am MT

You only get one chance to make a first impression with your Canvas course. Make it count by using game-changing tools from Cidi Labs to design a welcoming space for your learners. Join us for a 30-minute live makeover that will take a homepage from bland to BAM with DesignPLUS! Kenneth Larsen, Chief Instructional Designer at Cidi Labs, will demonstrate the research-backed features that help students feel welcome, stay focused and engaged, and know where to go for help. You’ll walk away with ideas to make your homepage’s first impression more informative and inviting.

Unlocking Course-Ray Vision: Designing Like a Superhero with Lake Highland Preparatory!

June 12th at 10am MT

Have you ever looked at a Canvas course and wondered why a specific design choice was made? Course design superheroes, Sam Meyer from Lake Highland Preparatory and Brad Moser from Cidi Labs, want to help you improve your course designs and make it easy for you to do so (without spending hours researching or coding). Sam and Brad will share their superpower, Course-Ray Vision, to reveal the research behind each decision. They’ll help you bring student engagement into focus, show you how to lower cognitive load, and what small design choices can have maximum impact on student success. Sam will use examples from Lake Highland that are helping improve face-to-face and online classes. Brad will share how easy it is to accomplish these changes using the Cidi Labs DesignPLUS toolset. Superhero capes are optional.

In case you missed a recent webinar:

Meet ObservEd: The New Student Performance Monitoring Tool from Cidi Labs

This webinar featured a live demo, example use cases, and Q&A with the Cidi Labs team as they introduced the newest game-changing tool for Canvas- ObservEd!

Introducing ObservEd from Cidi Labs: a student performance monitoring tool for Canvas. With ObservEd, staff from advising, athletic, equity, disability, and other key offices can seamlessly monitor the academic status of the students they’re deeply invested in, all in real-time and without compromising privacy. Say goodbye to outdated reports and clunky workarounds as ObservEd provides a carefully designed view into Canvas to monitor critical information such as grades, due dates, class participation, and more. Having a comprehensive view of students’ schedules, syllabi, and academic performance metrics enables more informed communication and proactive support for specific populations of students.

Cidi Spotlight: Too Much Content on a Canvas Page!

If you are a course designer or educator who has faced a Canvas page and wondered, “How will I fit this all here?” we’ve got an event for you! This Cidi Spotlight highlighted the tools that can help you organize, chunk, and design your content into accessible, engaging formats that learners and faculty love. Cidi Labs’ instructional designers walked you through how to accomplish professional and visually stunning-looking pages without having to know HTML. We highlighted features from DesignPLUS, a suite of simple yet powerful Canvas course design tools from Cidi Labs. Check out this webinar to see the new columns tool, tabs, accordions, and more!

Riding the Wave: Bellevue College's Faculty Professional Development with Cidi Labs

Have you ever had to roll out an entirely new faculty training program in 5 months? Learn how this team accomplished it and won over faculty with Cidi Labs tools. In 2022, Bellevue College created the Online Excellence Teaching Academy (OETA) — a seven-course program that faculty must complete in order to teach online.

The OETA’s components include a mix of asynchronous online, synchronous virtual, live remote and in-person courses and workshops. With the help of Cidi Labs’ DesignPLUS tool-set and TidyUP course clean-up tool for Canvas, the Bellevue eLearning team has created beautiful and accessible courses that provide faculty participating in OETA instruction about online teaching – but do so in such a way that showcases the importance of course design for the faculty-as-student learning experience.

Key milestones in the OETA program include an accessibility check with the eLearning team – where TidyUP is deployed to remove old, out-of-date files; faculty can learn how to use DesignPLUS to enhance their courses for a better learning experience; and implement the Quality Matters rubric to better understand why course design and accessibility matter to all students – and especially those online.

Stories of Heroism: DesignPLUS Superpowers in Action featuring Florida International University Online

Ready to get inspired? Don’t miss this dynamic session featuring Florida International University, as they showcase the superpowers they discovered in using DesignPLUS, a suite of simple-yet-powerful Canvas course design tools from Cidi Labs.

FIU will show you how to harness the power of these tools to overcome the villains of limited time, resources, and technical skills to create amazing learning experiences at scale. You’ll see the tools in action and learn how you can unlock superpowers such as task shrinking, barrier blasting, course-ray vision, and much more!

So put on your cape and join us for an unforgettable story of how a few simple tools can help you unleash superpowers to deliver more engaging, accessible learning experiences for all students.

Designing an Exemplary Learning Experience:
A Joint Webinar with OLC

Did you know that the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) uses DesignPLUS and UDOIT to design the exemplary courses that are part of their Center for Professional Learning? Join this webinar to learn more about OLC’s process for designing these exemplary online learning experiences and catch a glimpse of the course template they have designed to maximize engagement in their workshops.

Design Matters: Bringing Together Research & Action

Cidi Labs brings together research and action to empower more educators and course designers who make a difference in the lives of learners everywhere. In this webinar, we shared the why behind design decisions made when building a Canvas course. Using Universal Design for Learning, research on cognitive load, student engagement, student retention, and student persistence, we showed what design decisions can make a positive impact on your students’ success. Through the narratives of our customers who have put this work into practice, you’ll hear about the unexpected benefits for students and educators. Using Cidi Labs tools, we demonstrated how to implement these research-based practices into your Canvas courses. See why design matters with Cidi Labs.

How To Become a Course Design Superhero

Are you ready to become a Course Design Superhero and level up your superpowers? Join us for a dynamic session featuring Cidi Labs suite of simple-yet-powerful Canvas tools and live demonstrations of the course design superpowers they can unlock. We’ll show you how to harness the power of these tools to overcome the villains of limited time, resources, and technical skills to create amazing learning experiences at scale. We’ll share stories from other course design superheroes who have used Cid Labs tools to unlock superpowers such as task shrinking, barrier blasting, course-ray vision, and much more! We’ll share practical tips for maximizing the impact of these tools and provide actionable insights for creating truly impactful learning experiences. So put on your cape, grab your trusty tools, and join us for an unforgettable story of how a few simple tools can help you unleash superpowers to deliver more engaging, accessible learning experiences for all students.

Upcoming Events

Calendar

May 9, 2024

Instructional Designers and The Cloak of Invisibility- A Tale of Intention Hiding in Plain Sight, https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2ppV7LHPRVCuIaxuJqtMtw#/registration

Dates: May 9, 2024 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

May 14, 2024

Cidi Spotlight- Homepage First Impressions: https://cidilabs.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YtP7PmCmSjyCocpVKhKAcA

Dates: May 14, 2024 12:00 pm - 12:30 pm

May 20, 2024

Lincoln Legacy TLC Conference 2024, Champaign, IL

Dates: May 20, 2024 - May 21, 2024

May 21, 2024

Educause Demo Day: UDOIT Advantage. Register here https://events.educause.edu/webinar/demo-day/2024/digital-accessibility-tools

Dates: May 21, 2024 9:15 am - 10:15 am

Find an oldie and a goodie :

Toggle through our archive of previous webinars in the list below.

A Jumpstart for Building Quality Matters (QM) Ready Courses in Canvas

How can we make it easier for faculty to ensure their Canvas courses meet Quality Matters Standards? In this webinar, you will see how Pittsburg State University in Kansas is giving their faculty a huge jumpstart by providing course templates that meet 25+ QM Standards right out of the gate, plus embedded guidance that helps faculty keep quality in mind as they customize their course. We also demonstrate how easy it is to build and apply the QM-ready templates using DesignPLUS – a set of tools from Cidi Labs that make high quality Canvas course design easy.

Introducing UDOIT Advantage for Canvas

Imagine if you could magically turn all those PDF files lurking in your Canvas courses into more accessible Canvas Pages. Now you can, with UDOIT Advantage! Check out this webinar to learn more about an exciting new version of UDOIT – an automated accessibility assistant that guides course designers and educators in improving the accessibility of their Canvas courses. We’ll take you on a tour of UDOIT and highlight the much-anticipated new features that will give you an accessibility advantage.

The Journey toward Optimal Course Design: Making Every Step Easier

With the emergency phase of Covid-19 behind us, many institutions have turned their attention to improving their online courses, along with the processes and tools involved in course design.

In this webinar, we explore ways to optimize every step of the course design process, from building and staging to refining your Canvas courses. You’ll get an up-close look at a set of tools that have helped over 450 higher ed and K12 institutions more easily develop professionally styled, highly engaging and accessible Canvas courses – without the technical skills, large teams, or oodles of time that are often required to do so.

A Scalable Course Development Model to Achieve the Impossible

Develop 60 hours of engaging Canvas course content for over 100,000 learners with 4 instructional designers in 9 months – impossible, right?!

Not for the Education Service Center, Region 11 Reading Academies design team, who rapidly built a scalable delivery model for the Texas Reading Academies, using tools from Cidi Labs to meet these goals, which were driven by a state mandate to provide literacy training for their teachers.

Watch this webinar to learn how they pulled off this incredible feat and delivered a highly satisfying Canvas course experience for participants that is:

- Engaging
- Professionally styled
- Consistent
- Accessible

We also demonstrated the set of tools that helped the ESC Region 11 Reading Academies design team achieve the levels of efficiency and quality required to build this highly successful program in so little time with a small staff.

This webinar provides practical tips to help you handle the ever-growing demands on your course design and delivery practices, so that you can deliver more without sacrificing quality.

Tools to Bolster Your Canvas Course Quality Initiatives

In this webinar, we explore the ways that the Cidi Labs instructional design tools for Canvas can help make your Quality Matters work much more efficient and easier to scale.

The Importance of Visual Design in Online Courses

When it comes to online courses, beauty is more than skin deep. Studies have shown that the aesthetics of an online course are important factors in motivating students to engage and persist in the learning process. Traditionally, however, designing professional-looking courses requires loads of time and technical skills such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

This webinar explores how DesignPLUS can help you create high quality, engaging, and accessible Canvas courses without requiring advanced technical skills.

Looks Do Matter: Taking Your Canvas Course Design to the Next Level

Research has shown that a well-designed course promotes a positive user experience. In this video, we’ll use DesignPLUS – our advanced course design toolset – to transform the look and feel of a basic course.

Shifting Online Course Design Practices from Surviving to Thriving

In March 2020, the small team at Fullerton College moved 20,000 students fully online in just 3 days by leveraging DesignPLUS and UDOIT Cloud to create engaging, accessible, and quality-driven Canvas courses.

Accessibility Made Easy: Introducing UDOIT Cloud 3.0

UDOIT Cloud 3.0 – our Canvas course accessibility checker – is a significant leap forward in the functionality and user experience of the platform, making it easier and more efficient than ever for you to ensure your Canvas courses are accessible to all learners.

Tools that Impact Canvas Course Design

Presented by: Kenneth Larsen @ Cidi Labs, Dr. Tracy Stunz @ Clovis Community College and Robert Caldwell @ North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Using DesignPLUS in Canvas to Address QM Standards for Course Design

Presented by: Mike Zackrison and Kenneth Larsen @ Cidi Labs, Alicia Reed @ Laredo Community College and Jillian Jevack @ Quality Matters

Lighten your load this summer with ReadyGO

Featuring Eric Larson, University of St. Thomas, Minnesota and Tawnya Means, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Take your Canvas Courses to the Next Level

Featuring Kenneth Larsen, from Utah State University and Christie Fierro and Justin Kornheisl from Olympic Community College

Maximize Accessibility with UDOIT Cloud

Featuring the University of Minnesota and University of Central Florida

TidyUP your Canvas

Featuring Anna Stirling (Mt San Jacinto College) and Christopher Phillips (Utah State University