Author: Shane Lanning (they/them)

Education is Like a Burger, Culturally Bound

April 16, 2025 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

Just like a “burger” can mean different things across cultures, so too can education, requiring educators to consider diverse learning backgrounds and adapt their classrooms accordingly. I tell this story to highlight how we all approach our lives with the experience that we have had thus far, and this experience is deeply rooted in our […]

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Gamify Your Course with Twine

November 1, 2023 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

Learn how you can utilize Twine to create interactive, gamified course materials. As faculty consider strategies for increasing student enthusiasm for learning, many are turning to gamification. For a lot of us, this has taken on a few different forms. We have either assigned an existing game for students to play or utilized game-like features […]

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Utilizing Canvas for Collaborative Learning

September 6, 2023 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

Learn about Canvas tools for facilitating meaningful group work in your class. One of the first articles I wrote for the Teaching Innovation Blog was about students’ shared frustrations for collaborative learning and how we might overcome some of the challenges that group work presents in our classrooms. In that piece, I explained that despite […]

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How to Create Anonymous Discussion Boards with New Canvas Redesign and Why You Might Want To

May 3, 2023 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

Canvas Discussions Redesign offers instructors the ability to create anonymous spaces for student engagement that might otherwise be stifled by social pressure. Anonymity is a tricky pedagogical tool. On one hand, it can encourage learners to engage more honestly. While on the other hand, we have this sense that anonymous responders will seize the opportunity […]

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Creating Space for Radical Openness in the LMS

April 5, 2023 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

How can we use digital space of an online LMS to work towards creating a space of Radical Openness for co-creating with students and engaging them in shaping the course? I recently stumbled upon a 2017 blog article by Dr. Jesse Stommel in which he considers what kind of Learning Management System (LMS) bell hooks […]

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Creating a Reflective Space in Canvas

March 1, 2023 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

Learn how to set up a dynamic reflective space for your learners through the creative use of built-in Canvas tools. Reflection has been a huge part of my learning, and I engage my students in some of that deep thought in my courses. I value reflection because it provides learners and instructors with the opportunity […]

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Less Worry, More Learning: How Ungrading Has Changed My Student Experience

January 25, 2023 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

Read about how ungrading in a graduate class changed the author’s experience and helped them center their own reasons for taking the course. The Teaching Innovation Team offered a summer book club for faculty in which we read Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). In its literal sense, ungrading is […]

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How Changing Our Assumptions Can Impact Student Learning

December 14, 2022 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

It’s easy to unintentionally make assumptions about the background knowledge students bring with them to class. How can we check the assumptions we make, and how can we assist students who do have background knowledge gaps? In August 2022, I facilitated a workshop on implicit bias and course design. My overall goal was to engage […]

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Bringing the Future of Higher Education to the Here and Now

November 30, 2022 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

In a time of rapid change, these tactics can help higher education faculty “center the needs of the students” and “ensure equitable and inclusive experiences.” For the past few months, I have been thinking about the future of higher education. Recently, I have learned from books like the Great Upheaval and at conferences like OLC […]

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Leveraging User Personas for Course Design

November 9, 2022 by Shane Lanning (they/them)

Learn how a tool from user experience design can help inform student-centered and empathetic course design. User personas are a tool for user experience design to help make products with the specific users at the center. While I’m not advocating for a view of higher education that sees students as consumers and courses as products, […]

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