Welcome to the first COLRS Catch up of the academic year! Periodically, we will send out these emails to provide reminders or updates, share materials you may have missed, and highlight some of the amazing work our faculty is doing in their online classes.

Please take special note of the information about Turnitin in the Canvas Catch Up section. We will be offering trainings, but the information in this email should help you get started.

In case you missed it

In August, our focus was getting your semester started right, and we offered the following resources to help you get started:

• Fall 2026 Semester Launch for Faculty Letter: While some of this information was specific to the days leading up to the start of classes, we want to draw your attention to our change in office hours and to the course and gradebook backups performed by ITS.
• Canvas Basics Workshop: If you haven't used Canvas before (or haven't used it in a while), feel free to watch the workshop recording where COLRS staff walk you through some important features in our LMS or review the Canvas Basics slides. If you'd like more information about Canvas, visit the Getting Started in Canvas page on our website.

Instructor spotlight

We are thrilled to formally announce the 2026-2028 OPEL Faculty Fellows!

• Dr. Md Rasel Al Mamun, Assistant Professor in the Department of Management Information Systems, will develop and implement a scaffolded internship and experiential learning model to strengthen workforce readiness and industry engagement.
• Dr. Anna Payne, Instructor in the School of Education, aims to produce a scalable, research-informed model that reduces barriers to licensure and promotes more equitable candidate outcomes.
• Dr. Rishikesh Sahay, Assistant Professor in Computer Science, is developing a practical and responsible framework to guide faculty use of artificial intelligence in teaching, research, and academic decision-making at UIS.
• Dr. Minh Tam "Tammy" Schlosky, Assistant Professor of Finance in the College of Business and Management, will lead Bloomberg Without the Barrier, a project that will deliver the power of UIS's Bloomberg Trading Lab to online learners.

These Faculty Fellows join the 2025-2027 OPEL Faculty Fellows cohort: Dr. Leah Bueso, Dr. Neetu Singh, and Dr. Hei-Chi Chan. Please join us in congratulating them!

Canvas catch up

We have officially moved to Turnitin as our plagiarism and AI detection software. There are three primary components to our new Turnitin integration: using Turnitin on your regular assignments, creating Turnitin Clarity assignments, and adding Turnitin to Harmonize discussions.

If you want to use Turnitin on your regular assignments (like you would have done in the past with Copyleaks), you will create your assignment like normal. At the bottom, you will see a new Document Processor option. This will be how you set up your assignments to make use of the plagiarism and AI detection functionality. Learn more about adding Turnitin to an assignment.

Turnitin Clarity is a new assignment type that gives students a space to complete their work directly in Canvas. When you create an assignment of this kind, you can see a playback of their writing process to help you assess whether or not the student composed the work, and you can configure settings for AI assistants for students (or turn off those features entirely).

To get started with a Turnitin Clarity assignment, you will need to go to the Assignments area of your course, click on the three dots in the upper right hand corner, and choose "Turnitin." From there, you can follow the instructions for creating a Clarity assignment on Turnitin's website.

If you use Harmonize discussions, you are also able to have Turnitin check student posts for plagiarism. Learn more about setting up Turnitin on Harmonize discussions by reviewing the Harmonize website. Please note that this scan does not check for potential AI generated work and is only scanning for plagiarism.

Other Canvas updates

Things change quickly in Canvas! Here are some highlights of other new features that might be of interest:

• We have enabled the Notebook feature for students. This allows students to highlight text written on Pages in Canvas, mark those highlights as important or unclear, and take notes on their thoughts and observations. They can also see a record of all of the content they've highlighted by clicking on the Notebook link in their course navigation.
• IgniteAI is Canvas's suite of AI tools, and we have unlocked the ability to use two of them in your courses. In accordance with our office policy on the implementation of AI tools, these are not turned on by default; we want to give instructors the ability to opt in if they would like instead of needing to opt out. Learn more about adding feature options to a Canvas course, including the ones below:
  • IgniteAI Search for Courses allows all users (students and instructors) to search for keywords within a course. This can help users locate specific information throughout the course.
  • IgniteAI Generator for Rubrics allows instructors to generate rubrics for assignments based on the assignment name and description. As with all generative AI tools, we highly recommend that you edit the output created by this tool if you plan to use it.

Looking ahead

We're excited to announce our new UIS Online Course Quality Rubric! We developed this rubric to simplify openly licensed online course quality standards widely used in higher education. The rubric can be used as a map for course design and facilitation.

We want to start by saying that this is a work in progress, and we are open to and encourage feedback. We want this to be a tool that is helpful to you, both as you reflect about the work you're already doing, and as you consider what work you'd like to do in your online courses moving forward. Please do not hesitate to reach out with questions or ideas!

We also want to support and celebrate the work you're doing. Our teaching tip and workshop series this academic year will focus on each of the six domains individually. For each domain, we'll explain a little more about what it is, share a practice or two that could help you achieve essential standards in that domain, and highlight ways to make online teaching more joyful. We'll also shine a spotlight on instructors doing amazing work in these areas already in our regular COLRS Catch Ups.

As always, thank you for your incredible work with our students! We'll catch up with you again soon!

-Emily, Carrie, Scott, & Taylor