Early on, many instructors treated InScribe (Q&A Community) like Wikipedia for teaching and learning. But over time, innovators like Megan Porter figured out how to use it to simplify communication, promote peer learning, and provide a place to go for help (from both instructors and classmates) in large classes.
If you haven't seen InScribe in a while, it's definitely worth a fresh look—there's a lot more flexibility, and it's more organized and easier to search. You can use it to make content more relevant to your students' lives, and to create running discussions with more natural interactions.
Community building
- Carve out student spaces, so they can brainstorm, collaborate, and study together
- Add elements like video and audio segments for more interactivity
- Create polls, and let your students create polls, to drive engagement
Better management for questions and answers
- Receive notifications when questions are answered
- Endorse especially good posts, and use reputation points as motivators to stay active and be a conversation starter
- Use AI capabilities to monitor for inappropriate posts—and to do sentiment analysis, so you can identify students who are struggling
Features that go beyond reading/writing-focused disciplines
- Take advantage of a solid math editor with LaTeX
- Generate runnable code for Java, Java Script, and Python (R coming soon)
Coming this spring, with the rollout of InScribe 2.0, you'll get much better integration with Canvas through roster sync (for automatic account creation) and grade sync (for automatic passback to your gradebook).
And deep linking will make it easier to navigate to content and discussions you want to be in—plus, you'll be able to drop widgets in assignments and modules to contextualize where students might be going (widgets go directly to a topic, so you don't have to hunt around).
If both tools exist, make sure you're using InScribe 2.0, so you can take advantage of these new features when they're available. There's no reason to stay in the old version. You don't lose anything in the move to 2.0. All communities will be the same and remain linked.
Want to see InScribe in action? Reach out to your campus teaching and learning center for a demo.