The Law Center captures roughly 13,000 hours of course recordings each semester, using a hardware network that streams video and audio from every classroom, with scheduled lecture recordings being carried out by Panopto. Recordings are made available for students to stream through Canvas, and instructors are given control over the default visibility of their recordings. This massive amount of video content allows the law center to serve students for whom physical attendance is prohibitive, but found new value as institutions transitioned into and out of digital and hybrid learning modes. With the assistance of engineers from the central campus, Panopto was tightly integrated into Zoom such that lecture recordings from online classes would be automatically uploaded to the same location as any in-person lecture recordings. The eventual result, after much trial and error, was a seamless system that allowed faculty and students the flexibility to meet online, on campus, or in a hybrid setting, and still rely on every lecture recording to be made available to them shortly after class. With an increased demand for asynchronous video content from students who were under quarantine, the law center adapted their faculty training model to further encourage the use of Panopto as an effective means of producing their own video content outside of class meetings. Particularly in light of increasingly prevalent research on the effectiveness of lecture content when students are able to view the material at their own pace, a cross-section of law center faculty have maintained original video content as a crucial element of their courses. The trials of meeting the ever-shifting demands of the community throughout the pandemic have yielded a heightened appreciation at-large for the value of the law center's lecture recording system, and the path that led to the current system is one that can inform other institutions aiming to more effectively deliver content. As law professors teaching an intensive first-year course, we must build connections with students so we can teach effectively and help students succeed. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to teach our Legal Practice courses remotely, we looked for ways to build and foster these connections through improved use of online tools, such as our course's Canvas Learning Management System. This tool that once sat in the background became critical as a way to provide entry points for our student's interactions with us as their professors, their colleagues, and the course itself. It also allowed us to make the course more inviting, interactive, and inclusive. Since returning to in-person learning we have maintained and expanded several of these improvements. During this presentation we will share four specific examples of improvements we made to help students connect and to create space for those connections: creating more visually appealing “liquid syllabi”; using discussion boards for video introductions (previously discussed at https://www.lwionline.org/article/community-building-better-outcomes-our-silver-lining-teaching-pandemic); using discussion boards for interactive assignments such as research projects; and using the Announcements function to create a weekly class newsletter (previously discussed at https://lssse.indiana.edu/blog/guest-post-how-sending-one-e-mail-a-week-helped-me-connect-better-to-my-law-students/). At the end of the session, participants will have concrete, effective, and easy-to-replicate methods of using Canvas to strengthen their teaching.

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