Instructors Share Their Best Canvas Tips
It's crunch time for adopting the Canvas LMS! While you're building out those master courses for spring semester, review the following #protips from instructors who have been successfully teaching in Carmen (Canvas). Tab through the different topics for a variety of helpful advice:
"I like the way assignments automatically populate on the calendar. My students love it too!" - Sharon Schweikhart, Associate Professor, College of Public Health
"The 'validate links' button is awesome." - Rebecca Andridge, Associate Professor, College of Public Health
"The 'Course Detail' tab under settings has a 'more options' hyperlink at the bottom of the page. This has some hidden gems for course set up. I generally disable the comments on announcements because I am not alerted if a student does comment." - Amy Jauch, Clinical Instructor of Practice, College of Nursing
"I have been making use of the video feature to do weekly check-ins with my online classes. I record a video announcement toward the end of the week to give them reminders of upcoming deadlines." - Darcy Hartman Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics
"Using Modules to organize your materials is similar looking to the Old Carmen." - Steve Boyles, Professor, Animal Sciences
"I like the way you can organize the course session by module; it fits how I think about my course and is very clear for students." - Sharon Schweikhart, Associate Professor, College of Public Health
"My biggest tip (and this came up in the LMS Advisory Committee meeting) is to HIDE FILES from the menu! It's available to Students by default and most of the time faculty do NOT want their students using Files as the way to find files! :)" - Rebecca Andridge, Associate Professor, College of Public Health
"There are multiple ways for students to access assignments, pages, etc. I have had several students think there was an additional assignment because they were able to navigate to it through several methods. Use the navigation tab under settings to provide a consistent logical flow for the class by eliminating some of the of the navigation tools from the student view. For most of my courses the students access all information and assignments through modules." - Amy Jauch, Clinical Instructor of Practice, College of Nursing
"The rubric function has decreased the time our TAs spend grading written assignments. From the instructor end, rubrics are really easy to make, but beware, students can see the rubrics created." - Erica Szeyller, Assistant Course Coordinator, Biology
"Click the “Use this Rubric for Assignment Grading” for the grade to automatically populate from the rubric to the gradebook." - Amy Jauch, Clinical Instructor of Practice, College of Nursing
"Discussion posts (graded ones) can be reviewed and responded to for everyone to see in the discussion board, just as you would expect. However, if you want to respond to an individual more privately, you can do so through SpeedGrader in the comments area." - Audrey Begun, Professor, College of Social Work
"In the SpeedGrader: there is a button to MUTE an Assignment, so you can keep the grades hidden until all of them are done. This is nice." - Aimee Ulstad, Associate Professor, College of Engineering
"If you mute an assignment, students cannot see the grade entered but they also cannot see any instructor comments or mark-ups on Crocodoc." - Erica Szeyller, Assistant Course Coordinator, Biology
"Nice piece of information to know…even if an assignment is muted, students can still submit to the assignment. So if you have a student submitting late, you can mute the assignment for grading and that student can still submit." - Amy Jauch, Clinical Instructor of Practice, College of Nursing
"If your grade for a discussion assignment involves (1) posting and (2) responding to others’ posts, you can EASILY see one student's work on both parts in SpeedGrader—this saves trying to figure out if they did multiple postings!" - Audrey Begun, Professor, College of Social Work
"In the gradebook, the option to “Treat Ungraded as 0” is only a visual display for you personally (i.e. the setting does not push to the student view or to other instructors in the course). Students have their own options on how they would like to view their grades. When you submit grades to the registrar, by default all grades are sent with ungraded assignments treated as 0. If you would like an ungraded assignment dropped you put a grade of EX for the particular grade item." - Erica Szeyller, Assistant Course Coordinator, Biology
"FYI: In the grade system, by DEFAULT, students see an automatically checked box called 'Calculate Based only on Graded Assignments'. Based on your assignments, this may or may not be the correct way to calculate final grades." - Aimee Ulstad, Associate Professor, College of Engineering
"In SpeedGrader—it will not show the stats for the whole class on specific items unless you have graded all of the open-ended items first. Then you get accurate stats (discovered because I have a “no points” open ended comments area on each quiz that needs to be actually assigned 0 points before I can see the quiz stats)." - Audrey Begun, Professor, College of Social Work
"The resources in the Canvas Commons were essential for me as I built and refined my course. It's easily navigable, contains rich and varied resources, and provides clear information about whether and how materials are copyrighted and can be used. (I especially appreciated Lea Young's Peer Review Module.) Access Canvas Commons from the Canvas dashboard by clicking the icon that looks like an arrow inside the letter C from the left-hand navigation bar." - Kay Halasek, Associate Professor, Department of English
We hope you find these tips from the pros helpful! If there are still other questions you have about what you can do with the Canvas LMS, please visit the Canvas Community, a place where you can find answers and share ideas with instructors from other universities.