Canvas: Teach More Effectively and Save Tons of Time!

Section 1 - The Canvas Portal Interface

The Canvas Portal page or, “dashboard” could either be your institution’s custom link, or the Canvas public course.

Login Area canvas.instructure.com or your institution url.

Once logged in the portal home page:

Canvas portal home page layout

To do sidebar

• Lists top 5 assignments to be done now (graded if instructor).
• Coming up, lists 5 assignments to be done next week.
• Recent feedback lets instructors know about assignment feedback they’ve gotten from students, and students can find feedback from the instructor in this section.
• Start a New Course

Global activity stream

• The activity stream can contain anything from discussions, to conversations, assignment notifications and announcements.
• Hovering over an event, allows you to click to see more.

• Global top horizontal navigation bar, this provides global navigation to your courses.
• Canvas home page/portal home page logo takes you to the portal home page.
• Courses >> You can customize listings
• Assignments - Instructor sees assignments to be graded, student sees assignments to be done. (See Assignments video lecture)
• Grades (see Grade section for an in depth look at the canvas grade center)
• Calendar (see calendar video lecture)
• Settings - takes you to your profile settings such as notifications.
• Inbox and Messages takes you to Conversations (see Conversations)
• Your Name takes you to your Canvas Profile >>Notifications << (same as Settings)
  • Home takes you back to the Canvas portal home page.
  • Profile allows you to manage your personal profile, that others in the system can see.
  • Notifications allows you to set your notification preferences. (see Notifications)
  • Files allows you to manage your personal files, as well as navigate to managing all your courses files.
  • Settings
  • Add your personal email address, or several email addresses.
  • Other contact methods, such as FB, text messages, etc. Note cell phone texts may not be free for your provider.
  • Register additional services, such as Google Docs, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
  • Change password and timezone
  • ePortfolios helps you manage your ePortfolio in Canvas.

• Logout
• Help
  • Ask for help
  • Check the manual
  • Report a problem with Canvas
  • submit a feature request

Canvas Notifications

Notifications in Canvas is great, because you can tell Canvas when to notify you and about what. You can even add a different email for different notifications, and you can also add a third party social network for notifications, such as Facebook. You can get notifications about anything from conversation and discussion updates to notices for new announcements, and assignments. Hover over each notification to get more detailed information (through a pop-up context sensitive help box) about what it will do.

• You can make notification changes in the following areas:

1. Course Activities
2. Discussions
3. Communications
4. Scheduling
5. Groups
6. Alerts

• You can have different notification settings for different email addresses (see Settings to add contact methods)
• Hover over each item to get more detailed information pop-up.
• You can opt to be immediately notified, on a daily basis, or weekly, or not be notified at all whenever something changes in this area.

Canvas Course Navigation and Announcements

The Course Home page.

• Every course has a main left course specific navigation, what you choose to show here is customizable under the course settings or (course control panel).
• Note the left course navigation is different from the global navigation, the left navigation is course specific navigation.
• Note the breadcrumb trail under the horizontal global navigation, this trail allows you to navigate to the parent folder, or up one level, rather than go all the way to the home page (multiple levels).

Changing your course home page layout

• This is where you can change what will show in the main content area, the default to show here is the course activity stream. You can use this space to direct your students to the most important resources they will need to be successful in your course.
• Change Home Page Layout allows you to design what shows on your course landing page:
  • The Course Activity Stream.
  • Page that you'll design yourself. Different layouts and things are possible with the “Rich Content Editor” formatting bar
  • Your Modules for the course (see modules video under section 3)
  • The Assignments list
  • The Assignments list with the Syllabus
• Show the course activity stream (same as global activity stream, except it is just for this course) The teacher and students can see the most recent Announcements and Discussions in your course.
• The, “To Do” sidebar reminds students of upcoming Assignments

Changing the course left navigation menu

• You can change your left navigation by clicking on the settings of your course, and then click on the Navigation tab. You can then click and drag to make changes.

Section 3 - Adding Course Content

Home Page Design

You can use the course home page to talk about your course, and perhaps a little about you, or the instructors for example. You can then add a link to the syllabus or to your weekly course modules. Or you can post the whole course syllabus there, or a link to it (see Change Home Page Layout video)

• Use either the pages button to get to pages or click on the “edit this page” button on the right of the home page.
• Use the “Rich Content Editor”, which has a formatting bar, but with additional “rich content” options, such as adding video, math equations, or pie charts.
• The rich content editor will have more icons if you have added educational apps under your course settings.
• The sidebar called, “Page Tools”, gives you access to all your course materials, which you can drag-and-drop onto the page, if you want to link to particular course materials.
• Switch views to switch to HTML

The Course Syllabus

• Syllabus calendar and Grading scheme (if using assignment weighting) are shown on the right.
• The course description goes at the top in the content section (edit to change).
• If you already have a syllabus as a document, then you can upload that and put a link to it.
• Date controlled section below,so any assignment or content item that you put a date on will show in this section chronologically. This also means that date changes you make in the course will automatically be reflected here in the syllabus, as well as on the calendar and the content item itself.
• Undated items show at the bottom

What are Modules?

Modules allow you to organize your content to help control the flow of your course. The best way to organize modules is logically, sequentially, and consistently. For example, each module could be a week, or each module could be a topic. You can also release modules after the prior one or certain requirements have been met. This is a great place to start adding content to your course.

• Create a new Module.
• The following content items can be added in Modules.
  • Assignments
  • Quiz
  • File
  • Content page
  • Discussion
  • Text Header
  • External URL
  • External Tool (Educational App or LTI tool)
• Example of sequential consistent listings in each modules would be: readings, assignments, quizzes, discussions. Repeat that sequence in each module for clarity and ease of use. The students will appreciate it!
• Editing modules.
• You can release new module after a certain condition has been met, such as “score a minimum of 5 points on the quiz at the end of each module, in order to proceed to the next module”.
• Lock or hide a module by date (date can then be seen in the right corner of the module)
• Viewing student progress through modules. Determined by the students completing required elements in the module. If you don't set up any requirements, you won't be able to track your students' progress within each module. Required elements may include requiring the students viewing a page, submitting an assignment, or earning a minimum score on an assignment or quiz.

Files

The Course Files area is the location where you can upload and organize all your course files, such as lectures, powerpoints, readings, images, and any other documents you may have. They can then be accessed from within most places in the course, using the “Page Tools” sidebar.

There are three different files areas: Course Files, Personal Files, and Group Files (each is a different files area) and only those members of a particular group can access those files.

As with the modules, be sure to organize the files in subfolders, for example by week or topic. That way it will be easy to find, and also easier when copying them over to the next semester/quarter.

• Uploading a file
• Preview files, a number of file types can be quickly previewed: .doc .docx (.docx files may not preview correctly) 
.ppt .pptx (.pptx files may not preview correctly) 
.xls .xlsx (.xlsx files may not preview correctly) 
.pps .ppsx (.ppsx files may not preview correctly) 
.pdf .ps 
.odt .odp 
.sxw .sxi 
.txt .rtf
• Files are arranged by canvas in alphabetical order (at this time)(so if you need them in a certain order, you can always put numbers in front of the file names to get Canvas to order in the order you want.
• Note the file sizes of your files, be sure to optimize, and not use Canvas for file storage unrelated to the course. Your institution will likely have a quota on how much you can upload per course. View your quota on the bottom left of the file window or under settings.
• Organizing files: Renaming, deleting, moving
• Locking files or folders and setting unlock, and unlock after date
• Note that you can move from right to left, not left to right pane.
• You can see all files for all courses in right bottom link
• Batch uploading files through the .zip format, or you can upload up to 50 by multi-selecting files and dragging them into the file window.
• If uploading the same file (new version), then you will get dialog box asking you if you want to overwrite, or rename the file with the same name, so you can have both files.
• Linking to a folder that is publicly viewable.
• Downloading whole folder as zip

Announcements

Announcements allow you to communicate and broadcast time sensitive information with your students, or provide directions to various things that are due, and where to find them. You can even use announcements to automatically pull and share blog posts relevant to the class.

• Students get notified right away as soon as you release the announcement, through the notification settings they have made for announcements, so that could be email, facebook, linkedin, twitter, sms, etc.
• You can even share custom made blog feeds into your announcements
• Create an announcement (use rich text editor and content selector sidebar) (students can only create announcements within the group they’ve been assigned to).
  • You can add an attachment
  • You can opt to delay announcement
  • students can reply to an announcement by default, but you can also force them to reply, before seeing other student replies
• Edit an announcement
• Delete an announcement
• Close announcement for comments
• Announcements are listed by default by showing the newest first
• Search an announcement (and filter out only unread announcements with the unread button)
• Select announcements from the search results to either:
  • Lock them from being commented on
  • or to Delete them altogether
• Add an external RSS or blog feed to announcement
  • Filter the feed so only posts with a certain topic are included
  • Delete feed X corner button
• You can add the announcement feed from the course to an external feed reader such as google reader, feed reader, Firefox livefeed, or outlook RSS.

Section 4 Communications

Conversations

• Conversations, or messaging, is a great way to keep in touch with students, or to have small group conversations. Check your inbox (and at a glance whether there are any new messages) by clicking inbox on the global nav bar top right. (right-click Win, Option click Mac to open inbox in new window)
• Summary of conversations on the left, preview pane on the right (always from new to old at the bottom). Use scrolling on the right pane to view multiple related messages as part of that conversation.
  • Unread replies are indicated by a blue dot to the left.
  • Course name indicates which course the message is associated with.
  • Click on the blue dot to mark something that was already read, back to unread (so you can come back to it again later)
  • You can limit the conversations to show only unread by clicking the unread from the inbox drop-down list.
  • You can tell how many posts are part of a conversation by looking to the number to the right of the conversation right below the date stamp.
  • Canvas also shows speedgrader assignment and quiz comments inside conversations (see assignment title, link to assignment, and score listed indented)
  • You can filter conversations by individual, group, course or other keywords
• Click on the inbox inside conversations to see archived, starred, sent, unread, and discussion replies.
• Create a new message:
  • Click “Compose” icon
  • Use To: field to type a name, group name, or search from the roster of your courses by clicking the address book icon on the right. To delete selected name use the backspace (Windows) or Delete (Mac) or click white X next to name. Then press enter or return.
  • Can send to entire class by selecting “Everyone” from address book.
  • Sent messages will also appear on the top of the inbox.
• Replying, acting on messages:
  • Reply above the message (add attachment or media) appears in both panes.
  • Use “actions” gear icon button to the right of the message to: mark as unread, star, unsubscribe, mark as unread, or delete a message.
  • Forward by checking message (checkbox underneath time/date stamp) or messages and then click the forward button.
  • You can reply to an individual in a group conversation by hovering mouse over individual name, and selecting, “New Message” link.
  • Unsubscribe from conversation, select checkbox, then gear icon, then unsubscribe.
• Get notified when there is an update in conversations
• Archived messages are not deleted, just moved out of your inbox. To retrieve click on the inbox drop-down, and select archived. To archive select messages, then gear icon, then archive.
• Group messages can check to include as group, or uncheck if sending just to those individuals selected.
  • Note group icon, instead of single icon next to group message.
  • Click add people to add more people to group conversation.
  • Note status line that was added so folks know new people were added to conversation.
• Starring conversations allows you to mark important conversations.

Discussions

The discussions tool provides instructors a way to enable and facilitate conversations using threaded or focussed discussions with students. Discussions can be on any topic. They can be organized by example by week or topic. Discussion participation can be included into grading and you can add a discussion rubric to not only help with grading, but provide students with guidance on how you will grade their contributions. Discussions are a great way to continue the conversations started in the classroom, to allow for more thoughtful and meaningful interactions due to the asynchronous nature of discussions.

In a traditional classroom, discussions can be dominated by the top talkers and quick and sometimes reactionary thinking. Face-to-face discussion can lack the reflection and refinement of deeper thought processes. If you are teaching fully online, or in a blended learning environment (some face to face, and some online components), discussions can be of benefit to the learning process and also have social benefits.

Here are some examples of how discussions can be used:

• Help students discuss an issue or newspaper article related to the course with peer feedback.
• Pro/Con discussions
• Q and A with the the teacher whether specific topics, or broadly. You could have a discussion about each week’s materials covered, so everyone can read and benefit from the Q and A.
• Follow-up on a conversation or questions that began in a face-to-face classroom and encourage a continuous train-of-thought throughout the week.
• Test student comprehension of important points made in class.
• Debate contradictory and complex ideas.
• Brainstorm, have students analyse, and come up with different solutions and different approaches to a class problem.
• Use discussions to allow students to provide peer feedback to each other.

Note that discussions are displayed in the course activity stream with the course ID and are identifiable with the bubble icon.

Discussions are organized into three main areas.

• Discussions. These are current discussions within the course. Discussions can remain open indefinitely, or you can specify a date range (as designated by the available from/until date). Discussions are ordered by most recent activity. Students will only see this section heading if there are discussions within this section.
• Pinned or Sticky Discussions. These are discussions that you want your students to see at the top of their page. Pinned discussions can be arranged in any order, using drag-and-drop. Students will only see this section heading if there are discussions within this section.
• Closed for Comments. These discussions have been manually closed for comments, or the discussion is past the available from/until date. These are discussions that are only available in a read-only state. Closed for comments discussions are also ordered by most recent activity. Students will always see this section heading, even if there are no discussions within this section.

Creating and editing a Discussion

It is always a good idea to have an icebreaker thread for the students to introduce themselves and not get penalized. For example, you could ask them to talk about their favorite book or film and a few sentences why, or two truths and one falsehood about themselves. And then ask others to reply with what they think is false. Etc.

• Start a new discussion by clicking the Discussion button.
• Change the discussions settings by clicking the Gear button.

• Multiple due dates for when you have various groups or sections that have differing due dates. (show when students can see the date is due). Leave end date open, to make the discussion appear indefinitely.
• Grading the discussion.
• Pin (and unpin) a discussion by gear icon, or drag to the pin area.
• Order discussions by dragging and dropping.
• Closing discussions for comments by date using the gear icon to the right. This is a way to keep discussions focussed as opposed to long threaded discussions (which you set with the threaded discussions checkbox). For example, closing a discussion can be helpful if you wish to limit the answers to a question, or explain a policy. You can reopen this way too. You’ll see, “this topic is closed for comments” in gray under topic header.
• Edit a discussion by selecting the discussion and click the edit button.
• When you reply to a discussion post, there will be a blue rectangle around your post, indicating it has been newly posted.
• If you want your students to be able to reply with attachments, you will need to change the global discussion settings for the course, by clicking the gear icon on the discussions homepage (You can also make global discussion settings changes from within the course settings page).

Creating and editing a Discussion

It is always a good idea to have an icebreaker thread for the students to introduce themselves and not get penalized. For example, you could ask them to talk about their favorite book or film and a few sentences why, or two truths and one falsehood about themselves. And then ask others to reply with what they think is false. Etc.

• Start a new discussion by clicking the Discussion button.
• Change the discussions settings by clicking the Gear button.

• Multiple due dates for when you have various groups or sections that have differing due dates. (show when students can see the date is due). Leave end date open, to make the discussion appear indefinitely.
• Grading the discussion.
• Pin (and unpin) a discussion by gear icon, or drag to the pin area.
• Order discussions by dragging and dropping.
• Closing discussions for comments by date using the gear icon to the right. This is a way to keep discussions focussed as opposed to long threaded discussions (which you set with the threaded discussions checkbox). For example, closing a discussion can be helpful if you wish to limit the answers to a question, or explain a policy. You can reopen this way too. You’ll see, “this topic is closed for comments” in gray under topic header.
• Edit a discussion by selecting the discussion and click the edit button.
• When you reply to a discussion post, there will be a blue rectangle around your post, indicating it has been newly posted.
• If you want your students to be able to reply with attachments, you will need to change the global discussion settings for the course, by clicking the gear icon on the discussions homepage (You can also make global discussion settings changes from within the course settings page).

Reading/editing/moderating/deleting and subscribing to a Threaded Discussion

Threaded discussions allow you and the students to comment on replies and create new threads in the same discussion forum. In contrast with focused discussions that don’t allow multiple threads or replies within replies (only nesting two-deep).

• You can search entries or authors.
• White dot indicates unread, blue dot indicates new reply.
• Click on a person’s name to go to their bio profile page.
• Gear icon allows you to go to a topic, edit a reply, or delete a reply, mark all as read.
• You can subscribe (you are automatically subscribed to discussions you create).
• If a discussion topic is graded, then you will see a link to the speedgrader in the replies.
• Collapse and expand threads by hovering over the thread main post, note the spacing between threads.
• Delete discussion by clicking gear icon and select delete.
• Students can be forced to comment by first posting their own reply (set this option under the discussion creation settings).
• You can moderate or change a student reply, by clicking the gear icon and selecting “Edit”. It will then show as edited by you at the bottom of the post.
• You can subscribe to a discussion by clicking the subscribe button, which will turn green when subscribed. You are automatically subscribed if you created a discussion. You can not subscribe to individual threads within a topic. Go to notification preferences to change the frequency of notification and the notification method.

Filtering discussions

• Filter a discussion by discussion title, name, or keyword in the Search title, body, or author field.
• View only unread discussions by clicking the Unread button.
• View graded discussions by clicking the Assignments button.

• Discussions can be for classes and groups (if created). Students can create their own discussion groups assuming they have their own group.
• Discussions can be made private.
• Rubrics can be applied to a discussion forum, so students can see what they’re graded on.
• Speedgrader can view individual student contributions to various discussions easily by making the discussion a graded assignment, so the instructor can grade the student on their discussion contributions.

Grading Discussions

• Edit or add a new discussion and select “Graded” in the discussion settings.
• Once created, note that the discussion will say it is graded, and how many points possible and when due.
• Graded discussions can be peer reviewed.

Threaded discussions allow you and the students to comment on replies and create new threads in the same discussion forum. In contrast with focused discussions that don’t allow multiple threads or replies within replies (only nesting two-deep).

• You can search entries or authors.
• White dot indicates unread, blue dot indicates new reply.
• Click on a person’s name to go to their bio profile page.
• Gear icon allows you to go to a topic, edit a reply, or delete a reply, mark all as read.
• You can subscribe (you are automatically subscribed to discussions you create).
• If a discussion topic is graded, then you will see a link to the speedgrader in the replies.
• Collapse and expand threads by hovering over the thread main post, note the spacing between threads.
• Delete discussion by clicking gear icon and select delete.
• Students can be forced to comment by first posting their own reply (set this option under the discussion creation settings).
• You can moderate or change a student reply, by clicking the gear icon and selecting “Edit”. It will then show as edited by you at the bottom of the post.
• You can subscribe to a discussion by clicking the subscribe button, which will turn green when subscribed. You are automatically subscribed if you created a discussion. You can not subscribe to individual threads within a topic. Go to notification preferences to change the frequency of notification and the notification method.

Filtering discussions

• Filter a discussion by discussion title, name, or keyword in the Search title, body, or author field.
• View only unread discussions by clicking the Unread button.
• View graded discussions by clicking the Assignments button.

• Discussions can be for classes and groups (if created). Students can create their own discussion groups assuming they have their own group.
• Discussions can be made private.
• Rubrics can be applied to a discussion forum, so students can see what they’re graded on.
• Speedgrader can view individual student contributions to various discussions easily by making the discussion a graded assignment, so the instructor can grade the student on their discussion contributions.

Grading Discussions

• Edit or add a new discussion and select “Graded” in the discussion settings.
• Once created, note that the discussion will say it is graded, and how many points possible and when due.
• Graded discussions can be peer reviewed.

Assignments

Assignments can be used to assess your students competency and comprehension of the course content. You’re only limited by your imagination as to what kind of assignments to create. Some examples of assignments that you can deploy through Canvas, are online submissions of homework, such as documents, text files, links to student work, images, or other files. You can also do peer reviewed assignments. You can have graded discussion assignments. Assignments can also be graded with rubrics and can be aligned with course outcomes.

Assignments will show up automatically in the Assignments area. They will also show on the syllabus, calendar, and grades. If these assignments don’t have a due date applied to them, then they will go in the “Other” list on the Syllabus. The Calendar also shows assignments with due dates. Those assignments without due dates will show in a list on the right, after you click on, “Show undated events”. Assignments can be grouped into categories, or groups of assignments. This allows you to grade them based on the percentages assigned to the assignment group. If you wish to use an anti-plagiarism tool for assignment submissions, that depends on whether or not your institution or course has licensed and implemented a third party application such as Turnitin for assignments (this option would then be available under more options in the assignment settings).

Viewing Assignments

• The assignments page can be accessed both in the global navigation and the left navigation (unless instructor disables assignments button).
• To view the assignments that are due, you would see those either under the global navigation, or the right sidebar under, “To Do”, where a list of up to 5 assignments that need grading show.
• If you’ve added the assignments to the modules, then you will also see them there. If they have dates on them, you will also see them in the calendar, and the syllabus. Undated would be under “Other”.
• You can view statistics about your assignments under your course settings. Select Course Statistics on the right, then open the Assignments tab to view the, “Assignments Usage Report”.

Creating Assignments

• You can create submission assignments, where the student has to put their assignment into a dropbox, or you can also create an assignment where there is no upload needed, such as a in-class assignment or activity. This allows you to have a gradebook column for that in-class assignment.
• To create an assignment, you can do so from the assignments page. You don’t necessarily have to put anything in the assignment yet. They can simply be placeholders until you’re ready to put more info into it. Once completed, you can click on edit to add further options to the assignment.
• You can also add the assignment from within the modules page (see modules video). Then come back later and edit further options for that assignment.
• You can make a lot of things into an assignment, such as an upload file assignment, discussion assignment, quiz assignment, video or other media upload, external tools (see Educational Apps), or not graded assignment, which simply means that assignment will not be graded but will still show up for the student under things to do, global navigation, and their syllabus page.
• Students can upload anything into an assignment, or link to a Etherpad doc, or google doc. Pages can also be used, similar to a wiki document, where you can view the page history.
• You can insert content into the assignment text box, such as from the rich content editor, or the content selector sidebar to the right.
• Limit submission types, with the online option by selecting checkboxes for allowable content types. Also, if you limit by content file type extension, be sure to not add spaces, and separate file types with a comma (ie. doc,docx,txt,odt). It is always a good idea though to tell students exactly how you want them to submit the file, using specific file naming conventions, as well as letting students know what file type or size is appropriate.
• Select the group you want to assign this assignment to. See groups for more detail about deploying to groups of students.
• You can then leave the “Assign Grades to Each Student Individually” blank, if you want the whole group to get the same grade for that one submission, or you check this box, if you wish to give each student credit individually.
• See peer reviews for more detail about the peer review system.
• Due dates. “For”, indicates the course section that this applies to. If you don’t have multiple sections for your course, this field is not relevant. “Due date”, is for when the assignment is due. “Available from”, and “Until”, is when the assignment becomes available to the student and until when the assignment will no longer be available. If you get the dates in the wrong order, say you put an until date that has already past, Canvas will point that out with an error. (Varied or multiple due dates only apply if you have multiple sections and you want them to have different due dates)
• Locked until determines when student has access, and locked after option, determines how long the student will have access to the assignment.
• Editing assignments, by clicking the pencil icon.
• If you change the assignment, you can let the students know that you have changed the assignment settings by checking the checkbox at the bottom of the assignment settings.

Peer Review Assignments

Peer Review assignments allow students to review each others works, creating another avenue to course content comprehension, “learning by doing”. By adding a rubric to the assignment, and clearly explain the rubric and how to use it to students, you increase the chances of students providing good quality peer feedback to their peers.

• Assignments can be peer reviewed.
• Peer reviews are not anonymous.
• Students need to submit their own assignments first, before seeing the assignments of peers.
• Create assignment, then select more options, and select, “Require Peer Reviews”.
• You can manually assign, or automatically assign peer reviews.
• Automatically allows you to set the reviews per user and the date of reviews (after the due date) then click update. To then review how it is going, click on the Peer Reviews link in the right sidebar.
• Manually assigning peer reviews allows you to choose who gets to review the assignment of another student. Assignments must be completed before you can assign peer reviews. Click on Peer Reviews on the right sidebar. Then click on the plus icon to assign the review to a student from the drop-down list. Click “Add” to add additional students.
• Check marks indicate the peer assignment has been completed, caution triangle icon says it still needs to be completed.

Creating Groupings of Assignments

Assignment groupings or categories help you organize your assignments into logical groups, and also help you if you wish to weight one group more than another group. This allows you to set a percentage weight to a group of assignments, regardless of how many points that group accumulates, it will weigh a certain percentage.

• You can add a group under the create an assignment page.
• Add a rule that applies to that grading group, such as drop the lowest 1 score for each student, which removes the assignment with the lowest score from being calculated in the category or group grade. Drop the highest removes the highest score from that student. Never drop X assignment, lets you specify which assignment should not be dropped regardless of grade in that assignment group or category. Click update when finished, and click the x to remove a rule.
• Add assignment to a particular group by selecting dropdown under “Add Assignment”. Or you can also add an assignment to a group under the assignment editing settings.
• Select the, “Weight the final grade based on assignment groups”, to allow Canvas to weight your grades based on the weights you gave to the groups. You can make changes to the weights anytime. Ideally you want to get 100% total, but you could add an extra credit grading group category if you want by adding that percentage on top of the 100%.

Assessments or Quizzes

The quiz tool can be used to both create quizzes, exams, as well as surveys. There are a number of quiz types you can utilize in Canvas. You can use graded quizzes, practice quizzes, and graded surveys, for use in for example teacher evaluations where you want the survey to be anonymous, but still provide credit. And you can also use ungraded surveys where you solicit opinions or other info from students, but no grades or credit is given. For example, an instructor can use an anonymous survey mid-semester to gauge the issues students are having, so that the instructor can proactively adjust the course to address the issues before they become issues later. Both these survey types can be anonymous.

Creating a Quiz

• Give the quiz a name.
• Categorize it into an assignment group, you can make the assignment groups in the assignments area (see assignment group video).
• Shuffle means randomize the answers.
• Time limit means a time limit on the quiz or survey, otherwise the time is indefinite (depending on the dates set).
• Allow multiple attempts for the quiz (note option to keep highest score and option to limit attempts to a certain number).
• Give students quiz feedback on their results, and whether or not to show students which answers were correct (default is always yes).
• Restrictions is where you use an access code or password to unlock the quiz, typically used in proctored environment. Filter IP address is even better, since the access password could be shared with smartphone or through a text.
• Optional third party tool respondus lockdown browser (which is a tool that prevents cheating by using custom stripped browser, and locking down the browser) options would appear below, but this depends on whether your institution or course is licensed to use this third party tool.

• One at a time, locks the questions from backtracking to previous questions. If you allowed one question at a time with backtracking, then they can click the previous button. If you locked the questions, no backtracking allowed, then the student will get a warning that they cannot change their earlier answers.

• You can add varied due dates for each section if you have multiple sections. There will be a button to add due dates underneath. If the due date is set, and a student is taking that test at that time, then the test will be automatically submitted as soon as the due date and time passes.
• After you set the quiz and the settings, click on the Questions tab to start adding questions.

Managing Quizzes

• You can randomize the order of the questions in the quiz settings (use the find questions option).
• Publish your quiz when ready for students to take. Don’t publish when you’re still editing your quiz, or students who go into the quiz will end up not seeing the updates.
• Check the quiz preview button to get a look at how the quiz will work for students. You can fill it out and see how the quiz responds to student input.
• There are additional quiz options in the gear icon next to the quiz once it has been created.

• You can go back to edit the quiz.
• You can apply a rubric, or view it (see rubrics video). The rubrics could for example be applied to essay questions, allowing you easier grading.
• You can preview the quiz.
• Show response results so far.
• Message students who have already taken the quiz, or who haven’t yet taken the quiz.
• Lock a Quiz to keep students from taking the quiz or change the due and available dates.
• Delete the quiz to remove altogether.
• On the sidebar you can view the statistics, moderate the quiz by for example giving students more time or additional attempts.
• Grade quiz in speedgrader (see speedgrader video).

Question types:

• MC questions can have more than four answers. Click on the plus icon to add another answer.
• True/False questions.
• Fill in the blank. Note that you can have more than one answer, by adding another answer, and it is not case sensitive.
• Fill in multiple blanks. Use brackets surrounding the words that you are referencing. Once you place a reference word in brackets, then you will see that word in the “show Possible Answers” dropdown menu. Then select each word, to enter the answer for.
• Multiple answers question. Select each correct answer by clicking on the greyed out arrow to the left.
• Multiple Dropdowns. Similar to Fill in multiple blanks, except that in this case the student is presented with the possible answers in a dropdown menu, so they don’t have to type the words. Use brackets surrounding the words that you are referencing. Once you place a reference word in brackets, then you will see that word in the “show Possible Answers” dropdown menu. Then select each word, to enter the answer for.
• Likert scale question. Typically used in surveys to gauge the level of agreement with a statement. Use the multiple dropdown question for a likert like question. Create a table to put the questions in, to make it more aligned and clean looking..
• Matching question. Add the matches, and then add some distracting words to jumble up the possible matching options.
• Numerical answer question. Typically used in math questions.
• Essay question. This question type requires manual grading.
• File upload question. This question also requires manual grading. Any file can be uploaded, media, 3D project, images, audio, video, text documents, etc. You can manually download all the file submissions from the quiz area, or go into speedgrader to open up individual submissions.

• You can add any kind of media or content inside of questions, including from the course content selector in the sidebar.

• You can add feedback to your question answers.
• Click on the greyed out arrow to the left of an answer to indicate the correct answer, which will then turn green.
• Click on the triangle handle on the bottom right to expand the text fields.

Working with the question bank

Question banks can be used to manage questions, and you can draw from these banks in different quizzes. You can draw from any question banks that you have in any of your courses.

• To find or create a new question bank, click on the quizzes link at the course left navigation.
• Then click on the question bank title to start adding questions. Note that if you change questions, but a quiz is already pulling those earlier questions, that you have to re-publish that quiz for the changes to take effect.
• Click, “Manage Question Banks” to work on a question bank.
• If you have a lot of question banks and you use one particular bank frequently, you can bookmark it when you’re in the question bank. You can now get quicker access to it next time by clicking “See My Bookmarked Banks” under quizzes.
• You can delete a whole question bank by clicking the delete icon under “Manage Question Banks”. Or going into the question bank, and then from the right sidebar, select “Delete Bank (careful!).

• Create quiz with random questions by using the new Question group, and setting how many questions you want Canvas to select from your question bank. Then select how many points they will be worth.

How to use Question bank

• Create the quiz or exam, and then under the questions tab, click on “Find Questions”
• If you already have question banks, they would show on the left. This includes question banks from other courses in which you have been the instructor and added questions to.
• Your department or administrator may have also added departmental question banks to this list. Some departments like to share question banks, so that is a great option.
• If you want to change the questions in the question bank, do so within the question bank, before importing into the quiz.
• To move questions, click on the “Move Multiple Questions” button in the right sidebar within the question bank.
• To move or copy individual questions in a question bank, go to the individual question, and click on the, “move/copy question to another bank” link, then from the next menu, select the bank to move or copy the question into, and then click on “Move/Copy Questions” button.
• Use, “select all” if you wish to import all the questions from the question bank into the quiz. These will then display in the same order in the quiz. Then click save, preview, and finally publish, when ready to deploy to students.
• You can also import a question bank into a different course. Click on your course settings, of the course in which you want to import. Select Import Content into this course. “Copy content from another Canvas course”. Locate and check the question banks you want to import, and then import. You should now have the question banks under your quizzes.
• Importing quizzes from other systems, such as Moodle, Angel, Blackboard, Respondus. Go to your course settings. Then click on, “Import content into this course”. On the next page, make sure to select, “Import content from a content package, or from another system”. Then select the export package that you made from another system, and wait for the confirmation email after successfully importing.
• Exporting course content also allows you to export a quiz, for import into a different canvas system.

Question Groups

Question groups allow you to create a random selection of questions from a group of questions, and then tell Canvas to pick a few questions to deploy to the students in the quiz, and assign a number of points per question.

• Create new question group and how many points worth each question.
• Once you import the questions into a question group, you can then decide how many questions to import into the group, and how many points per question. Note that the questions will be randomly selected from the pool. You can then add questions by clicking the plus icon.
• You can further edit the question group by dragging individually added questions into a group if needed. You can also edit the individual questions by clicking the pencil icon.
• You can link to a question bank, by clicking, “Link to a Question Bank” so the quiz group is referencing an existing pool of questions. This question group will now pull from that question bank that you have selected. This assumes you have either created some question banks, or that your department has given you access to some shared question banks.

You’ve created a quiz, and have deployed it to students. The students are in the middle of taking the quiz, Canvas auto-saves the responses constantly, protecting the student from a dropped internet connection. Canvas still allows you to tweak the quiz settings while it is being taken and you can also monitor the results as they are coming in.

• If students are taking the quiz, and you wish to moderate it in real-time, you can click on the name of the quiz, and then select, “Moderate this Quiz”. Be sure to hit refresh (F5 on Windows) to make sure you have the latest results. Click on pencil to moderate for a particular student. You can also select multiple students, and then change extensions for these students.
• If you want to extend the time on a student who is at that moment taking a test, you can see the clock icon next to their name. Click on the icon to provide the extra time, or remove time.
• Click on the quiz to open, then the gear icon to, “Show Student Quiz Results”. Note that you can provide extra attempts from here as well, by clicking on the student name.
• From within this area, you can view individual student results. Correctly answered questions will show green flags, incorrect, will show red flags.
• You can also view the Quiz Statistics on the right sidebar next to the quiz (statistics will be available as soon as a student has completed a quiz).
  • See the distribution of each question, highlighting consistently unanswered questions, or high ratio of wrong answers (this helps you throw out a question, or clarify this teaching, if too many students misunderstood).
  • Right column shows data, such as average time taken, mean and standard deviation.
  • Further item analysis, see Item Analysis PDF.

Rubrics

A scoring rubric is an assessment tool for communicating expectations of quality of a certain task, such as a paper assignment. If you share the rubric with your students for a particular assignment, you also encourage student self-reflection and self-assessment, as well as communication between an assessor and those being assessed. Rubrics can be attached to any Assignments, Quizzes and Discussions in Canvas. Rubrics are typically comprised of rows and columns. Rows are used to define the various criteria being used to assess an assignment. Columns are used to define levels of performance for each criterion.

When to use:

• Communicate assessment or assignment expectations to students.
• Use rubrics in peer assignments or self-assessment, so the students have a better grasp on how to score each other in a meaningful, and more accurate and fair way.

• You can align a pre-defined learning Outcomes with a course rubric inside your course.
• Assess online submissions in the SpeedGrader which will make grading easier.
• Once created and deployed, you can no longer edit the rubric.

Creating Rubrics

• Click on Outcomes >> Manage Rubrics >> Add Rubric (left course navigation).
• Edit Title (pop-up window for longer descriptions) and add Criterions.
• Create new ratings and splitting new columns by clicking on vertical dividers (when it turns into double ended arrow).
• Edit and delete ratings by clicking on pencil icon or delete icon.
• Add point value, or remove Criterions.
• Chose whether or not to use this rubric for grading.
• If you’re using Outcomes, you can link to Outcome Criterion.

Adding or Finding Rubric to Assignment

• Go to assignment, then click on, “Add Rubric” at the bottom of the assignment, to either find an existing rubric, or add your rubric right here.
• If using for grading, be sure to check, “Use this rubric for assignment grading” box.
• You will now see the rubric at the bottom of the assignment.
• You can chose to do free-form comments. /

Adding Rubric to discussion

• Go to your discussion, and then click on gear icon to right. From the dropdown, select, “Add Rubric” to either find an existing rubric, or add your rubric right here.
• If using for grading, be sure to check, “Use this rubric for assignment grading” box.
• You will now see the rubric at the bottom of the discussion assignment.

Adding Rubric to Quiz

• Go to your quiz, and then click on gear icon to right. From the dropdown, select, “Show Rubric” to either find an existing rubric, or add your rubric right here.

Section 6 - Grading

Introduction - What is the Gradebook?

The Canvas gradebook and speedgrader allow you to input your grades and comments for students, and use a rubric if you want. Students can easily keep track of how they are doing in your course, and they appreciate it when you, the instructor use the gradebook ability. You can group assignments (see “Grouping Assignments video), and you can also use weighting of grades, to allow one group or grade category to weight heavier than another. The Canvas gradebook automates the grading process, in the case of multiple choice questions for example, and also allows manual grading. You can add a rubric as well, to speed things up, and increase the accuracy of grading (see rubric video in previous section). You can also view a grade history. Students will get notified in case of gradebook updates (based on their notification settings) and you the instructor will get notified when an assignment has been submitted by a student. And finally, you can easily message students who have, or have not yet submitted the assignment, or you can message students based on certain score.

Entering Grades in Speedgrader

The speedgrader does exactly what it says, you can grade fast and effectively. You can navigate easily between assignments, and students, to grade, use the rubric, provide grades, and then add comments (including audio comments).

Viewing submissions

• You can access the speedgrader from either an assignment directly to the right (assuming you set the assignment as a graded assignment). You can also access the speedgrader from the gradebook by clicking down arrow next to assignment, and selecting, “Speedgrader”.
• You can view the submission details, like the time submitted, and if it was late. In the case of multiple student assignment submissions, you would see a dropdown list with dates and times. You can also click on the download icon to download the individual submission.
• To download all submissions for an assignment, click on an assignment, before you go into speedgrader, and then select “Download Submissions” from the right sidebar.
• If you have applied a rubric, then you can use this while grading. The students can also view the rubric which allows them to understand your expectations for the assignment, in turn giving them a better chance at improving the assignment outcome (see rubric video).
• When adding a comment, you can click on, “Submit comment” to add. Comments will shown from old at the top, to new at the bottom. Comments will appear, besides in the gradebook and speedgrader, also in the conversations area (note you can add a speech to text comment using speech recognition, only in Chrome browsers).
• You can add a file, video comment under the comment area as well.

• In the case of writing assignments, Speedgrader will automatically convert a large number of document formats into editable files using Crocodoc (docs, xls, ppt, and pdf type files). Crocodoc allows you to annotate on the students submission directly, no need to download the file, and annotate with a custom program, such as word, and then re-upload to the dropbox assignment for the student.
• You can sort assignments in the Speedgrader by name, date of submission, by status, or by section (in case your course has multiple individual sections), click on settings to change.
• You can navigate back to the course home page, by clicking on Course home, next to student drop-down list.
• The student drop-down list shows all students, and checkmarks to indicate their assignment status.
  • Green (has been graded)
  • Yellow (graded and then resubmitted)
  • Empty checkmark indicates it has been submitted, but needs grading.
  • Grayed means student has not yet submitted the assignment.
• You can track how many student assignments you’ve graded by looking at the top-right corner. Which will also show you the class average.
• If you mute an assignment, notifications also stop for that assignments, and students will see a speaker icon with a red slash through it. They can then no longer view their grade for this assignment, until you un-mute it.
• You can hide student names, in case you want to grade without knowing whom your grading (say you have bias towards or against some students). Click on settings in the top right corner to set this option.

Annotating document submissions using Crocodoc

The Speedgrader has a great time saving feature that allows you to view and annotate most word/excel/presentation documents directly inside the grader, without having to download and mark them up separately from Canvas. If the document can’t be converted using Crocodoc, then two other apps will try to do it (Scribd or Google Preview). Files supported at this time are doc/docx ppt/pptx, xls/xlsx and pdf formats less than 100Mb.

• You can view the submission in the main content window.
• You have the option to still download the file in the top right, as well as within Crocodoc preview window, with or without annotations.
• You can zoom, comment and page through the document.
• Comment:
  • Point comment (to make comment about specific point).
  • Area comment (to make a comment about an area you select through click and drag).
  • Text comment (hover over to remove).
  • Highlight (select and right-click to remove highlight, or add comment).
  • You can move the drawing.
  • Click on an annotation to select it, you can then click Delete on keyboard Win/Mac to remove. Or right click the annotation and remove.
  • Strikeout, select what sentence you want stricken out.
• Student can view the annotations by clicking on the submission details.

Viewing submissions

• You will be warned if viewing an older submission from the submission drop-down.
• You can use the same grade for a resubmission by clicking “Use this same grade for the resubmission”.
• One way to keep students from re-submitting, change the assignment availability date, and then click on “Update Assignment”.

Course Statistics

Gives you a at-a-glance overview of statistics related to your course. With this information you can measure what content is engaging your students and what is not. Perhaps in the case of lack of participation on a certain content item, encourage students to participate more in those assignments, such as a particular discussion. You can also see the most active pages, dates, and times for your course use by individual students in the individual “Access Reports”. You can also see data for individual students, such as when was the last time a student logged into your course and how many times they accessed a certain course content item. So similar to Course Analytics, you can use this data to determine whether a student or students are participating enough in your course, or with particular content, and then work with those students to increase their participation.

To find your course statistics, click on the “Settings” menu item from the left course navigation menu. Then select the, “Course Statistics” button on the right navigation panel.

• Totals: Running totals of your various content types, such as tests, rubrics, and discussion post totals.
• Assignment tab: What kinds of assignments you have deployed, and how many have been taken.
• Students: An overview of who logged into your course, and when. This gives you an early warning system to see which students are not accessing your course and could be falling behind. You can further click on a student to get more details (this will go to the person’s page which you can also access under the left course navigation under “People”):
  • Access Report: This will allow you to see when a student accessed a particular course content item the last time, how many times the student viewed the item, and in terms of an assignment, how many times they participated.
  • “Your Interactions Report”: Allows you to see when you last communicated with this particular student, their current and final score, any ungraded assignments, and the ability to send the student a message by clicking on the blue envelope. You can also from here, select to see the interactions reports for all your course’s students. Once this is loaded, you can sort the views.

File Storage: See how your course is doing in terms of how much of the allocated space you are using, and how it breaks down in terms of media files, vs all other files. The typical course storage allocation is 250 Mb, which serves most folks purposes.

Course Analytics

Gives you access and at-a-glance overviews of course student activity, assignments, grades, and students data. Canvas Course Analytics acts as an early-warning system, by allowing you to identify which students are at-risk. From an instructor’s perspective, you can also see if your teaching style is effective. Canvas divides the Analytics up into three areas:

• Justification shows how the system is being used (like page views and participation data, see the Activity Analytics).
• Intervention shows and predicts which students are at risk (you start to see more yellow, instead of green for example), so this is like an early-warning system. See the Assignment Analytics.
• Learning shows how this is all tied to learning outcomes, whether your teaching style is effective. It also shows the gap between those students who are achieving the course outcomes, and those students who are falling behind. The graph above shows mostly green (meaning assignments submitted on time, but also some yellow. If you see a yellow trend, this shows that the student is starting to submit late, which could indicate they are starting to lag behind. A good time to intervene, and contact the student to hopefully prevent them from sliding further behind.

To get started with course analytics, go to your course home page.

• Click on Course Analytics (right navigation box)
  • The first section (Activity) shows how many page views your course had and if students took actions that day. You can hover over a day to view details.
  • The Assignments Analytics area shows you the distribution of submitted assignments (green), late submitted assignments (yellow), and “missing”, or not submitted assignments (red). You can hover over each bar to see the name, and more details on the status of that assignment.
  • The Grades area shows the distribution of highest, lowest, and median marked scores. So the median scores are the majority of students, between 25% and 75% represented by the thick bar. The thin whisker shows the extend of both the lowest score and highest score.
• Individual Analytics
  Finally, you can see the individual students and how they did on each of those three areas, and then their total score. This allows you to also see if there is any connection or confirmation between the students participating and their final grades. You can click on the column headers to sort the columns from high to low, or low to high to help gain further insight in the student performance and focus on the students who are lagging behind.
  • From here you can also click on an individual student name to drill further into that particular student analytics.
  • At the top of the individual student analytics page, you can see their score and a mail icon, so you can message the student from this area.
  • And you can easily navigate between the other students in this class using the arrows, and student selection drop down list.
  • Activity, shows the page views and activity for just that student.
  • Communications shows the messages from the student to the instructor, and then from the instructor to the students (blue bubbles). A way to see responsiveness.
  • Assignments. This shows diamonds representing the due dates, and the bar extending to the submission date. Green indicates that the submission was submitted on time (a long bar just means that the student submitted it way in advance, hover over to see the details), yellow indicates a late submission, and red a missed assignment. Gray diamonds are assignments without due dates, placed at the time of submission.
  • View individual grades just like with the whole class, you can see how each bar represents one assignment, with the thicker section showing the median between the 25% and 75% of student scores. The thin vertical whisker shows the range from the lowest score for any student in the course to the highest score. This particular student's score is marked with a dot, where just like above, green means on time, late assignments are yellow, and missing is red.
  </ul>

Thank you and please rate a 5 if you got something out of this course!

This shows how you can use the free Canva (not related to Canvas) image editing web site to create course images or any other image editing for that matter. It is a great tool!