Canvas for Instructors

An introduction to Canvas with suggestions on how to create your first course

Towards the end of each semester, students are given the opportunity provide instructor and course feedback using EvaluationKIT. Instructors can view current and past Course Evaluations. Some Deans also request that their Administrative Assistant have access to Course Evaluations in order to help organize and process them. Course Evaluations are access from the User's Canvas account settings.

Users are able to manage the courses that are displayed on their individual Canvas dashboard.

Courses are automatically added to Canvas the semester before they are to occur.

Students and instructors are automatically added to your Canvas course, but this article explains how you can add additional people to a course.

Overview of assignments in Canvas.

Instructors can use links in their courses to link to external content (YouTube video, publisher content, etc). It's a good idea to check and make sure that all of the links provided in the course work properly. To do this, Instructors can use the Link Validator Tool.

Course Question Banks can be converted to user Item Banks and used in the New Quiz Format. Using the New Quiz Format allows users to share Item banks between users, make edits to bank questions that will update Quiz questions to reflect the edits and Item banks are tied to the user so they can be used in any course. Canvas does plan on releasing it's own conversion tool in the future, however in the meantime users will need to manually convert older Question Banks into Newer Item banks.

Instructors can copy course content such as assignments, modules, pages, and discussions from previous Canvas courses into existing courses (entire courses can also be copied). Importing a course more than once may have unintended consequences. If you import content into a new course, edit the content in the new course, and later import the previous content again, the imported content will override the existing content.

As an instructor, you can copy module items and modules between courses that you have instructor enrollment.

Navigate to Assignments and create a new Assignment. Add an Assignment Name and Description. Assign a Point Value and (if you have weighted grading--move it to the appropriate Assignment Group). For Submission, Type Choose Online and only check Text Entry. Submission Attempts (Choose Unlimted just in case the student fails to submit multiple files the first time). Finally, Choose Assign to Everyone and add a Due Date and optionally add availability dates.

Instructors can use the Annoto add-on (any video created, uploaded, or linked using Kaltura) to create an Assignment that allows students to create and submit personal notes for an assigned video.

Google Assignments LTI 1.3 is the solution for instructors who receive a Google related assignment submission that may have one several error messages relating to not being able to access the file due to incorrect sharing permissions on the student side. Google Assignments LTI 1.3 correctly applies all of the sharing permissions so you can view the assignment within SpeedGrader.

Creating Assignment Groups allows you to organize the assignments in your course and create Weighed Grading if desired.

You can add a section to your course by editing your course Settings in Canvas. Sections help subdivide students within a course and offer section-specific options such as varied due dates for assignments, discussions, etc.

There are a number of ways for instructors to get help with Canvas.

You can create an announcement to share important information with all users within your course and with users in sections of a course. In your notification preferences, you can choose to receive notifications for announcements created by you as well as replies to announcements you've created. Your course must be published for students to receive announcement notifications. If you import an announcement from another Canvas course, new announcement notifications will not send to course users.

Instructors may want to cross-list courses in Canvas when they teach multiple sections of the same course or teach classes that are listed under multiple captions.

Instructors can copy/import their course content from prior semesters. Using the Canvas Course Import Tool, instructors can choose all content or select specific content from a prior course that they taught and import into their new course.

Instructors can migrate an individual quiz from Classic Quizzes to be used in New Quizzes

The new gradebook in Canvas is expected to replace the classic gradebook in 2020.

The new Quizzes tool in Canvas is available for instructors to use on a course-by-course basis.

Canvas does not currently have a way to print off the New Quizzes' Quiz and Item Analysis. However, Firefox allows users to get a fully printed screenshot (Google Chrome does not currently support a full screenshot).

Students who need to finish incompletes will be unable to access the course unless special dates are added for that student. This article explains how to set this up in Canvas.

You've always been able to share content from your Google Drive in Canvas, but now you will be able to do so seamlessly.

The Attendance tool in Canvas (called Roll Call) allows instructors to create seating charts for their physical classrooms. To help keep track of who is in class and where in the class they are sitting, we recommend instructors use the Seating Chart feature.

Using Google Cloud Assignment, Instructors can create an assignment template using Google Drive that allows each student go be given their own copy of the assignment while the original (Instructor Copy) remains untouched.

Instructors can use the Test Student to see the student's perspective on Canvas, use Student View to view the course, post and reply to discussions, submit assignments, view grades, view people, view pages, view the syllabus, view quizzes, etc. Each course has a separate test student.

You can weight final grades based on assignment groups. Selecting this option assigns a weight to each assignment group, not the assignments themselves. Within each assignment group, a percentage is calculated by dividing the total points a student has earned by the total points possible for all assignments in that group.

Canvas courses can be bookmarked in the bookmark bar and inserted into a folder to help with organization and quick access.

The easiest way to determine whether or not students can access an assignment is by the Publish Status. Although, this is generally accurate, there are additional settings that instructors can change to make the assignment not accessible such as availability dates.

Instructors can import quizzes from QTI packages in New Quizzes. Start by creating a new format quiz and then importing your QTI .Zip file You can only use QTI packages to create a new quiz. You cannot modify an existing quiz using a QTI import.

Instructors can use a PDF that has been converted into a JPEG image as a Canvas Quiz in the New Quiz format via Stimulus Questions (note this process is best suited for single page documents).