Focusing In: What’s Key in the Transition to Remote Learning?
With so many guides, resources, and choices, it might be challenging to hone in on the key elements of getting your classes ready for remote learning. In this guide, we offer two options, one for asynchronous learning and one for synchronous learning. Both options focus on two key components: keep communication foregrounded and include a way to share resources and collect work. Then, think about elements that you might want to add that align with your learning goals and your interests–you can add in an element or two from the menus below, once you get the basics worked out. You can think about this approach as a menu–you will have the base version, and what add-ons do you want (or not)  to include?

Asynchronous Version

To start out, you’ll want to make sure to communicate with your students and to have a way to collect and review work. You can do that through Canvas, which has near-universal adoption across campus.

Communicate

Create Announcements in Canvas or send messages through the Canvas Inbox. Use announcements or messages to check in with students and let them know about updates to course materials, activities, and upcoming assignments.  Your students are used to seeing you multiple times per week, so announcements and messages allow you to maintain a connection with your students–we can work toward maintaining community through the use of announcements and emails.

Completing work

Organize information for students to access content–you can upload PDFs of readings, links to library resources, and copies of your lecture slides if you’d like.  Think about how you use Canvas already–if you have places for these items, great–just continue using them. If you don’t, you can do that in modules (our recommendation) to help keep all material for one class session or week together.  If you’ve never used Modules, you might find these guides helpful:

• Adding Modules
• Adding Content to Modules

Setup assignments so students can submit homework online. Set up assignments in Canvas to allow online submissions.  Students can submit most types of documents directly to Canvas, and you can even grade them within Canvas, using Speed Grader and a built-in rubric, if you’d like.

Then, once you feel like you have a plan for communicating and collecting work, consider what other goals you have for your class.

You can refine your approach to communicating and sharing/receiving work through adding another element, either through Canvas (denoted with an * below) or another tool:

• Add a discussion element to help foster more interaction between your students who may be missing the vibrancy of your classroom.*
• Integrate a social annotation application such as Perusall or Hypothesis* to encourage student discussion and interaction with your readings by having them collaboratively annotate resources.
• Record a Panopto lecture and include it in the module.
  Post an online quiz for students as a knowledge check.*
• Meet with your students for office hours in Zoom or Google Hangouts Meet or, if you’re comfortable online, hold class during your regularly scheduled time using Zoom.

Synchronous Version

This version shares a similar common ground with the asynchronous version: at a basic level, you, too, will want to communicate and collect work. The added component to this version is including a synchronous class meeting to deliver information and allow for collaboration.

Communicate

• Create Announcements in Canvas or send messages through the Canvas Inbox. Use announcements or email to check in with students and let them know about updates to course materials, activities and upcoming assignments. Your students are used to seeing you multiple times per week, so announcements and messages allow you to maintain a connection with your students–we can work toward maintaining community through the use of announcements and emails.
• Hold class during your regularly scheduled time using Zoom.

Completing work

• Organize information for students to access content–you can upload PDFs of readings, links to library resources, and copies of your lecture slides. Think about how you use Canvas already–if you have places for these items, great–just continue using them. If you don’t, you can do that in modules (our recommendation) to help keep all material for one class session or week together.  If you’ve never used Modules, you might find these guides helpful:
  • Adding Modules
  • Adding Content to Modules
• Setup assignments so students can submit homework online. Set up assignments in Canvas to allow online submissions.  Students can submit most types of documents directly to Canvas.

Bonus elements to include, depending on your course goals and needs:

• Add a discussion element to help foster more interaction between your students who may be missing the vibrancy of your classroom.*
• Use a social annotation application such as Perusall or Hypothesis* to encourage student discussion and interaction with your readings.
• Record a Panopto lecture and include it in the module.
• Post an online quiz or exam for students.*
• Use Zoom breakout rooms for small group collaboration.
• Meet with your students for office hours in Zoom.

Welcome back!   Here are a few things to check as you set your courses up in Canvas for the semester. The Canvas Community is a great resource if you have questions about using Canvas. You’ll also find answers to many questions on the Office of Information Technology Support site.

  Make your course available to students

• Check the Start and End Dates for your classes. By default, students cannot view classes outside of those dates, even if the course is published.  Make sure to set the course end date so that students can use it to study for finals, submit final projects, and to check their final Canvas grades. We recommend setting the end date for three weeks after the last course meeting date. Go to the Course Settings to check and change the dates. Click on the Update Course Details button to save the changes.
• Publish your course by clicking on the Publish button in the upper right menu of the Home page

 Rename your course to add the semester and year

• Appending the semester and year to your course name will make it easier to identify in Messages, when copying your course and when combining sections.  Go to Course Settings to change the name.

 Import Content from another Canvas course

• Go to Course Settings for your new course and click on the button to Import Content into Course
• Under Content Type select Copy a Canvas Course
• Search for the course name
• Choose All Content unless you want to only copy over specific content or want to exclude Announcements created in your prior class.  Note that Announcements from the prior semester are automatically included in an “All Content” import.  These announcements will be available to students in the current course unless you delete them from Announcements. If you have announcements we recommend choosing “Select Specific Content” and not importing announcements.
• If you want Canvas to try and adjust your Due Dates on Assignments, also select Adjust Events and Due Dates
• Click on Import
• Complete instructions with screenshots are available in the Canvas Community

 Check for Broken Links in Your Class

• If you have imported material from another Canvas class, it’s a good idea to check for broken links before publishing your course. The links may work for you, but not for your students.  Links to external resources may have changed since the last time the course was taught.
• Go to Settings and click on the last button on the right for Validate Links in Content

 Combine multiple sections of a course

• If you teach more than one section of the same course, you can combine these into one Canvas course. Please be aware of potential FERPA issues if you combine course sections that do not meet together.  You can take some steps to protect students’ privacy by removing People from the menu, and not combining discussions. Instructions for combining courses are available from the Canvas Training Center.

 Add TA’s, Non-grading TA’s or additional instructors

• Go to the People link in the course menu and select +People.  Enter the TA(s) email address, change the role to TA, Non-Grading TA, or Teacher and click on Next. Verify the correct person is being added and click on Add.  Complete details on permissions for each role may be found in this support article on adding people to Canvas.

 Send a message to your students

• Send a message to your students via the Inbox or Conversations.
• Post an Announcement.
• Note:  The course must be published and the Start Date must have passed for students to receive messages or notifications.

 Meet with Instructional Technology

• We’re available to help you design your Canvas course, set up your grades, learn how to use new tools such as Google Drive, video conferencing and lecture capture, and to answer questions.  Contact us at support@stedwards.edu.

Would you like to save time grading multiple choice quizzes? Would you like to give your students an opportunity to self-test with low stakes quizzes online?  Canvas Quizzes enable the delivery of online quizzes that can mostly be automatically graded so you can spend your time on more important things.

Question types include multiple choice, T/F and short answer.  You can import your current quizzes to Canvas or create new ones.

Get an introduction to Quizzes in Canvas on

• September 21: 11:00 – Noon
• September 27: 2:00 – 3:00pm

All classes are held in Premont 116.

During the training we’ll cover

• Importing existing quizzes into Canvas
• Creating new quizzes in Canvas
• Quizzing options
• Using question pools
• Randomizing questions
• Moderating quizzes to give students additional attempts

Sign up via Eventbrite.

For more ideas on saving time by using Canvas, visit our Canvas Level Up site.

Below are the highlights from the September 16th Canvas release.  Canvas makes ongoing updates once per month.  Details about all updates are found in the Canvas Community.

Notifications Will Come from the Class Name

When students view course notifications in their email, all notifications are sent from the course name. This change helps students more easily identify notifications from a specific course. Previously notifications were sent from Instructure Canvas or the institution’s name.

Conferences (Big Blue Button) Updates

Conferences, the video conferencing application within Canvas, has a new interface and the ability to download and store presentations, chat transcripts and shared notes.

Please be aware the Conferences (Big Blue Button) does not work on mobile devices such as an iPhone or Android and that Conference recordings are automatically deleted after 14 days. If you need to save recordings of video conferences or have students who access via mobile devices we recommend using WebEx.

Additional information on the September 16th Release may be found in the Canvas Community.