Canvas Insider Journal - Weeks Four and Five of an Academic Term

The middle part of the term is not as “spirited” as the beginning and ending of an academic term. However, there are plenty of areas where Canvas is in need of some care and attention. This is a peek at what weeks four and five look like for a Canvas Admin at Western Washington University*:

Course communications cleanup - In efforts to remind students to read pages of the textbook or watch an online video link, some teachers will create a zero-point assignment in their course…and in some cases will overlook File Upload as the default Submission Type. This might create confusion for students as to what they are supposed to submit. I often recommend that the faculty copy the reminder content of the assignment and paste it into a new content page. Teachers can specify a due date for the reminder, such as the designated class day they are to read the textbook section by. Using content pages for reminders adds the date to the students’ To-Do column in the Canvas course, and it removes a column from the course gradebook to help streamline the grading process.

Revisiting quizzes that didn’t go according to plan - Sometimes students are unable to take a quiz during the specified timeframe or they encountered technology issues during the attempt. I’m able to help teachers grant the student their original attempt after the quiz ends or provide another attempt if needed. Also, some quiz questions may have incorrect information in the question or in one of the possible answers. I’m often asked to help teachers “throw out” a quiz question or grant students additional points to their total score. This can be accomplished by using Fudge Points at the bottom of the students’ quiz attempt in SpeedGrader, but in cases where course enrollment is…extensive, I sometimes recommend a zero-point assignment be created with no submission, export the course gradebook to an Excel ,csv document, enter the point value the teacher designates in the zero-point assignment column, and import the course gradebook to update lots of student scores at once. There are numerous other strategies available to help with unforseen quiz issues, and I often meet with the teacher either in person or via Zoom to discuss a customized solution for their needs.

Imported content contains glitches in links to content - Sometimes when links to course content are made, and that course is imported into a course in the future, if linked content is not imported, it sometimes defauts to the original prior-term course. This will create errors for students accessing content since they weren’t enrolled in the prior-term course. I often recommend re-linking to content within the course, and if it wasn’t imported in the first place, I have the teacher import the specific prior-term content into the current-term course, and update the content links accordingly.

As I shared in my previous weeks’ posts, this is a bit of a “time capsule” for a future Canvas Admin at WWU to reference, whether they are a successor or a temporary fill-in while I am absent from office from taking vacation or other reasons. Or it might be a helpful conversation starts for one of my fabulous Canvas Insiders out there? Drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about how I quickly respond to course requests in Canvas-land!

Thanks for your time.

-Chris

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*Western Washington University has about 15,000 students, 1,000 faculty, and about 2,000 staff...give or take. Western gives teachers of academic courses a large amount of agency in developing their academic courses without standardized blueprint or template courses. Western chooses to not require teachers to pass any formalized training before gaining access to their academic course(s). Teachers are able to rename their courses if they choose, and are permitted to add LTI Apps from the available selections in their course. Western’s faculty have the ability to cross-list their courses for an academic term, import content from a previous term, and are able to access prior-term academic courses with read-only rights. They are able to add other WWU personnel to academic courses in numerous roles, save for the student and observer roles. And many other permissions are given to teachers…