For those of you teaching with Canvas this semester:
Attached is a checklist (with corresponding links) to help your classes get off to a good start. And here is some information/reminders to help, too:
- View Canvas faculty notes and tips. There are a bit too many of these to fit into this email. Also, since Canvas adds new features and enhancements every three weeks, make sure to go to the Canvas Release Notes page to see what’s new.
- Publish your courses by the beginning of the day your class starts so students can access them. If you are not teaching an online or hybrid course and want to wait longer to publish your courses, that’s up to you. To publish your course, go to the course home page, and click Publish.
- If you are teaching a DE class, contact your students prior to the start of the semester, and encourage them to self-enroll into the Quest for Online Success Course in Canvas. This is a readiness course that prepares students to succeed online. Learn more about Quest. I notified DE students by email, and many have already self-enrolled. A reminder from you would be good, especially since students who added late did not receive the my email notification. Here are instructions you can copy and paste for your students:
a. Go to https://clpccd.instructure.com/enroll/KDENL6. If necessary, copy and paste the URL (without the period at the end) into your browser.
b. Log into Canvas with your W number. Your password is the first 2 letters of your first name, followed by the first 2 letters of your last name (all lowercase), followed by the last four digits of your W number. If you have already logged into Canvas and changed your password, use that password.
c. Click the button "Enroll in Course".
d. Click the button "Go to the Course".
e. Complete the modules.
- Also, if you are teaching a DE class and want to see how your course measures up to the quality standards set by the Online Education Initiative, you can compare it to the OEI Course Design Rubric. The LPC Academic Senate has endorsed the rubric as the standards to strive for in DE classes. View the Senate’s resolution. Examples that meet the rubric’s criteria can be found in the Online Course Design Guide and the Course Design Showcase.
- Make sure all of your content is accessible to students with disabilities. Everything you need to know about web accessibility, including “how-to” tutorials, is available in a Canvas course in which you have access. Just log into Canvas, and you will see a web accessibility course in your Dashboard called Creating Accessible Course Content.
- All online and hybrid courses must show evidence of an instructor’s regular effective contact with students, as per Title 5 and accreditation requirements. Title 5 adds that regular effective contact must take place among students, too. For hybrids, both types of contact are required in the online portion of the class. Read Hybrids @ LPC. When contacting students by email, online and hybrid instructors should use the Canvas Inbox for all of your email correspondences with students. The Canvas Inbox will automatically save the emails. Emails sent from Outlook will be archived, but they will not be available from a central location. Read more about regular effective contact.
- If you want students to have access to your class before the first day of the semester, go into Settings, change the Term start date and time, then check the box that says: Users can only participate in the course between these dates.
- The LPC DE Committee has developed recommendations, along with answers to frequently asked questions, that are intended to aid instructors—particularly new instructors—in determining how many students to add and when to add those students near the beginning of the semester. View the recommendations and FAQs.
- The LPC Online Learning web site includes a link called Faculty Resources, which was created for you. It provides information and resources for instructors online learning at LPC. The section also includes the DE Handbook.
- For financial aid and auditing purposes, you should record the last day of attendance for students who drop DE courses. This can be done easily in Canvas. In your course, go to the People page, click on the three dots on the right side for a student, and select User Details. This brings you to the student’s Profile page. Simply enter the date in the box under Last Day Attended. If a student dropped prior to Census, you can't enter the student's LDA into Canvas because that student simply disappears from the course. The best you can do is note the date elsewhere after monitoring your class roster in CLASS-Web.
The last day of attendance is not the last day a student logged into your course; it’s the last day a student actively participated in class. Read Federal Title IV and Last Day of Attendance.
Here is LPC’s DE drop policy:
The instructor may drop students who miss the first meeting of a course. The first meeting of online or hybrid Distance Education courses is the first day of the class as specified in the class schedule listing. For these courses, instructors may drop students who do not log into their Canvas course and/or complete indicated activities by the third day of classes. DE instructors may drop students if they have not submitted work and/or accessed the class for two consecutive weeks. For Summer courses, DE instructors may drop students if they have not submitted work and/or accessed the class for one week.
- Encourage your students to use the NetTutor online tutoring service. View student information about NetTutor. View faculty information about NetTutor.
- If you need (or want) a banner for the home page of your course, the attached file is a template to use. Just open it in PowerPoint, modify it, save it as a .PNG file, then upload it into Canvas.
- ConferZoom, the web conferencing too in Canvas, has a new interface and new features. Instructors can now allow students to book appointments, instructors and students can set personal preferences for email notifications about upcoming events and appointments, and instructors and students can have events and appointments appear in their personal calendars such as Outlook and Google. Learn more about these features.
- If you plan to use the online proctoring tool Proctorio, you need to understand how it works. View a faculty web page on Proctorio. You should put information about Proctorio into your welcome letter and syllabus. Here are links to an example welcome letter and an example syllabus. Both contain student language about Proctorio. Feel free to use it.
- If you decide to use the new NoteBowl app in Canvas, here’s a 5-minute video demo of how it works. NoteBowl, which can be used to replace the Canvas Discussion Board and Announcements with more of a Facebook-like interface, does not contain all of the functionality of the Canvas Discussion Board. Read about some of the pros and cons of using Notebowl. For instructions on how to use Notebowl, view Notebowl Faculty Links.
- You can also use NameCoach, a pronunciation and gender ID tool. NameCoach allows students to record their names and note their gender. Because of privacy reasons, only the instructor will be able to hear the recordings and see the genders noted. To use NameCoach, just enable it in the course menu. It’s self-explanatory from there.
17. If you would like to use Canvas’ New Gradebook, follow the instructions below to enable it in your course(s). The New Gradebook features several enhancements, and Canvas is still adding to it. Useage is optional; if you don’t enable it, the existing Gradebook will still be there for you. To enable it: Access a course, click Settings, click Feature Options, click the switch to New Gradebook to turn it on. Keep in mind that the New Gradebook cannot be disabled by an instructor or system administrator when one or both of the following features are applied: Manually adjust a submission status to none, late, missing, or excused Enable late or missing policies in the Settings menu. Those features are not compatible with the current Gradebook, so enabling their functionality will prevent an instructor from returning to the current Gradebook. Learn how the New Gradebook works.
18. Wanda Butterly and I will continue to provide faculty technical support. During nights and weekends, you can call Canvas directly at 1-833-300-3467. For students, all daytime support will be handled by LPC’s technical support desk, and they can call Canvas to get their nighttime and weekend questions answered. The student Canvas number is 1-844-600-3467. You might want to note this in your classes.
Good luck with your courses!
Scott
