More Canvas Studio maintenance - Saturday night

Canvas just sent another email about emergency maintenance for its Canvas Studio tool. This will happen at 10 pm Saturday and has a window of one hour, though Canvas says it expects to only need a portion of that time. It added that Studio could be down for up to five minutes during that window.

 

Scott

Canvas Studio maintenance tonight

Canvas just sent an email saying that it will be performing emergency maintenance on its Studio tool tonight at 10 pm. It added that maintenance for Studio will last for up to 10 minutes, and users might experience downtime for up to 5 minutes during the event.

 

Scott

Final Fall Canvas reminders

LPC faculty,

 

Attached is a checklist to help your classes get off to a good start. And here is some information/reminders to help, too:

 

1. View Canvas faculty notes and tips. These new features will be enabled in Canvas on Aug. 15:
   1. The Section column can be hidden from students in the People page when more than one section exists in the course. This change prevents students from viewing sections for other students when they have access to view the People page. This can be particularly beneficial if you have merged a non-credit section of a course with a credit section, and you don’t want students to see who is in the non-credit section. To do this, go to Settings in your merged course, click More Options in Course Details, then check the box in front of Hide sections on the People page from Students. Click Update Course Details at the bottom.
   2. Multiple pages can be deleted at one time in the Pages Index page. Multiple pages can be deleted at one time in the Pages Index page.
   3. If you want to see what is upcoming in Canvas, go to the Canvas Release Notes page.
      
      
2. Publish your courses by the beginning of the day your class starts so students can access them. To publish your course, go to the course home page, and click Publish.
   
   
3. 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 email notification. Here are instructions you can copy and paste for your students:
   
   

1. Go to https://clpccd.instructure.com/enroll/KDENL6. If necessary, copy and paste the URL (without the period at the end) into your browser.
2. 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.
3. Click the button "Enroll in Course".
4. Click the button "Go to the Course".
5. Complete the modules.
   
   

4. 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 Resources course.
   
   
5. 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 Module 5 of the OCDP course. If you don’t have access to the OCDP and want access, email me.
   
   
6. 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. Also, view the CVC-OEI’s Student-Student Interaction Guide (contains concrete examples).
   
   
7. The implementation of the New Rich Content Editor that was supposed to occur for the summer will now take place Dec. 19. The TLC will offer workshops on it this fall. View a video on the new RCE. If you like the New RCE and want to use it for fall classes, it's up to you to enable it. Just access a course, go to Settings – Feature Options, and toggle the Off switch to On for RCE Enhancements.

 

8. If you want to learn how to pronounce students’ names, you can create a Page and turn it into a wiki by allowing students to edit so they can phonetically spell their names.
   
   
9. If you need to give students extra time or extra attempts on a quiz in Canvas, use the Moderate Quiz feature. Too many instructors are editing their quiz and adding a student’s name under Assign To in the quiz settings while removing Everyone. The result is that only that one student’s score goes into the Gradebook, while the rest do not. Learn how to moderate a quiz.
   
   
10. 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.
    
    
11. 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.
    
    
12. 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.
    
    
13. 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.
    
    
14. 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.
    
    
15. 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.
    
    
16. If you want to learn more about Canvas Studio, the video platform in Canvas, go to the Canvas Studio page on the Online Learning web site. There’s also a page for students that you can pass on to your class.
    
    
17. You might want to export your gradebook on a consistent basis, such as every week. Every week might seem like overkill, but you never know what can happen, and nobody wants to jeopardize student grades. One note: When students switch sections in the middle of a semester, their grades and assignments do not automatically move to the new section. Exporting the gradebook from the students’ old section helps mitigate this issue.
    
    
18. If you want to merge sections in Canvas and have not already done so, read the Merging Sections in Canvas page, and follow the instructions carefully.
    
    
19. Canvas now offers a Training Services Portal that is available from the Help icon in the global navigation menu. Resources include live webinar trainings, recorded videos, and actual courses.
    
    
20. The TLC workshop schedule for the fall will be released soon. There will be an Intro to Canvas workshop on Sept. 1 (12:30-1:30) via Zoom, followed by a workshop on Hypothesis on Sept. 3 (1-2).
    
    
21. Wanda Butterly and I will provide faculty technical support. You can also call Canvas directly at 1-833-300-3467 or use the live chat that is available in the Help menu of Canvas.
    
    

Good luck with your courses!

Scott

 

Corrected link

Sorry for the incorrect link to the Canvas Studio for students page. It’s http://www.laspositascollege.edu/onlinelearning/canvas_studio.php

 

Scott

Canvas Studio for students page

For those of you planning to use Canvas Studio in your courses, I have created a new web page for students. It contains a video and tutorial links for students on how to complete tasks requiring Studio. Feel free to include this link in any instructions to students:

http://www.laspositascollege.edu/onlinelearning/faculty/canvas/merging.php

 

Scott

 

 

Links to Canvas Guides

As some of you know, Canvas migrated its user guides to a new platform last week. These Canvas Community links to individual pages in the guides were supposed to work again after the migration. Well, many of those links work, but many also do not. The web addresses are not supposed to change, and according to Canvas, they haven't.

 

Of course, a week later, it is still a work in progress. I was told today that all of the links should work by Monday. This might be a problem for those of you who include such links within your courses to serve as technical instructions for students. If you want to wait for Canvas to fix the links, that's up to you. If you don't, you can use the links at https://guides.instructure.com/​.

 

You can always check the status of Canvas at https://status.instructure.com/.

 

Scott

Canvas Summer 2020 wrap-up

For those of you teaching this summer,

 

To wrap it up the Summer session and prepare for Fall, please note the following:

1. Here’s how course access at the end of a semester works in Canvas:
   1. You will have full access to your course until Aug. 14 at 11:59 p.m. After that, you will only have read-only access. However, you will be able to export your course. At that point, get to the course by clicking Courses – All Courses. It will listed under Past Enrollments.
   2. Students will have full access to your course until Aug. 6 at 11:59 p.m. (unless you have changed the Term end date and time). After the Term end date and time passes, students will have read-only access. They can get to the course by clicking Courses – All Courses. The course will show under Past Enrollments.
   3. If you want students to have full access after the Term end date and time, go into Settings, increase the Term end date and time, then check the box that says: Students can only participate in the course between these dates.  
   4. If you don’t want students to have any access to the course after the Term end date and time, scroll down in Settings, and check the box that says: Restrict students from viewing course after end date.
2. For each class, check the accuracy of your grades, then DOWNLOAD YOUR GRADEBOOK AND COURSE SEPARATELY!
   1. For students who do not complete assignments by the deadline dates, manually give them zeros in the gradebook. If you leave their grade cells blank, those missing assignments won't count against them in Totals when they check grades.
   2. Make sure you don’t have any grade columns that show as hidden when they shouldn’t be hidden.
   3. If you incorrectly gave a student extra attempts on quizzes by adding that student’s name under Assign To in the quiz settings while removing Everyone, you will need to add Everyone back in. You’d notice this in the gradebook if you have a quiz column with only one student’s score while the rest of the students have no scores. Once you add Everyone back in and click Save, all of the scores will show.
   4. When you are finished with grading, download your Gradebook by clicking Actions - Export. Keep your exported Gradebook on your computer and/or external/online drive.
   5. To archive your course and save it for safekeeping (in case anything bad happens to Canvas…and it has happened!), go to Settings – Export Course Content – make sure Course is chosen under Export Type, then click Create Export. Once the process is finished, click New Export to download the file to your computer and/or external/online drive.
      
      Exporting, downloading, and saving your Gradebooks and courses are critical! We have had incidents in the recent past where entire courses and class grades were lost. Don’t get caught without backups.

 

3. When moving from one semester to another, you can either copy a previous semester's course content or export the previous course and import it into the new course. You can do either of these by going to Settings and choosing Import Course Content. If you then select Copy a Canvas Course, you might have to check the box to "Include completed courses."
   1. Learn how to copy a course.
   2. Learn how to export a course.
   3. Learn how to import a course.
      
      
4. Also when moving from one semester to another, do not remove assignments from the Calendar. If you need to remove assignments, do this from the Assignments area. If you need to remove quizzes or discussions, do those from their respective areas, too. This pertains to both the course from which you are copying and the course into which you are copying.
   
   
5. Students have been inputted into their Fall 2020 courses.
   
   
6. If you are teaching during the Fall, you should send a welcome letter to your students a week or so prior to the first day of classes. We offer a welcome letter template for your optional use, along with an online syllabus template, and an entire model course template.
   1. View/download welcome letter template
   2. View/download syllabus template
      
      
7. These new features will be enabled in Canvas on Aug. 15:

1. The Section column can be hidden from students in the People page when more than one section exists in the course. This change prevents students from viewing sections for other students when they have access to view the People page. This can be particularly beneficial if you have merged a non-credit section of a course with a credit section, and you don’t want students to see who is in the non-credit section. To do this, go to Settings in your merged course, click More Options in Course Details, then check the box in front of Hide sections on the People page from Students. Click Update Course Details at the bottom.
2. Multiple pages can be deleted at one time in the Pages Index page. Multiple pages can be deleted at one time in the Pages Index page.
3. If you want to see what is upcoming in Canvas, go to the Canvas Release Notes page.
   
   

Scott

 

Turnitin update

LPC Faculty,

It appears that Turnitin is working again in Canvas. If you had written assignments using Turnitin due the past four days or so, though, you might have to go into the Speedgrader for each student, and click Resubmit to Turnitin.

Scott

 

Fall Canvas students to be inputted tonight

Canvas instructors:

 

I wanted to let you know that Fall 2020 students are scheduled to be inputted into their Canvas courses tonight. If you don’t want students to access your courses until the start of classes, please keep your courses unpublished.

 

Scott

 

Turnitin

For those of you currently trying to use Turnitin, you have, obviously, noticed that it’s not working. District ITS will be working with the vendor today to remedy this situation.

 

Scott