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. These new features were enabled in Canvas on Jan. 5:
- The New Rich Content Editor. View a video on the new RCE.
- The new assignment submission interface for students. If you detail steps for students on how to submit an assignment, you will want to update those instructions. View a student tutorial titled How do I upload a file as an assignment submission for a course using Assignment Enhancements?
- If you want to see what is upcoming in Canvas, go to the Canvas Release Notes page.
Also, student and faculty support available through Canvas changed Jan. 1. Neither students nor faculty will have access to calling Canvas directly. Instead, both have access to a new “self-service” support page by clicking Help in the global navigation menu. On the page, in addition to 24x7 live chat for students and faculty, there is 24x7 email support. The self-service page is powered by LPC’s Knowledge Base that will give students and faculty answers to popular college-specific questions.
There are also links to the self-service pages on the right side of every page on the Online Learning web site. Go directly to the faculty self-service page.
- The New Rich Content Editor. View a video on the new RCE.
- 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.
- 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:
- Go to . If necessary, copy and paste the URL (without the period at the end) into your browser.
- 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.
- Click the button "Enroll in Course".
- Click the button "Go to the Course".
- 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 Resources course.
- 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, you can get that same info in the Web Accessibility Course in Canvas.
- 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. Read more about regular effective contact. Also, view the CVC-OEI’s Student-Student Interaction Guide (contains concrete examples).
- 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.
- 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. Also, when giving a student extra time on an Assignment, you can add the student’s name under Assign To in the Assignment settings, but do not remove Everyone.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 weight your grades and offer extra credit, do not set up an Assignment group called Extra Credit and give it a percentage of zero. Doing so will not calculate extra credit earned by students into their grade totals. Learn about extra credit options in Canvas.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. Read the other important info on that page, too.
- Canvas 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. Zoom also holds live training.
- In every course, you will notice EvaluationKIT Course in the top box in Settings – Navigation. This allows the official faculty union student survey to be deployed to courses, so please do NOT disable it by clicking the three dots to its right or by dragging it to the lower box. Just ignore it. The link is not visible to your students unless you are being evaluated, and even then, it will only be visible for the duration of the evaluation. I wish the installation didn’t put the link there, but nonetheless, thank you for your cooperation.
- The TLC workshop schedule for the spring will be released soon.
- Wanda Butterly, who is back to part-time hours, and I will provide faculty technical support (in addition to the aforementioned Canvas support changes). Again, you can use the self-service page in the Canvas Help menu to access 24x7 chat, email support, and the knowledge base.
Good luck with your courses!
Scott
