Using Canvas for online course

[doc700]

I am looking for some more information about how I should be using Canvas.

For some context, I have been teaching for a few years now, face to face.  Last spring, we moved online along with the rest of the country but at that point I was trying to hang on/learn how to use Zoom.

My university is fully online instruction this year so I am starting the course from scratch online.  I am trying to think about how I should set up my Canvas site.  I have been using Canvas for my face-to-face teaching but it was sort of an afterthought; all critical information was communicated during class, students turned in paper assignments in class etc.  I would upload notes, homework solutions etc to the "Files" section, put my syllabus online and pretty much leave it at that.

I am now trying to make my Canvas page for my online class.  It seems this will be the front door to the class as they will go to Canvas to get the Zoom links for the lectures, turn in their homeworks and interface with the course.  I've never used features like "Modules" before.  I can read the help pages for the technical details but was hoping for some help conceptualizing how my Canvas site should function effectively.

Thanks!

[namazu]

What is your broad disciplinary area, if you don't mind sharing?

How is the course generally organized (i.e.,around readings, thematic units, historical overview of the field, projects, papers, problem sets, other)?  Often these chunks, whatever they are, will translate into modules, and you can group the relevant readings, activities, and assessments together.

Does your school have a Center for Teaching and Learning or an Instructional Technology Center or similar?  They (are probably totally swamped at the moment but) may be able to provide guidance on best practices or show you some Canvas templates for your discipline. 

Similarly, if you have trusted colleagues whom you know to be good teachers with experience teaching online, it may be worth picking their brains for ideas or having them show you how they use Canvas.

[arcturus]

I use Canvas for my (designed) online GenEd science course. I have organized it as one module per week. Each module consists of one "page" that contains links to the assignments for the week, followed by the course content (mixture of text and videos); a reading assignment; a reading quiz; a discussion question; and an activity (aka homework, but actually would have been an inclass learning activity in a face-to-face class). I also have exams and a final (scaffolded) project, so those assignments are included in the relevent modules as well. I make the "page" for the relevant module the homepage for the week, so that students see the course content immediately upon entering the course and the course is "active" insofar as the appearance changes each week.

People have different opinions regarding whether students should be able to see all the content, or if they have to move through the course by, e.g., watching a video before they can see the next material. My philosophy is that it is best for the student to see everything (in the module) at once so that they can judge how much time it will take to digest the material for the week. Others think that it is beneficial to require students to at least attempt to watch posted videos. You can be sophisticated by embedding questions into your videos, too. Your mileage may vary, particularly considering the level of the course and the expected engagement of the students.

It sounds like you may be teaching synchronously (zoom links for the lecture), so some of what I have said may not be as important for you. Nonetheless, I would encourage you to create a page for each module with links to the files (and text explaining what the files are), rather than just sending students to the files section to find lecture notes, homework files, etc.

[mythbuster]

Our Center for Teaching and Learning has a bunch of Canvas Templates that you can install. Basically everything will be organized for you and you just fill in the blanks and labels. Ours also have many self-enroll tutorials and videos to watch. Many of the videos ate directly taken from You tube, so you might try a quick search there.

I am hoping that your classes start later than this coming Monday as ours do. There is a real learning curve to this. I use Canvas fairly extensively in my F2F, and it's taken me a LOT of time to get my courses ready for start all online.

[arcturus]

Also, I forgot to add: the announcments feature is very useful. Anything that you used to say at the start of class can be written as an announcement and sent to the class as a whole. I have a document that includes drafts of the announcements that I send throughout the semester (drafts, since they need to be modified for the specific circumstances of the class-at-hand, but are mostly similar for each term I teach this class). If you expect to teach this class online again (spring semester, perhaps?), I recommend keeping a copy of your class announcements. Canvas will copy these over if you copy your existing course, but I find it helpful to have my own copy, where I can make the relevant updates each term. As an asynchronous online course, I try to have at least 3 class announcements each week: (1) beginning of the week announcement providing context for the topic of the module; (2) mid-week reminder/clarification regarding the discussion topic and/or activity; (3) class-wide feedback on the previous week's activity. I also post to the discussion groups each week. This provides regular (and effective?) contact between instructor and students and keeps the course present in student's minds.

[doc700]

I teach physics.  Each week, the students attend 2 lectures + 1 recitation section with the TA.  I also assign weekly problem sets that are due the following week.  So the course is roughly organized by weeks.  Each topic might be 1-3 lectures but since the students do weekly homework, a 1 week "unit" is the natural grouping.

I haven't seen any templates for my university's teaching and learning office.  Two of the full time teaching professors in my department shared their Canvas pages with me and they were fairly similar to how I was using them (basically how we would use a Google drive -- a file upload).  I teach at a residential university and my school offered 0 online courses until last March.

What is your broad disciplinary area, if you don't mind sharing?

How is the course generally organized (i.e.,around readings, thematic units, historical overview of the field, projects, papers, problem sets, other)?  Often these chunks, whatever they are, will translate into modules, and you can group the relevant readings, activities, and assessments together.

Does your school have a Center for Teaching and Learning or an Instructional Technology Center or similar?  They (are probably totally swamped at the moment but) may be able to provide guidance on best practices or show you some Canvas templates for your discipline. 

Similarly, if you have trusted colleagues whom you know to be good teachers with experience teaching online, it may be worth picking their brains for ideas or having them show you how they use Canvas.

[doc700]

Yes!  I have about a month before my first lecture.

I will be teaching a different class in the spring.  Both courses I am teaching this year are the same as last year, although obviously with the different format.  I have all the lecture materials from last year and did get familiar with how to do lectures/breakout rooms/office hours etc on Zoom last spring.  I am trying to make my course effective online but also to be realistic that this is hopefully the singular year I will teach online/am also trying to run my research lab/write grants/write papers.

For YouTube, is the general idea that I want to make "Pages" and then assemble the pages into "Modules"?

Our Center for Teaching and Learning has a bunch of Canvas Templates that you can install. Basically everything will be organized for you and you just fill in the blanks and labels. Ours also have many self-enroll tutorials and videos to watch. Many of the videos ate directly taken from You tube, so you might try a quick search there.

I am hoping that your classes start later than this coming Monday as ours do. There is a real learning curve to this. I use Canvas fairly extensively in my F2F, and it's taken me a LOT of time to get my courses ready for start all online.

[arcturus]

Yes!  I have about a month before my first lecture.

I will be teaching a different class in the spring.  Both courses I am teaching this year are the same as last year, although obviously with the different format.  I have all the lecture materials from last year and did get familiar with how to do lectures/breakout rooms/office hours etc on Zoom last spring.  I am trying to make my course my effective online but also to be realistic that this is hopefully the singular year I will teach online/am also trying to run my research lab/write grants/write papers.

For YouTube, is the general idea that I want to make "Pages" and then assemble the pages into "Modules"?

Yes. You can have multiple "Pages" in a module if you prefer that (two pages for material associated with the two weekly lectures, for example). As I wrote above, I prefer a single Page for each module, so that is up for the entire week, but you can do whatever you think will work best for you. Providing the links to the various material (link to the assignment page where they will submit this week's homework assignment; zoom links for the lectures; etc) on the Page that will act as the homepage for the week makes it much easier for students. You could still just provide access to "Files" (if you have these clearly organized in folders), but I think students will appreciate the easier access via a the weekly module "Page". Also, you can retain this structure when you teach in the future, just exclude the no-longer-needed zoom links and proceed.

Are you planning on recording your synchronous lectures? If so, you can post them to this Page after class so that students who cannot attend (for whatever reason) can watch. Note, however, that this practice may result in fewer attendees at the scheduled time, so it may not be in the students' best interest for you to do this.

[downer]

I've been finding sorting things into modules is useful. But it is my first time with Canvas.

On my version of Canvas, I also see "collaborations," "folio," "studio", "piazza", and "badges." They all look very interesting, but I am ignoring them all for this semester.

I'm also putting a lot of content on my Google Drive and sharing it, and just putting links on Canvas pages, external URLs, or in other places, to my Google Drive pages. Canvas seems to be coping with that pretty well.

[sprout]

I'm sorry you're not able to get a lot of help from your school.  Our teaching and learning office has been incredibly important during this time.  A couple of suggestions:

• Google something like "canvas course design basics" and you can find resources from other schools
• Canvas has a robust help site and community forums.  You might find this useful:Getting Started with Canvas as an Instructor

For my own advice, I recommend you use modules to organize your course.  If students are accessing Canvas on their cell phones, 'Modules' is the first thing they see. For fully online classes, I have a module for each week.  At the top of each module is a weekly homepage or to-do list.  You can use text headers to set different sections in each module, like "Lecture Videos", "Graded Work", "Readings", etc.  You can also have a couple of modules that are not weekly. For example, I have an "Exams" module at the top where I put a link to the currently open exam.

[mamselle]

My one problem with Canvas, as I recall a few years ago, was that a lot of the messages sent to students went as in-house/intra-university emails, and after a good deal of radio silence on a couple of questions I was trying to get answers for, they informed me "no one reads their emails anymore.....it's text or nothing."

Since at the time I didn't have a phone that made texting possible, let alone easy, I kept having to insist that they use their emails for the class because that was the only way to send messages when things came up (like security locking us out one AM because they hadn't finished work on the room lock systems the night before....).

I realize that particular issue won't come up, but relying on email communication may be a mixed blessing if it's only sporadically used.

M.

[arcturus]

My one problem with Canvas, as I recall a few years ago, was that a lot of the messages sent to students went as in-house/intra-university emails, and after a good deal of radio silence on a couple of questions I was trying to get answers for, they informed me "no one reads their emails anymore.....it's text or nothing."

Since at the time I didn't have a phone that made texting possible, let alone easy, I kept having to insist that they use their emails for the class because that was the only way to send messages when things came up (like security locking us out one AM because they hadn't finished work on the room lock systems the night before....).

I realize that particular issue won't come up, but relying on email communication may be a mixed blessing if it's only sporadically used.

M.

Canvas now allows students to forward announcements to text message in addition to email accounts of their choosing.

[Hegemony]

Skip all the fancy frills of Canvas and stick to the basics.

The key is to have a module for each week, and have the same components in every module. Make the parts of the course predictable. So as someone has said above, put your course components in order in each module.  It might look like this:

Week 1: The American Revolution
• What to do this week [a list of instructions]
• Lectures to view [post the lectures or the links to the lectures]
• Reading [post the reading here]
• Discussion board [first post due Wednesday, response to another student's post due Friday]
• Short writing assignment [due Wednesday]
• Short quiz on the material [due Friday]

Where people run into trouble is by having the components be different every week, and therefore unpredictable. If the students have a quiz on Wednesday the first week, on Friday the second week, no quiz the third week, and on Monday the fourth week, you'll have a ton of confused, frustrated students, and a ton of emails begging for second chances because they missed the quiz deadline. Plus you yourself won't be able to remember what's supposed to happen!

So the keys are:

1. Make it uniform and predictable, as above
2. Get it all set up in advance, every bit of it!  No exceptions!  Then you can relax and devote time to paying attention to the students when the course gets going.

I recommend sending an announcement at the end of every module, summing things up and reminding them of deadlines, and whenever anything big is due.  I put this notice in the introduction to the class:

So that you get all announcements sent out about the course, set your notification preferences for Announcements to "Notify Me Right Away." 
   Do this as follows:
1. Log into Canvas.
2. On the left, click on "Profile."
3. Then click on "Notifications."
4. Go down the list of settings to "Announcements" and click on the left-most checkmark.

Then you, the prof, send out announcements by going to your Canvas homepage and looking at the row of options on the left, and clicking on "Inbox." Then go to the top right and click on the little icon of a person holding a pen. You will get a little box that says "Compose Message." When you compose the email, click on the little box that says "Send an individual message to each recipient." This will ensure that the students don't get a long list of all the emails of the other students in the class with every message. It will also mean that if they reply to the message, their reply won't get sent to all the other students.

Doc700, if you PM me, I will email you my two handouts, "Quick and Simple Tips for Teaching Online," and "Simple Tips for Online Quizzes in Canvas."  The people in my programs says the tips save them a good deal of time.

[mamselle]

My one problem with Canvas, as I recall a few years ago, was that a lot of the messages sent to students went as in-house/intra-university emails, and after a good deal of radio silence on a couple of questions I was trying to get answers for, they informed me "no one reads their emails anymore.....it's text or nothing."

Since at the time I didn't have a phone that made texting possible, let alone easy, I kept having to insist that they use their emails for the class because that was the only way to send messages when things came up (like security locking us out one AM because they hadn't finished work on the room lock systems the night before....).

I realize that particular issue won't come up, but relying on email communication may be a mixed blessing if it's only sporadically used.

M.

Canvas now allows students to forward announcements to text message in addition to email accounts of their choosing.

Oh, good.

There is learning in mammalian bipeds.

M.

[doc700]

There is also a Canvas app and I think you can set it up with push notifications. 

This actually caused quite the drama for one of my colleagues last spring.  He was trying to upload a final exam that he would keep hidden until the scheduled start of the timed exam window.  He screwed up the upload and it took about 10 minutes to realize it was visible to the students.  Some fraction of the students got the notification that the file was uploaded, immediately logged and saw the exam.  As a result they had access to the questions the night before and could study off the actual exam.  As I said, online education and Canvas has not been smooth for my department...

I appreciate everyone's help with this! 

My one problem with Canvas, as I recall a few years ago, was that a lot of the messages sent to students went as in-house/intra-university emails, and after a good deal of radio silence on a couple of questions I was trying to get answers for, they informed me "no one reads their emails anymore.....it's text or nothing."

Since at the time I didn't have a phone that made texting possible, let alone easy, I kept having to insist that they use their emails for the class because that was the only way to send messages when things came up (like security locking us out one AM because they hadn't finished work on the room lock systems the night before....).

I realize that particular issue won't come up, but relying on email communication may be a mixed blessing if it's only sporadically used.

M.

Canvas now allows students to forward announcements to text message in addition to email accounts of their choosing.