Deducting grades from students for late submission is not only unpleasant, but also tedious. You can have Canvas automate the process. Here is how:
1. Go to course settings.
2. Under “feature options,” turn on “new gradebook.”
3. Click on the gear icon that represents gradebook settings.
4. You can now configure how much you deduct for missing or late assignments. Remember to click on “update” to save your settings.
If you team-teach a course with multiple sections, synchronizing changes across different sections can be a headache. Canvas has a Blueprint course tool that allows you to make changes to a “blueprint” course and push the changes to all other sections associated with the course. Please check the following video to find out more:
Check this page for additional Canvas resources.
If you hear from students that they cannot submit their Turnitin assignment in Canvas, one likely cause is that the due dates have passed. Canvas-Turnitin due date conflict could also cause the problem. To check and change, follow these steps:
3. Check if the due date has passed. Change if needed.
4. Save if you have made some changes to the due date.
5. Look for Turnitin settings. Depending on your screen size, it could be collapsed into these three bars, as shown below.
6. Click on “settings”.
7. Check the start date (when student can start to submit), due date (when assignment is due) and release date (when feedback is given to students) to make sure they are set in a way to allow submission. Make change as needed.
8. If you want to allow late submissions, click on “optional settings”, as shown above.
9. Check to allow late submissions, if applicable.
10. Remember to save your change by clicking on “submit”.
If this does not solve the submission problem, please contact us for help.
If you constantly email with students for a time to meet for office hours or arrange time for a series of class presentations, please remember there might be a better way of scheduling.
Google Calendar
If both sides know a general time to meet, just create a Calendar invitation which can get the item on the calendars for both you and the other person, if he or she accepts it. Even if the invitation is not accepted, there is a record on your calendar how many people (and who) have accepted your invitation. You can also add a notification which will remind both yourself and the other person about the event before it starts.
Canvas Scheduler
For your classes, you can use the “scheduler” tool to create appointment slots. Here is how:
Go to your course, find calendar for the course, click on “scheduler”, and then “create an appointment group”.
You will then see this page, where you can name your appointment group, select the date and the time range, and specify if you’d divide the time range into equal slots of, say, 10 minutes. Click on “go” and Canvas will automatically create a series of time slots for your appointments. Remember to “save and publish”.
Now, you can tell students to reserve appointments using the scheduler tool. Ask them to go to your course, find the course calendar from the course home page, select “scheduler”, and then click on the name of the appointment group. They will then be able to click on available slots to make reservations. If they change their minds, they can click on the slot they reserved to “unreserve” it.
You can book me:
The Canvas scheduling tool only work for your courses in Canvas. If you intend to show your availability to others not associated with your class or even ACU, you can use the “youcanbook.me” tool to create a public-facing scheduler for others to see your availability and book your time.
Check the following video for more information about this tool:
We have created a Spring 2017 template course with some common information you might find useful, especially if you are starting the course as a blank one with no content.
The template include some generic university calendar items including the spring break, holidays, and general grades due dates.
The template also includes modules corresponding to dates in the semester, starting with Monday of each week. This may help you to populate content corresponding to each week, but you can always edit the names after you have populated the content.
As shown above, the template also has some common resources such as Canvas video tutorials your students may find helpful. It is under “module 0”, which also include some common resources as shown below:
After this template is imported into your course, you can adjust the content as you see fit.
The template is a resource, not a requirement. Use it only if it helps you to get ready for the semester. If you are not teaching the course using this weekly structure, this template may not be that helpful.
If you are interested in importing the template into your course for a quicker start in building your course, please send the URL to me(bxf13b@acu.edu). Go to the settings page and copy the URL of the page (Example: https://acu.instructure.com/courses/2067020/settings) and email it to me.
We have had Turnitin integration in Canvas in a while and we have heard of a few issues which I would like to address in the following question and answer format.
If you are a new user of Turnitin, please check this post for instructions on how to deploy the tool in your course.
Question: My students were told that they have to create accounts in Turnitin. Why did that happen? Shouldn’t Canvas have taken care of that?
Answer: Account creation requires first-time users to agree to Turnitin terms and conditions. Students will need to agree to allow their accounts to be created. If they have chosen not to agree, they might want to clear their cache and try again, or use another browser or computer to perform this one-time action.
Question: My students were not able to submit their assignments due to error messages about assignment title and dates. What might be the issue?
Answer: You will need go to Turnitin settings and give the assignment a title, a start date, due date and feedback release date that should be consistent with the assignment dates you assigned in Canvas assignment settings.
Question: A student claims that his or her assignment has been submitted but I could not see it. Why?
Answer: The top reason is that the student may not have followed through in the submission process. One last step is to click on a button to accept the submission. If a student does not do this, his or her assignment will not go through. If an assignment has gone through, a student should see a confirmation message on the screen. There really isn’t a middle ground between a successful submission and an unsuccessful submission. You can ask the student to resubmit and make sure the button for confirmation is clicked.
Another possible reason is that you might have switched in your submission method from “online” to “external tools” in the middle of students submitting their assignments. If that’s the case, submissions turned in earlier can be accessed through the Speedgrader instead of the Turnitin inbox.
Question: Can I use the Canvas Speedgrader and Turnitin only for originality check?
Canvas has now made it possible for Turnitin assignments to be pushed to Speedgrader as well, so yes, it is possible to use the Speedgrader for grades and comments.
Turnitin released its new Turnitin Feedback Studio app (download here).
For ACU Faculty to sign in, open the app and select “Log in with Access Code.”
Next, open a Canvas course in Safari on your iPad (not on a laptop, and not in the Canvas app). Navigate to an assignment that is using the Turnitin LTI and open the Turnitin viewer by clicking on a submitted paper.
In the Feedback Studio view, tap the i in the circle on the lower right of the screen. If you do not see the “i” icon, it may be covered by a gear icon. Tap on it and you will be able to see the “i”icon.
Tap the “Generate Code” button.
It may take a moment or two before the code actually generates.
Next, copy the generated code and paste it in the appropriate place in the Turnitin app.
Remove the spaces before hitting Return.
Once the code is accepted, you will be able to use the Turnitin Feedback Studio app on your iPad.
Tap anywhere in the paper to make comments and suggestions. This app is new and is a little buggy, but has potential to be a great markup tool as improvements are made.
Canvas is synced to Banner to make sure student, teacher and TA records are consistent across systems. To add co-teacher or students to a course, you may need to contact the registrar’s office. Click here to find how.
You can, however, add a TA to your course in Canvas. If you add a teaching assistant, do not add him or her in Canvas through the invitation method. Instead, add your teaching assistant through MyACU. Here is how:
Go to MyACU, Click on the course tool icon (the wrench)
Click on “assistants” tab, search for the person you would like to add as TA to your class and click on “+add” to add him or her. You can add more TAs after that.
Once you have done this at MyACU, the information will trickle down to Canvas when it is synced with Banner next time. You may need to wait a couple of hours for this process to complete.
Check this page for additional Canvas resources.
If you hear me speaking to myself in my office, it is not a sign that I am getting crazy. I might be “typing”. Voice recognition technologies have made it possible for us to input by simply speaking. Here are a few examples:
2. Dictate in Google Docs:
Google Docs now allows you to dictate as well. It is called “voice typing” under “tools”. Give it a try. It is fairly accurate.
3. Generate video subtitles:
If you upload a video to Youtube, Youtube can automatically transcribe your voice into subtitles which you can then improve into more accurate ones. The automatic process saves you at least half of the time compared to doing it from the scratch. However, if you do not have the time for lengthy editing, you might consider using a professional service.
4. Leave voice comments in Canvas:
When grading student work in Canvas, you can use voice comments to give feedback to students, or use the Speech Recognition tool (works in Chrome) to have your comments turned into text.
5. Take voice notes:
If you use Evernote, you can leave yourself a voice note instead of typing it.
I hope this gives you some ideas of using voice to make input easier and faster.
As you grade student work, here are a few suggestions about Canvas grading that may make your work easier.
2. Having difficulty telling how much each student makes on the final grade? Move the “total” column to the front, near student names, so that it is easier to find out. You can always move it to the back when it is desirable to do so.
3. You can drop the lowest grade(s), as long as you put them in a category. It works now even if you do not use weighted grading. Dropped grades will be shown in gray in the grade book.
4. Are students still missing one or more assignments? You can message them directly in the grade book while working on a particular assignment, quiz or discussion. Click on the options icon 
for any grade book column, and then choose “message students who…” to contact them with ease.
5. (Contributed by Dr. Mark W. Riggs, Professor of Mathematics) If you changed a grade but at a later time you want to know what the original score had been, or if you have a teaching assistant grading for you, you could use “view history” to find out more about the grading history, as well as changes you or your TA have made.
You can even revert to an earlier grade if needed.
6. Last but not the least, you can have Canvas calculate the letter grade for you for your course. In your course settings, turn on “grading schema”. You can even customize your own grading schema to convert final scores into letter grades the way you specified in the syllabus!
If you have questions about any of the above, contact the instructional designers for help.
Do you know of another “trick” that you think others may benefit from? Share with us!
Check this page for additional Canvas resources.
A new Canvas user interface (UI) will be rolled out on Saturday, June 18th, 2016 at 8:00AM, which we found to be the best time for the change after reviewing the summer schedules of both the Abilene and Dallas campuses.
What will change?
Where can you learn more?
Canvas has a fairly effective tool for building ePortfolios. It allows one to create pages, add attachments, embed videos and add work directly from courses. Please watch the following video for instructions on how to use this tool.
I have also included an instructional module for ePortfolios in Canvas Commons with the following pieces:
You can search for my name (Berlin Fang) or search for “ePortfolio” to add it to your course and customize it afterwards.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions.
Check this page for additional Canvas resources.
Canvas Speedgrader does not have a Word Count feature, though it is under development according to this thread. Before this feature becomes available, you can get your word count in either of these two ways. This may be a fairly minor issue, but it can be annoying if you keep having to copy text into a word processor for word count while grading.
If you use Chrome or Firefox, install an extension called “Word Count Tool”. I could not find a similar tool in Safari yet, but please share if you find one.
Once installed, highlight any text (or the entire paper), right click, and then click on “Word Count Tool”, you will be able to see the detailed Word Count information, like this:
If you enable Turnitin for student assignment, Turnitin allows you to see the Word count for the paper fairly easily.
Click on the percentage that represents matching, such as “8%” below.
Click on “Text-Only Report” at the bottom right corner.
Now you should be able to see the word count for the submission.
Dr. Dannelle D. Stevens, Professor of Education at Portland State University, and co-author of Introduction to Rubrics recently shared her suggestions to the The Professional and Organizational Development Network (POD Network) for writing assignment instructions which I think are really helpful. I am sharing these suggestions and examples with her permission:
“1. Title conveys type of assignment.
Not “Term paper” but “Research paper: Describes and explains challenges for women pioneers on Oregon Trail from 1842 to 1865″2.The purpose of the assignment is clear.
The purpose of this paper is for you to refine your research skills, to practice analysis and synthesis of historical documents, and to learn about and appreciate what women experienced on the Oregon trail from 1842 to 1865.3. Describes what completed assignment will look like.
The paper should include at least 10 secondary and 5 primary sources. It should be at least 10 pages long, double-spaced with 12 point font.4. Tells point value in relation to other assignments.
The paper is worth 20 points out of the 100 points for all assignments in the class.5. Describes how you will score the assignment (uses a rubric).
The rubric below elaborates this task description and will be used to score the assignment.”
Please also note that Canvas has a rubric tool that can be easily used for assignment grading. Check with the instructional design team if you need help setting up your assignments or rubrics.
The Canvas grade calculation method is fairly robust compared to other systems. As students usually expect all their course-related information in the same place, you do not need to use Excel or any other tool for grade calculation if you have set things up properly in Canvas.
By default, Canvas calculate grades by adding up all column grades. It does not use weighted grading method unless you tell it to. With the total, non-weighted method, you will very like see a percentage rather than raw points for total grades. For instance, for students earning 800 out of a total of 1000, Canvas will display 80%.
What if you prefer to use total points (800, for instance) instead? Switching to total points is very simple:
1. Mouse over the heading for the column called “total” (usually towards the very end of the page), and you will see a downward arrow, click on it.
2. Click on “switch to points”. Please note that this option is not available if you have chosen to use “weighted grading” method, because Canvas is following your logic to calculate your total grade based on the percentages you assign for each categories of assessments.
3. You will then see a warning to show that a change will happen. Click on “continue”. Also, take this as a reminder that you will need to tell students your grade display has changed from a percentage system to a total point system. Students will appreciate that notice.
Additional tips:
Please contact me or David Christianson if you need any assistance with any of the above. We’d love to discuss with you in greater detail.
As you prepare for your course for the next semester, remember you will need to request a new course shell. Check instructions here if needed. If you want to make an exact copy of the course (clone it), you can choose “copy” when you request it.
If you anticipate major changes in your course, and you do not want the trouble of having to delete content you would not like, you can choose “create”when requesting the course, and import content later on. One major benefit of doing this is that you can handpick the content types you would like to include. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to do that. Once your blank new course shows up, follow these steps:
1. Go to your new course (or any other course to copy content INTO) and click on “settings” on the button left of your course menu,
2. On the right, find and select “import content into this course”
3.Choose “Copy a Canvas Course”;
4.Start typing the name or course ID for the course you’d like to copy from, or make your selection from the list.
5. Choose “select specific content”. Click then on “import” next. (Of course, if you change your mind and decide to copy everything, that would be fine too. Just choose “all content.)
6. The import process will start, click on “select content” button when it shows.
7. Now you can select one or multiple types of content you would like. Please understand that some content types may be related to each other. For instance, if your quizzes are based on “question banks”, you might want to select both “quizzes” and “question banks”.
8.You will then see the job processed.
9. When you see “complete”. You can start to check if everything looks right to you.
If you find that things do not seem right after you import it, do not hesitate to contact us for help. It will be tremendously helpful if you can provide the course URL to us when you need help. Otherwise, we would have to perform a lot of searches to find the course and page you would like help with, with possibilities of us looking at different courses/sections with identical names. When you are on any page in Canvas, you can find that it has a unique URL, just copy and paste that URL in your email to us, or when you try to get help from Canvas directly.
Having worked with a number of learning management systems, I found that one the biggest complaints from faculty to vendors is the lack of a a good mechanism to consider extra credit items in final grades. I think this is probably more of a pedagogical issue than a technical one. Those wanting to use extra credit should first of all examine the purpose of having extra credit assessment activities. It will help to ask questions like:
I can think of the following scenarios of having extra credit. I have also included some recommendations. Please add as needed.
In any of the cases above, it is unnecessary to find ways to factor extra credit into total grades, as that will make it a required normal grade item/category, which defeats the the purpose of having optional, extra credit items.
We would welcome your thoughts on the issue.
There are situations when you need to release a quiz or exam to different students at different times. This can be done fairly easily in Canvas either by individual students or by sections. Check the video below for details.
You can now embed an EBSCO Search Box into your Canvas wiki and assignment pages. Just change the edit mode to “HTML Editor” and paste the following code:
<iframe src=”https://widgets.ebscohost.com/prod/customerspecific/s8479690/search2.html” width=”650px” height=”240px” style=”border:none”></iframe>
The search box contains many of the features of our library searches so your students are easily able to type in their search terms for accessing articles, books, videos, and other resources.
This video explains how to add the search box to the page and its functionality.
If you have questions please contact Mark McCallon at mccallonm@acu.edu
