Canvas: First Look

Description of the video:

[00:00:01]
>> Kim: Hello everyone, and welcome. Today's webinar is Canvas: Getting Started; it's meant for instructors, and so if you happen to be a student and you're not instructing any courses, the information here may be way more than you need. But for any of you that will be instructing or supporting instructors, this should be enough information to get you up and running with Canvas.

[00:00:26]
We're presuming that you have little to no experience; if you do have some experience in Canvas, today's webinar might still be useful, because we're going to be going over some of the really basic tools that will make your life a lot easier if you know how to use them.

[00:00:40]
So even if you've been using Canvas, but you're not sure you've been getting the most out of your experience, then hopefully today's experience will be valuable for you. And if you are completely new to Canvas, well, you are the people that we are hoping to get all set up.

[00:00:55]
So that's a good thing. Let me go ahead and share my screen... ...and we will get started. So the first thing I wanted to do was introduce myself and my co-host. So my name is Kim Murday, and with me today is Madeleine Gonin; this webinar was created as a partnership between IT Training and the Centers for Teaching and Learning.

[00:01:25]
I happen to work at the Center for Teaching and Learning here at IUPUI, and Madeleine works for the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning down in Bloomington. But just so you know what IT Training is, they are your spot to go for training on the software that IU provides.

[00:01:42]
They have online modules in Canvas; they also are available, they also have online workshops that they do and webinars, and in addition to that, they are also available for special requests. And I always like to stress that, because a lot of instructors don't realize that IT Training can come in and help get their students ready to succeed in their course with some basic technology skills.

[00:02:07]
And so that is something they're more than happy to do for groups, including a group of students that you may have in your course. So I just wanted to mention that and then the other partner, of course, was the Teaching and Learning Centers, and you'll see a link on this slide to contact information for all of the teaching and learning centers.

[00:02:26]
But Madeleine, can you say a few words about what the teaching centers are and what we do?
>> Madeleine: Yes, Kim; so the teaching centers, as you mention are available on every campus and we are here to consult with you about any aspect of your teaching. I work in the instructional technology team down here in Bloomington, but we also have consultants who can help you with any other teaching-related questions, course design, if you're thinking about creating a service learning course, again pretty much any aspect of your teaching, we are happy to help you.

[00:03:00]
And we all have workshops, small group presentations, and also happy to consult with you one-on-one. So if you have some more questions today as you leave, let us know which campus you are in, and then we can connect you with your teaching center.
>> Kim: OK, thank you Madeline.

[00:03:18]
So what we're going to cover today is, we're going to give a quick orientation to Canvas make sure that you are comfortable with the tools, and what they're called, and where to find them. We're going to take a look at a brand new Canvas site, one that has not been set up in any way, just so for those of you who are new to Canvas you'll have a sense of what you need to do when you first have your official course provisioned by the registrar.

[00:03:45]
We're going to spend some time talking about the Assignments tool and the SpeedGrader, because those are probably the two most important tools to understand and be able to use, in order to get the most out of Canvas. And so we're going to spend some time on that, and we'll also take a look at the Syllabus page and how to set that up.

[00:04:07]
We'll talk about how to set up your home page, when you first, for when you and your students first come into your Canvas course site. And then we'll also talk a bit about setting your communication settings and specifically notifications, how to get word from Canvas if something is going on.

[00:04:25]
All right, so the first thing we want to do before we even open up Canvas, we want to talk a bit about this Assignments tool, because as I alluded to just now, the Assignments tool really is the most important one to have a grasp of within Canvas. Madeleine, can you say if you words about why the Assignments tool is so important?

[00:04:45]
I've got an example here, maybe you can introduce us to that whole concept.
>> Madeleine: Yes, Kim. So really we start with the Assignments tool in Canvas because that's how many other tools are populated. And the most important thing for most instructors is that as you set up Assignments, that is how your grade book is set up.

[00:05:07]
So that's why you really want to start with that Assignments tool, in order to set up the grade book, if you want students to be able to view their grades.
>> Kim: OK, so can you walk us through the elements of this assignment that I have -- example that I have shared here, and why each of these elements are so helpful or important?

[00:05:30]

>> Madeleine: Yes, definitely. So right now on the screen, what you see is, an example of an assignment; this one is called Essay on Roman Life, and you can see here in the assignment description, it's very handy, in that you can include files. So you can see that we have a link to a file that students need to read, and then you can also see that here we've already embedded a video from YouTube.

[00:05:56]

>> Kim: Let's take a step back, because I think we're talking about the due date and how that...
>> Madeleine: OK.
>> Kim: ...goes in, before we get into those...yes.
>> Madeleine: So at the bottom of the screen, you see the due date is September 29th, so what happens is when you set an assignment due date, it's going to show up for you at the bottom of the Syllabus tool.

[00:06:15]
And so that's what you see at the very bottom of the screen, and that's what happens automatically, and it will also show up in your students' calendar. So that's very convenient for students, and that means for you as an instructor, your students cannot claim that they did not know when an assignment was due, because it shows up in the Assignments tool, on the calendar, and in the syllabus.

[00:06:37]
So let's see, what's our next piece that we're talking about, Kim?
>> Kim: We're talking about that, you were alluding to it earlier, the things you can embed right there in the instructions of your assignment.
>> Madeleine: Yes, that's very helpful, because now you can embed files; you can embed your PDFs, or if students need to work on a particular Excel spreadsheet, anything that they need to access, they can access that directly from the assignment.

[00:07:03]
So you don't have to send students to the Files tool to then find what it is that they need to read; so that's very convenient. So yes, you can see a direct link to files, directly links to video; this could be a YouTube video, it could be a video that you created.

[00:07:20]
Could be any file that you can imagine; you can link to images, things like that. Let's look at next...OK, so next on the right side of the screen, and we'll talk later about this publishing; but once you publish an assignment, you get access to SpeedGrader. So if your students are submitting Word documents, PDFs or PowerPoints, you will actually be able to do some on-screen commenting and grading.

[00:07:50]
And so that preview window all the way on the right, of the SpeedGrader window, and you can do all of your grading there. And I think we're going to talk about that a little bit later but as you enter grades there, they're automatically pushed to your gradebook. So it really is a time saver, both for you as the instructor and for your students.

[00:08:10]
So your students aren't spending time trying to find all the components they need to access to complete the assignment; instead, it's all there for them and they can spend their time actually focusing on doing the assignment itself.
>> Kim: Exactly; thanks Madeleine. All right, so what we're going to do now is head over to Canvas itself, and I've loaded up a tab just with the main Canvas page where you would log in, and you can get to it a multitude of ways.

[00:08:36]
There are links to Canvas all over Indiana University's websites, but you can always just type in canvas.iu.edu, and that will take you to the log in for Canvas. And you have to do the secure login, so that means, you do have to have a token or some other Duo device in order to securely log in.

[00:08:56]
And when you do, you get to the dashboard, and I've zoomed in a bit here to make sure that we can see what I'm sharing here, but let me know, and Madeline, you'll have to give me a quick heads up if there's any chats because I'm not easily seeing those right now, but let me know if you're having any trouble seeing and we'll do our best to make that even more visible.

[00:09:18]
But what I wanted to talk to you a little bit about, just to give you a quick orientation to the way Canvas is organized, again, if you're not already aware, there is a red bar. It's branded nicely with IU red here on the left, and you will find global tools here.

[00:09:32]
So your own account; you'll also have the Dashboard, which is where you land when you first log in, as well as a link to Courses. Your calendar, which as I said earlier, or said just now, is a global tool, so it's actually the calendar for all of your courses.

[00:09:47]
You'll also see your Inbox, which is the Canvas e-mail tool; that is also global. And so all of your, all of the e-mail within Canvas that you might get from any of your courses is all going to be in that one same spot. There's also a tool here called Commons which we can touch on briefly at the end, if we have time.

[00:10:06]
It's got some good resources, but in particular, I want to make sure you're aware of the help here, because the help is a really nice feature we have here. When you click on that you get a number of different options. If you are a student in any course, you'll see this "Ask Your Instructor a Question".

[00:10:20]
That means your students will be able to see that as well, and if they click on that, it will start a Canvas email directly to you, so that they can ask you a quick question. The two that I want to make sure you're aware of are Search the Canvas Guides and Ask the Community.

[00:10:32]
Canvas has some really nice online guides, with screen captures and videos, in order to help you learn how to use it most efficiently. If you can't find what you're looking for, clicking on Ask the Community is often a great place to go because other people may have been searching for answers to the same question that you have.

[00:10:52]
All right, so the other thing I want to do is, before we really get started, is log into an empty course and just give you a quick orientation to these tools that are over here on the left. Now when you first come into your course, it's going to be, as Madeleine mentioned, unpublished, and what that means is you have access to your course--you can get it set up however you like, and it will remain unavailable to your students until you choose to publish it.

[00:11:22]
And so it's going to be really important before the first day of classes that you actually publish your site so that students can get into the Canvas site and start learning about your course, but certainly by the first time you meet you want to have that published so that students can get in.

[00:11:37]
There's a couple of tools in this list over here on the left that aren't necessarily really obvious by their names, so I just want to take a couple of seconds to mention them. The first one is the Quizzes tool; you may think, ' well, that's OK, I don't give quizzes in my course, I just give tests.'.

[00:11:54]
Well, if you do want to create an automatically graded assessment of some sort, Quizzes is the tool you want. You can use it for tests; you can also use it for surveys. You can use them for graded or ungraded tests or surveys or quizzes, whatever it is that you like to call them.

[00:12:10]
So don't be fooled by that name Quizzes here. We won't to have time to talk about that tool in any detail today but we'll be happy to answer questions at the end. And as with many of the features with Canvas--because this is just a brief overview--if you want to get more information on any of them, do not hesitate to contact your local teaching and learning center and we will be more than happy to help you get oriented to these tools in more details.

[00:12:34]
The other tools I want to mention: Discussions, it's kind of like where you find forums, so if you think of that sort of thing, once upon a time called the b-boards, that's all under the Discussions tool. People is really your roster; that's what the People tool is. You will, if you have an officially registered course -- this is a practice course that I'm using and so I don't have the photo roster -- but for any of you that are teaching an official IU course you will get a tool called the IU Photo Roster, and that actually has the pictures of your students that are loaded into the system.

[00:13:08]
They get pulled in automatically, and so if that's a way that you use to learn your students' names, for example, that can be a really helpful tool as well. The last two I want to mention is this Files tool, and the Files tool is actually one that I often keep hidden from my students, and the reason why I can afford to do that is because as we were mentioning earlier in the PowerPoint, if you have a file that you need your students to find, you can usually embed it into either the assignment instructions for whatever it is they need to know, or you might perhaps put it up in the instructions for discussion as a prompt.

[00:13:45]
You might add those to a page; you can do all sorts of things to files to make sure that they are found by your students just when they need them, and so sending your students to the files tool is actually not necessarily all that helpful. And these other techniques that I'm mentioning also work for things like URLs.

[00:14:06]
URLs, by the way if you have external sites that you send your students to, Files is not a good place to put those, but we can talk about other ways to make sure that your students get access to those if that something that's important. So a couple of other quick things to mention: there is a Course Setup Checklist over here on the right.

[00:14:24]
And so if you're not sure what you would need to do in order to get your course ready, this Next Steps will pop up and it will make suggestions for you and show you how to import content from other courses. Generally, if it's a course coming out of the registrar, you won't need to add students, but you might need to add TAs and things like that, that's something that it helps you walk through.

[00:14:43]
Select Navigation Links is something that we definitely recommend, and you'll notice the very last one here is Publish the Course. And as we mentioned earlier, that is going to be really critical. That is something that comes up frequently in Canvas, that not only just the course itself needs to be published, but as you create artifacts in Assignments or Discussions or Announcements even, you have to choose to publish them to make them visible to your students.

[00:15:09]
So make sure that you keep that in mind. OK, so I think we can head over to the Assignments tool at this point, which as we said is the, probably the keystone, the most important tool of Canvas to make sure that you're taking advantage of. And you'll notice that in my empty course, it's kind of this light gray.

[00:15:29]
We've all been trained by things like Adobe and Microsoft programs that if it shows up light gray in a menu, that means it's not available. Not the case here. In this case, it just means it's either empty and/or invisible to students. In this case it's empty, I don't have any assignments, and so I can just click on it to start adding my assignments.

[00:15:50]
All right, so Madeleine, can you say again a few words about why this Assignments tool is so important.
>> Madeleine: Yes, Kim, again, we're not just building the Gradebook from here, but it's a way to also get those assignments, will give students access to those assignments through the syllabus tool, and through the calendar tool.

[00:16:12]
And within the Assignments tool itself, we can organize our assignments. So, and the terminology that Canvas uses is "assignment groups," so you might have all of your assignments for week one, maybe you have those in a group; or maybe you organize assignments by the type of assignments, so for instance homework or quizzes, or, you know, reading reflections, essays.

[00:16:41]
It just depends on how you choose to organize your assignments. And then I suspect Kim is going to talk to you in a moment about how we even weight these groups, so we can say assignments are worth 100--oh, no, sorry, 30% of the grade, [LAUGH] or things like that.

[00:17:00]
But yeah, pretty much with Canvas, if you only use one tool--well, we hope you'll use more than one tool, but Assignments would probably be in the first tool that you will want to set up in your course.
>> Kim: Very, very true; thank you, Madeleine. So as Madeleine was talking, I was demonstrating just using this +Group button to add additional groups, and this is, as Madeleine said, it's optional.

[00:17:22]
You don't have to use assignment groups, but there's lots of reasons why you might want to take advantage of that. My personal favorite reason to take advantage of the assignment groups is in order to weigh my grades. So if I have a hundred point system for my course and each assignment or exam is worth a certain number of points and those all add up to a hundred, then I don't need to worry about weighing my categories, my assignment groups.

[00:17:49]
But that's not generally how I personally organize my course. I have a tendency to decide on the fly whether or not I want to have ten assignments or eleven or twelve, but I know that however many assignments I have, I want the assignments part of the course to be worth 30% of the grade.

[00:18:08]
And if I want Canvas to do all of that difficult math in the background for me, than this is how I would do it. There's a gear wheel that's up here at the top; you'll see there's actually multiple gear wheels. It's an icon you'll see frequently in Canvas and this is where you'll find your settings.

[00:18:22]
The one at the very top is going to be the settings for the assignments tool entirety, and in this case it's whether or not you're going to weigh your grades. So when I click on that, I'm going to say, you know what, yes, I do want Canvas to do this math for me, I want to weigh my grades.

[00:18:38]
So we'll say that assignments are worth 30, we'll say essays are worth 30, and we'll say exams are worth 40% of the grade. And you'll notice I have an extra assignment groups here called readings, and leave that actually at 0%. Madeleine, can you say why it might be, why you might want to have a group like readings that's not actually worth part, anything, any part of the grade?

[00:19:02]

>> Madeleine: It could be used just to track whether or not students are turning in work along the way, and maybe you just assign a single grade at the end. The other thing is that you'll sometimes see that this is how you, could be a way that you can assign extra credit.

[00:19:21]
Although I will say extra credit is definitely something you want to come and talk to us about.
>> Kim: Very, very true. My favorite reason for including something like a readings group that has 0% is just because I might have a due date when I want those readings to have been read by, and if I put them here in the Assignments tool then they will show up in the calendar, that will show up in the syllabus, like we were saying earlier.

[00:19:47]
They won't be losing points if they don't do the reading, but it means that everything is organized for my students, and they know precisely by what date I want them to have done the reading. As Madeleine said, you can use an additional category for extra credit. Definitely come in and ask for help for that because it can get just a little bit tricky.

[00:20:05]
My general recommendation is to have all of your percentages weigh, add up to 100%, at least for during the semester. You can actually have it add up to less; Canvas will not yell at you if you leave it at ninety percent or eighty percent, but it makes the math--and it does the math in the background, so if somebody had 85 out of 90% then they would end up with an A--but it gets a little confusing for both you and your students.

[00:20:35]
And so that's why I would definitely recommend having that add up to to 100%. It's just going to be much, much easier for you and your students. So let me go back, and I was trying to erase my 30 and change it back to a 40 and instead it went back a page for me.

[00:20:53]
So I want to save that. There we go, very good! Now, once we've done that, now we have additional options that will show up as we start to add assignments into these assignment groups, including some really neat things like the ability to drop highest or lowest--lowest is probably more common--and that sort of thing, which we will demonstrate very quickly at the end.

[00:21:18]
But first let me show you how you would actually add an assignment in the first place. There's a plus button here, and this can be a great way to start adding assignments before the semester begins. If you know that you're going to have Homework 3 and it's going to be due on, let's say, September 29th, then you can put in that base information--it's going to be worth ten points.

[00:21:43]
I'm not sure exactly what the nature of homework 3 is going to be; you don't have the, you haven't written instructions yet or anything like that, you can have this kind of placeholder information in here until you're ready to put in those details. But if you start out and you know exactly what the instructions are going to be for your assignment and what you need your students to do and by when, you can use this big blue +Assignment button up here at the top.

[00:22:11]
That will bring you to the full interface where you can put in your homework. So let's say I've already got my Homework 1 completely planned out, then I'm going to go ahead and use this version to get in all the details. After I put in the title, the next thing I want to make sure that you're aware of is this rich content editor that shows up underneath.

[00:22:31]
This is actually something that shows up in a lot of different tools: in Discussions, Announcements, in Pages, this interface here. And you can copy and paste instructions from Word documents or other documents, if you need to, you can certainly just start typing your instructions [TYPING] right here in this box.

[00:22:55]
And as we were kind of implying earlier, you can actually put in, if there was a reading, I want you to do this reading and watch this video before you then write a paper, three page essay about such and such or so and so, you can have those readings and things like that right here within these instructions.

[00:23:17]
So very quickly I just want to mention a couple of things about this, these instructions, or not the instructions, these ICONS here, I should say. If you are pasting from Word, you may have to do some minor formatting like you'll find with this top row here. If you are teaching specialty courses like math courses you can have math equations put in here; you can pull in Google Drive and other tools like that.

[00:23:44]
There's even the ability to pull in media from a tool called Kaltura, and if you are a heavy user of your own videos, I would definitely recommend coming and talking to the Teaching Centers about Kaltura and how to take advantage of that. The other thing that I'll mention is there's a couple of tools here that go through and help with your formatting, and this is a great way to help your instructions be more accessible to screen readers [TYPING].

[00:24:14]
So I wanted to show you that there. Notice over here on the right there's an "Insert Content into the Page," there's a number of different ways you can help Canvas keep everything all together. You can link to different areas of Canvas, so if I had any discussions programmed, if I had any quizzes or tests programmed, and things like that, I could very easily link them right here and/or embed them.

[00:24:40]
If I have files I want them to read, it's unbelievably easy to add those. As I mentioned, there's this Files tool over here; you can load your files into the Files tool before you start working on your assignments, but even if you hadn't, you can just upload a file on the fly while you're doing this.

[00:24:57]
So let's say I wanted our students to look at a certain document before they do this assignment. I can attach it right here: I will just upload it, And that gets linked automatically in here, and it does some really neat processing things once I save my assignment. So we'll look at that.

[00:25:23]
It's also a way to add images; you can add images that are already in your course or ones that you upload right in that moment. We're going to give it some very very basic settings, things like points, make sure it's going into the assignment group that I want.

[00:25:37]
I'm going to display grades as percentage, but you can choose all of those sorts of things, and then submission type is going to be pretty important. If you want them to submit online you have to choose at least one of these; it might be text entry where you give your students the same interface here or it might be a file upload, that sort of thing.

[00:25:56]
There are other options, including if it's going to be something on paper or it's just a reading for no points, you might have no submission. And then external tool: there's lots of different options there. If you think that might be something that you're going to need, if you're going to use something like Voicethread or Turnitin, if these tools sound familiar to you, and you're like, "I am definitely am going to need to use those," come and talk to us if you're not sure how to use those as external tools.

[00:26:20]
Or if there are things that you think might be available, like Turnitin as an originality report; if that's something that might be useful to you, come and talk to us we'll help you figure out the proper settings for that. Same with things like group assignment and peer reviews; we don't have time to get into those details, but know that those are options with your assignment.

[00:26:42]
What I'm going to do is, I'm going to give this assignment a due date, and we'll make this Homework 1 due, we'll put it into August 25th, let's say. It defaults to a minute before midnight, makes things very clear. You can also choose "Available from" and "Until". "Available from" will keep that assignment hidden from your students until a certain time, so if for example I was going to discuss this assignment in class on the 21st, and I really didn't want to get started until after class, then I might say this is going to be available from the 21st at 6pm, and then I know no eager beavers are going to go in and start trying to work on it ahead of time.

[00:27:22]
We'll all be on the same page. The Until field is also very important if you have an opinion about late grades -- or, excuse me, late submissions. If you don't particularly care if things are turned in late, you just want to make sure you know, Canvas will definitely accept late assignments, if you leave this blank.

[00:27:42]
But if you know you do NOT want late assignments, or you only will accept late assignments up until a certain date, you'll want to put in something here. If I don't want to accept any late assignments at all, I'm just going to copy and paste in that exact same due date and time and make sure that my students are unable to turn in anything after that, Canvas just simply won't allow it.

[00:28:02]
Anything to add, Madeleine, before I save this?
>> Madeleine: No, Kim, I think you've gone through the most important details.
>> Kim: OK, so I went ahead and saved that, and one of the things I was mentioning earlier is that, once you attach a document it does do some processing.

[00:28:20]
It gives you the ability to preview that document right here from within the instructions. So your students, when they come to do this assignment, they're actually going to be able to look at this document right here from within the assignment, instead of having to hunt it down in some other location.

[00:28:35]
So that's one of the really neat things that it does. You also have the ability to download it; if you click directly on the name or open it in a new tab, depending on what you want to do. If rubrics are thing you use, come and talk to the teaching centers, because there are some really neat options with rubrics.

[00:28:50]
But instead, what I want to do is come back to assignments, and talk a little bit about publishing, and then we're going to jump over to the SpeedGrader, because I want to make sure that we have just a couple of minutes to talk about the SpeedGrader. All right, so, do you remember that I mentioned that you have to publish your course, otherwise your students can't see it?

[00:29:08]
The same thing happens with things like assignments. They are completely invisible to your students until you publish them. Now that includes things that have an "available from" date. So I was just trying to highlight that but it really wants me to drag and drop. By the way, you can drag and drop these things, so if Homework 1 actually belonged in Essays, we could just drop it down there!

[00:29:27]
Is that not cool? OK, so Homework 1, meantime, it's not available until August 21st at 6pm. Well, that date could come and go; if I have not published this assignment, my students will never see it. And if we get, the number one reason why any student calls the Support Center for help with Canvas, it's because they can't find an assignment that they know is due, and unfortunately it's usually because the instructor has forgotten to publish it.

[00:29:53]
Thankfully it's very easy. If you don't use that "Save and Publish" option that's at the bottom of the editing interface for each assignment, you can come back to this page and click on this little cloud, and that will publish it. So it can be super easy to actually use these and just go through, figure out which ones show up in green; if they're green, then they're published.

[00:30:14]
They may not be available until a certain date, but at least students know that there is a Homework 1 and know that it will be available as of August 21st, and that it is due on August 25th. They won't be able to see the details if you have that "not available until" date.

[00:30:28]
OK. I think that pretty much covers what I wanted to get about actually putting in your assignments. We're going to see how that gets integrated with the other tools in a minute, but before we do that, I wanted to actually show you an example of the SpeedGrader. While I'm pulling that up, Madeleine--I'm going to go to a course already has some assignments turned in to do that--Madeleine, can you say a few words about the SpeedGrader and why it's so popular?

[00:30:53]

>> Madeleine: Yes, Kim; as I mentioned in the very beginning, SpeedGrader allows you to do some on-screen commenting on student work if it's a Word document, PDF or PowerPoint, but it also allows you to comment using audio or video. And so we have some, for instance a fine arts instructor, where students are turning in photos of their artwork.

[00:31:19]
Well, this instructor goes through, views the piece, and just records an audio comment for each student. And so they feel like that's a lot faster for them to give students the feedback that way. So you can be creative in how you provide students feedback.
>> Kim: Very, very true.

[00:31:38]
So what I did was, I went to an assignment that actually has some submissions, this Essay on Roman life in this particular course, and you can see over here on the right, now that I have this published the SpeedGrader tool is visible. And I actually have some submissions and it lets me know how many submissions I have, and how many have been graded.

[00:31:55]
So I opened up the SpeedGrader by clicking this here on the right, and it opened up in a new tab. And the SpeedGrader makes it very, very simple to view what your students have turned in. You actually have a list up here in the right, and you can see which students have turned in with this icon, the yellow means that it has been turned in but not yet graded, and the gray means it has not been turned in yet.

[00:32:18]
So here I am on Ben's assignment, and let's say I'm ready to give him some comments. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use this comment button here--and bear in mind I can always zoom in if it's difficult to see--grab this comment tool and I can actually go in and draw, and I can choose the color that I want to draw in.

[00:32:38]
I can go in and highlight specific text and I can, again, choose the color I want to highlight in, so if there's something specific about this sentence I can highlight that. I can also go in and add a comment to that by right clicking, so if I have a comment about why I just highlighted that, so, "You need to reword this".

[00:33:01]
I can type in a comment that way. I can add in my own text and so if I want to come in here and say "careful with your citations" I can add that. And I can also strike out, which will give you the option of immediately typing in, so, you know, that should be "sweetroll" (one word), and so it gives you all of these sorts of options to be able to mark up this submission without going anywhere.

[00:33:32]
If you have a rubric, the rubric is actually going to be available right here as well, and once I'm ready to add in a grade--let's say I'm going to give this a 45/50, I can type that in and it immediately gets populated out to the gradebook, just by typing it in here.

[00:33:49]
So I don't need to go into the gradebook and do anything else. It is right there for me, and I can see the average how my students are doing. There's one button in particular on this tool, on the SpeedGrader, that I think is really helpful, and Madeleine, can you say a few words about why one might want to use this "Mute/Unmute Assignment"?

[00:34:10]

>> Madeleine: Yes, Kim, that's particularly helpful in large classes. What this button allows you to do is not release grades to students. So, by default, as soon as you enter a grade, either in SpeedGrader or in the gradebook, that student has immediate access to that grade. So when I use the "Mute Assignment" button, it allows me to finish the grading for the whole assignment and then at the end I can unmute the assignment and all the students receive their grade at the same time.

[00:34:42]
So that might be helpful. Otherwise students might come to you and say "Hey, my friend got his grade, where is mine?" so...
>> Kim: Yes, or what's more likely to happen yet is, it's not just "My friend got his grade, where is mine?" but " my gosh, did you not get my assignment, do I need to turn it back in, what happened, why isn't it graded yet?".

[00:35:02]
Nobody needs that kind of panic. So just remember to unmute it when you're done, so that your students can actually not only see their grade, but also your comments. We'll see if we can actually show an example of that sort of thing. I'm going to just do a couple of other very quick markups on this mysterious Test Student and we'll come back and we will look at those those comments later [TYPING].

[00:35:33]
All right, so, just putting those in. Note you can also add global comments over here on the side, and if you do have sort of holistic comments you want to make, that is actually a really good place to put them, rather than in these comments that show up here on the side.

[00:35:46]
Every once in a while students don't realize that they can zoom out and get a sense of those comments that might be showing up on the side. And so these are the comments they're going to see most easily, so if you do have overall comments or if you want to make sure that they come in and look at your specific comments, you can actually put something in here.

[00:36:04]
And this is where, as Madeleine was saying, you can actually put in a media comment. This requires Flash, so it's not ideal, but it is a way...or you can use "Upload Media" if you've recorded it in something else. It is a way to add in spoken and/or video feedback, which can be really, really helpful.

[00:36:24]
The types of files that one can do this kind of markup in...Madeleine, remind me, I think it's definitely Word documents and PDFs, are there other types that can be marked up like this?
>> Madeleine: Apparently also PowerPoints.
>> Kim: Very good, OK. So if you have an image and you want to be able to--that you're having your students turn in---and you want to be able to at least draw on it, then you can always have your students save it to PDF and that will allow you to be able to do that kind of specific markup or add comments on a specific part and say " this particular area is unusually unusual for this reason or that reason".

[00:37:06]

>> Madeleine: Now, Kim, I just remembered something. And some of our instructors might not know this, but Canvas does some pretty regular updates of the interface, and in fact the SpeedGrader tool is going to be upgraded very soon. So if you are someone who will not be actually using Canvas until later in July or even August, don't be shocked if this interface looks a little different.

[00:37:33]
Hopefully you will still have the same functionality, but just be aware that in the upcoming weeks SpeedGrader is going to go through some changes.
>> Kim: That is very, very good advice. Thank you, Madeleine. I'm going to go ahead and close this; you can close the tab, it opened on an extra tab, or you can always get back to your course by clicking on either the assignment title, it will bring you back to the assignment, if I remember correctly, or the Course just in general.

[00:37:59]
Yup, sure enough. And you can see it's updated nicely for me, two out of three submissions graded. Now, there is this option to download submissions and you can still do that, but the nice thing about Canvas is that you make it fairly easy to grade, whether you're on a mobile device like a tablet or on a computer, and so that is my personal preference is to do all of my grading online.

[00:38:21]
I don't have to worry about downloading files, I don't have to worry about printing things out, or have students printing them out and me carrying around a stack this big. I can have it all online and it works very, very nicely. OK, so we can come back to this if you have questions later on, but what I wanted to do now is take a minute and go over to the Syllabus tool, because there's, as we've mentioned a couple of times, there's kind of this integration between assignments and the syllabus.

[00:38:53]
So let's take a look at an example here in this populated course. So Madeleine, the way the syllabus tool works here in Canvas is kind of unusual. Are there ways that you suggest that people take advantage of this organization and maybe reconsider how they would put their course syllabus information in here?

[00:39:13]

>> Madeleine: Yeah, Kim, I think it gives you more flexibility. And in fact, if you could scroll down on that page, just to show the bottom part of this page, you can start seeing some of the assignments that are listed by due date. And that Course Summary section, Canvas creates for you automatically as you enter assignments, add due date, and publish them.

[00:39:39]
So the bottom part of the syllabus you can't edit, but the top you have a lot of flexibility, because it gives you access to that rich content editor, which we've already seen. So some instructors will actually have a welcome video, and they'll put it in the syllabus, or they'll just have their image and their...

[00:39:59]

>> Kim: Contact information, things like that? Madeleine, I think we've lost you.
>> Madeleine: Oops, am I back?
>> Kim: Yes, you're back.
>> Madeleine: I was going to say, and other instructors use it as a traditional syllabus tool; they'll put all their text in there, or at least is link to the PDF.

[00:40:20]
So I think you have a lot of flexibility in how you present the materials. I've seen some instructors who, for instance, just have documents, separate links to documents, for the regular course policies, and then their grading scale, that's kind of standard information that we're used to seeing in the syllabus.

[00:40:41]
And they have some of the other information visible to students on screen, so you have a lot of flexibility, so I would say, think about what it is that you currently do with your syllabus, and then as Kim goes through and demonstrates and shows you how to use the syllabus tool, think about whether there are new ways in which you can use the syllabus.

[00:41:01]
Because it's certainly also true, some instructors really only use the syllabus in Canvas, and then the assignments tool, as they put links to all their readings and things right there.
>> Kim: It's very true, and the fact that the syllabus tool actually pulls up any weighting you may have for assignments means that you may not need to include that information on your syllabus.

[00:41:24]
And one of the things that I used to always have, it was a multi-page part of my syllabus, was all of the assignments and when they're due. I now recommend that people take that out of their syllabus -- do not include that as text here. Because, let's say I needed to change the due date for a specific assignment.

[00:41:43]
In the old system, I would have to amend or change my syllabus and then put a new revised syllabus up for my students to see. Well, here, because the assignments are coming in automatically, if I decide to change "Essay on Roman Life" to be due on the next Monday, to give my students that extra weekend to work, this is going to be updated automatically by Canvas.

[00:42:06]
So instead of having to post a revised syllabus, that information is being taken care of by Canvas. I don't want to have that information in my in my electronic document at all, because then that might contradict when I've actually rescheduled it. So I could have here in the syllabus, for example -- so we can, again, preview that right here from within the page, and it's very easy to then shrink it back down when you're done -- I'm assuming that this is going to open up for me, but perhaps not -- there, we go, we get the policies at least!

[00:42:38]
And so once I am done looking at this, I can, again, always minimize that, and it doesn't require me to slog through a lot of pasted text here to get down to that course summary information, make sure that I'm up to date on all of my assignments. So these are just some things to consider as you're looking at this syllabus tool.

[00:42:58]
All right, so what I want to do is come back to my empty course. So let's come back to Courses, and I'm going to show you an empty syllabus page. Now, I have not touched the syllabus page yet, and yet here are two assignments are already showing up in this Course Summary.

[00:43:19]
Those are coming directly from the Assignments tool where I programmed them. And again, if I decide to change one of these, then this is going to be changed automatically. So you never want to come to the syllabus page and say, "Hey, I can't change the date in the course summary!".

[00:43:32]
Well no, of course you can't, because you have to change it in the Assignments, and then that will automatically update, dynamically update the Syllabus tool. But of course, up here, this is not particularly interesting; I want to make sure I have my information. So I'm going to click Edit up here at the top.

[00:43:49]
And this is how I can go in, and as Madeleine said, we get the same rich content editor and I can do things like include pictures of myself. So if I wanted to include a picture then I could do that just by coming over and selecting that -- this is one that I already had loaded.

[00:44:04]
I can put in information about myself: "Professor Murday," and my e-mail and whatever other information I want them to have. Did you notice that? That just switch to a link because Canvas recognized that as something that could be clickable for students. And the same thing goes for, if I have a website that I want them to be able to go to, I can just type in my website, [TYPING] and Canvas sometimes recognizes them.

[00:44:41]
If it doesn't, I can always highlight it, click on this link and make sure that it goes to where I need it to go. That's also, you can have text, like "View my Web site here" and you can highlight that text and use that link icon to make sure that they go to the right spot.

[00:45:01]
These are all things that you can do from within this rich content editor. Anything else you want to me to show while I'm here in the rich content editor, Madeleine, before I update my syllabus?
>> Madeleine: No, Kim; there are a lot of other things we can do in there, but again, talk to your teaching center consultants and they can help you figure out which of those tools might be helpful to you.

[00:45:23]

>> Kim: OK, I'm going to update my syllabus, and here we are, very good. OK so the next tool that I wanted to make sure that we're aware of is this Home tool, and part of the reason for that is because when you are first creating your website, your Canvas site, the home page is what students are going to see first when they log in.

[00:45:44]
Madeleine, are there things that you recommend we do with the home page, things that might make my course more welcoming for my students, for example?
>> Madeleine: Yes, Kim, I've seen a couple of different things. Again, in this area, you can choose what shows up. So some people choose to show their syllabus, or their assignments list, or they create their own page, for instance.

[00:46:12]
And so what I've seen some instructors do is, like you see here on screen, you can have a photo or even a video that welcomes students and gives them the basic information about what they need to get started. This is particularly helpful if you are teaching an online or even a hybrid course, or maybe you're teaching freshman, you know you could really use this introductory page as a way to orient them to the course.

[00:46:38]
I've seen instructors even clarify the structure like, "this is how I get started in this course" or "here are the expectations". Here you have someone who is showing, actually, the syllabus, so you really get to choose what it is that students see first. Yes, and I've also seen some courses where they actually have a summary page for each week.

[00:47:03]
So maybe they have a very -- so, business presentations, they have a lot of materials that students have to pay attention to, presentations, and watch videos, and turn in papers every week, so they actually have a page for each week. And here in this Introduction to Geology, you see something similar.

[00:47:22]
It's like, ok, we can go to week one and see what is it that I need to do for week one. In business presentations, they actually have a page that they change each week, it's like "Here are all the things to pay attention to this week" and then they just switch it out each week, so...

[00:47:37]

>> Kim: They do make it very easy to switch out the home page, so that is something that you can actually choose to do. It makes it more interesting for your students, too, as they come in. We can always leave here on the default, which is recent activity, and as things happen in your course, as you add assignments, as you have discussion posts and things like that, or you've graded papers, then that will show up here in this recent messages if you leave it on the default.

[00:48:02]
But this link over here on the right when you're on the home page tool allows you to just choose one of five different things. You can keep the same course activity stream, you can link to your actual course modules, which is the example that we have here, where this is going directly -- you can see on the home page, but what you're seeing are the modules -- if you're not sure what modules are, they're a way to organize your content if it's all being organized within Canvas, maybe don't necessarily have a textbook per se.

[00:48:31]
If you want to learn more about that, again contact your local teaching learning center. You can link directly to the assignments list, so if that's what you want students to focus on at any particular point during semester, you can do that; or the syllabus page itself. If you have the syllabus page set up very nicely, as we do in this particular one where it has a nice introduction to the course, then that might be, you might want that to be your home page.

[00:48:54]
And then if you want to create your very own custom front page, then you can use the Pages tool. And we don't have time to go over the Pages tool and exactly how to use that right now, but if that's something you want to do, there's all sorts of resources available to you.

[00:49:09]
And so I cheated, and this is not actually a true empty course; I added in this possible front page, and I'm going to switch that just to show you one of the resources that you could make use of. And that's where we have this grid of pictures that can be links to the different modules.

[00:49:28]
And so if you do have a course that can be done in whatever order the student prefers, then this is a great way to have this organized as well. So they make it very easy to change that home page back and forth, and that's where if you have multiple pages that will work for you, you can do that super easy as well.

[00:49:47]
Any other comments Madeleine, before we move on and talk a little bit about our communication settings?
>> Madeleine: No, Kim, I think we've covered -- well, actually, one thing about this Home Page. Just a reminder, you can see Kim's page is unpublished -- so actually, her course is unpublished, so by default, when you receive your registrar-generated course, that will be unpublished.

[00:50:15]
So again, you have to publish that when you want students to actually be able to access your course. So by default, it's unpublished; just remember to do that as your last step before you let students loose into your site.
>> Kim: Right; remember you don't have to have your course perfectly set up for the entire semester before you publish it; you could have a lot of placeholder assignments here.

[00:50:39]
Sorry, hold on -- [COUGH] -- excuse me. You could have placeholder assignments here you don't have all of the details, leave them unpublished, but still come in and publish the course. Or you could have them with the placeholder information and just still have them not available until a certain date, and maybe you come back and you add those details later.

[00:51:03]
The course doesn't have to be perfect, but you want to be set up somewhat, so that students already can see the organization of your course and what they're going to want to focus on. We will talk a little bit about how to personalize this list of tools over here on the left, which is another great way to help your students get oriented, but before we do that I want to say a few words about how Canvas will get in touch with you if something important is happening in your course, or in your courses, I should say.

[00:51:33]
And so, there are specific communications that you want to set. You'll want to come over here to where you'll -- usually if you are first logging in, it will be just a silhouette of a person, but if you click on that and go to profile, that will allow you to add in a picture.

[00:51:50]
And especially if you had an online course, I would definitely recommend adding a picture. It helps students realize that you are a human being, that you are, that there is somebody that really is there teaching the course and interacting with them, and it makes it just much more friendly.

[00:52:06]
So that is something that I would recommend doing; then you can choose whether or not to add additional information into here. So if you want to change or personalize the way that Canvas notifies you about things going on the course, you want to go to the settings tool, that's the next place you want to go.

[00:52:28]
Excuse me. So, what you can do is, you can come over here to the right, there's actually a spot where you can add "Ways to Contact," and this is basically ways that Canvas can get in touch with you. Now whatever you put in here -- of course your standard Indiana University address is going to be appearing here -- but you could add additional email addresses if you want.

[00:52:51]
And so if I wanted to add an additional email address, I could just click on that "Email Address" and if there's one that I check on a much more regular basis than my IU account, I may want to put that in. So that's something that I did for example with my gmail account.

[00:53:03]
If I'm the sort of person who really prefers to get texts about certain things, then I can actually add an additional contact method here and put in my cell number. And so I can choose my carrier, and it will come up with an email. It will have me register my device, so if I were to actually click on this, it would try to send to a fake number and nothing would happen, so it's actually confirming that this really is your phone number that you get texts at.

[00:53:37]
Once you've done that, now we can go into the notifications up here on the left, and we can let Canvas know how we want it to contact us if something's happening. So let's see if that one will load up. Madeleine, do you happen to have the helpful links open?

[00:53:58]
Do you have the link to the document that shows, in the knowledge base, that shows what the default settings are? Because I of course have gone in and asked Canvas not to tell me anything at all.
>> Madeleine: Yes, let me see if I can grab that, I have it here somewhere.

[00:54:17]

>> Kim: OK, so while she's getting that -- she's going to put that link in the chat where that particular knowledge based document is -- the default that's set up at Indiana University is to have certain things sent to you right away. These are our four options: notify me right away, send a daily summary, send a weekly summary, or don't send me anything at all.

[00:54:37]
And I am in Canvas on a very regular basis, so I have chosen to set everything to "do not send me anything". So if there's a change in due dates, grading policies, if there's files, if something has been graded, if there are new discussion posts, if there are new e-mail...

[00:54:54]
Unfortunately they don't call it, the tool over here is the Inbox, but they refer to it here as Conversations; the conversations happen in the Inbox, they are messages. So if I want to know if I'm going to get an email, if I have gotten an email from a student, then I would want to have this notify me either right away or maybe send me a daily summary or that kind of thing.

[00:55:19]
One of the really neat features that Canvas has is that if you do have conversations notify you right away, then they come in as a separate email to whatever email it is you're having them sent to. You can actually reply to a student's Canvas Inbox message using Outlook or whatever it is, Gmail, and it will go back through Canvas.

[00:55:44]
And so that could be a really really neat thing. There's all sorts of things that you can choose to be notified by and it gives you a column for each type of notification, each address or text number that you have chosen to put in here. So I have three right now, but if you had four or five, you could choose, OK, well, I want to know when grades are posted here at this particular email address, but I only want to know about late grading at this email address, so these are things I can do.

[00:56:17]
Now there is one very important thing to point out, and that is that you as the instructor do not have the ability to decide to forward a Canvas email message to the students' IU email. This is something that the students choose, whether or not to set that up, so Madeleine, what's some advice that you give to instructors as they start a course, in terms of setting expectations?

[00:56:44]

>> Madeleine: Yes, Kim, this is probably most often, one of the questions that we get most often, that is, "How do I make sure that my students get my announcement?". Well, there's no way that we can ensure that, because students can come in here and change their notification settings.

[00:57:02]
I will say that by default, they will get your announcement and I did post in the chat room the default notification settings, so when your student first comes to IU, yes they will get all sorts of announcements or get your messages, things like that, and then as they make changes to notifications -- because these all global settings, meaning if you turn off a feature it's now true for all of your courses.

[00:57:30]
Anyway, so knowing this, what we recommend is tell your students which communications tools you'll be using, so where they should be looking for messages or information from you, and how often. So if you're going to use the announcements tool, then you can let them know "I'm going to use the Announcements tool; if you're not receiving my announcements, then it's your responsibility to come in once a week or every day, or how often, as needed, to the Announcement tool to look at the announcements".

[00:58:04]
If you're using the Inbox, then you'll just tell them check the Inbox. So just let students know up front which tools you'll be using and how often you think you'll be, or how often you want them to check those.
>> Kim: Exactly, and the other thing to bear in mind is that if you are going to send out really important announcements and you want your students to be getting those announcements as soon as possible, you may ask them to come in here and set their announcement preferences to "as soon as possible" -- that setting is going to be true for all of their courses, not just yours.

[00:58:39]
You cannot ask them to turn on immediate, right away, notification for announcements just for your course; this is true for all of their Canvas courses. So just something to bear in mind as you consider how important it is and how often you're going to require them to stay in touch with these different methods of contact.

[00:59:00]
All right, so the next thing that we're going to talk about is some other small interesting things that you may need to know, but I want to pause because we are scheduled to go to three fifteen today, but I know a lot of times you'll get into a situation where you really only have just the hour and you might need to take off early, so I'm going to very quickly throw in a link to our webinar evaluation.

[00:59:25]
If you aren't able to stick with us for the next fifteen minutes that we have scheduled, please take just a couple of minutes to fill out that evaluation. That would be super helpful; it really helps us improve our offerings for you and make sure that we get at what you need to know.

[00:59:39]
So I've got that there in the chat, but we're going to come back and we're going to talk a bit about some of those other aspects that I had mentioned earlier, like for example, how to go ahead and personalize this list of tools that's over here on the left.

[00:59:53]
So let me come back to my empty course. And the area that you're going to be looking for is in this list of tools on the left -- by the way, you can collapse that list of tools by clicking on this "hamburger" menu -- I love that, these three lines here, I love looking at it and thinking of hamburgers -- and if you're zoomed in or you're on a mobile device then you might have that list of tools automatically collapsed, so you'll need to find that.

[01:00:18]
If you go to the gradebooks, it automatically collapses, that's to give you as much real estate as possible. What we're looking is at the very bottom of that list of tools, and that is the Settings. And there's all sorts of really helpful things that you can establish and get ready for your course, here from the Settings tool.

[01:00:35]
Typically it defaults right here to Course Details, and so this is a spot where you can go in and you can enable a course grading scheme, you can go in and find more options and do things like choose whether or not students can edit their own discussion posts, or whether or not they can reply to an announcement.

[01:00:56]
So this is something worth exploring; if you have questions don't hesitate to get touch with us or use a Canvas help to get more information. Specifically, though, if we want to personalize this list of tools here on the left, and that's something we highly recommend, we want to click on the Navigation tab.

[01:01:11]
The reason why we recommend that is because there's often a number of tools here that you're not necessarily going to be making use of, or that you're going to be making use of but you don't want your students to get distracted by, and in that case what I would do is either drag them down into this "hide from students" area, or click on this little gear wheel and disable.

[01:01:32]
And so if I want to disable the files tool or the pages tool, because there's really no reason that my students need to go poking around there to look for things, all of the pages or files that I'm using are embedded exactly where they're needed, I can move those down into the "hidden from students" area and that way my students don't get confused by them.

[01:01:53]
If I know I'm not going to be using the Quizzes tool, then I might want to just drag that down and hide that also. It will help clean up this navigation here on the left, make it much easier for students to know "this is something that I am going to need to check on a regular basis" versus "this is a tool that my instructor doesn't expect to be using on a regular basis".

[01:02:15]
There are some neat tools that are available that are disabled down here, and so this is, you can see this is a really long list, so feel free to browse through this and see if there are tools that you might want to make use of that are not currently enabled.

[01:02:31]
If you have questions about any of those, your teaching center, we're the people that you want to contact and say "OK, I see there is a Piazza tool, is that something that I want to make use of?" -- we'll be able to help you with that. Some of the ones that are automatically enabled, things like Kaltura -- great for if you're using video in your class -- but if you're not, you can go ahead and hide those as well.

[01:02:54]
OK, anything else we want to mention while we're here Madeleine?
>> Madeleine: No, Kim, I think getting rid of tools you will not be using, that's a big one.
>> Kim: Make sure you save when you are done!
>> Madeleine: Yes!
>> Kim: Man is that annoying.
>> Madeleine: I guess one other tool, since you're in this area, if you go to the apps tab, [Kim: Yes!] sometimes instructors will want to add a link, so for instance, if you're teaching a foreign language then maybe it's useful to have a dictionary, or ready access to the dictionary, and you want that in the list of tools.

[01:03:28]
Or if there's a news site that you want students to look at very often, you can actually add a link to a URL on the left side, and you're looking for that Redirect tool, that curved blue arrow. And that just allows you to add a new URL to that list of tools.

[01:03:46]

>> Kim: Exactly, and so you just put in whatever that URL is and give it a good logical name, and that's going to appear in that list of tools. Really helpful. So you can just choose to show it in course navigation. OK. And I guess the other things, while we're here in the settings, there are some really helpful tools that show up here on the right.

[01:04:05]
One of my favorites is Student View. Student view does a really neat thing. It not only shows you what your course will look like to your students -- see how clean this looks, isn't that nice? It actually creates a fake account that you can use to turn in assignments, and then turn around as an instructor and practice grading on them and see how they show up.

[01:04:26]
So if you've got an online quiz and you want to make sure that it's looking OK for your students; if you have an assignment and you want to see what that's like for your students -- let's say I've got one assignment that says "not available until August 21st".

[01:04:38]
Well, I want to know, what happens if my students click on it? I can come in as Test Student, and there you go, it's locked down until August 21st. What about homework three? That one's not locked. Well there I go, I can see it as a student. And so what I can do -- of course, remember that was just that shell that we put in, so there's not a whole lot of information -- if it's something that you have open, you can actually submit, and it will, you can look that up in the SpeedGrader, for example, under Test Student.

[01:05:10]
And so that was one of the examples that I said I was going to mention earlier; you can reset your Test Student when you're done, if you want, and maybe you want to go back in and turn in, try something else, you can do that. And then of course, you can leave student view down here at the very bottom.

[01:05:23]
OK, so, let's see, let's come back to the Settings Tool...
>> Madeleine: Kim?
>> Kim: Yes, what else?
>> Madeleine: It occurs to me, two other things: one is, maybe look at the grading scheme, in course details?
>> Kim: Yes.
>> Madeleine: And then we should definitely show people how to get help.

[01:05:37]

>> Kim: OK.
>> Madeleine: Because the help files in Canvas are actually very good.
>> Kim: They really are! All right, so grading scheme, in this particular case I actually have -- and I've gone into settings, and I'm in the course details -- this is something that I would definitely recommend, is enabling a course grading scheme.

[01:05:54]
And the reason why you do that is because otherwise your students' grades will show up as percentages, but they will not know if that 93 is going to be interpreted as an A minus or an A. They won't know if their 98 is still just A, or is that an A+?

[01:06:11]
So these are things that students often want to know, and if you enable the grading scheme, then that will be put into the Grades tool for them and they'll be able to know what grade they have in class, not just what percentage of the grade. And other comments about that, Madeleine?

[01:06:28]

>> Madeleine: Just that you can also create your own grading scheme, so, again, a teaching center consultant would be happy to help you that, but you can customize that in many different ways.
>> Kim: Ok; note that if you have set up a course, maybe you've got a practice site where you're working on how you want things to be organized, you can always use this Settings tool to import content from one Canvas course into another.

[01:06:54]
That could be very, very helpful, especially as you're going from semester to semester; don't reinvent the wheel: import your content. All right so let's take a second to talk about the help, and then if we have time for additional things, then we'll be happy to answer your questions or we can explore a little bit more.

[01:07:12]
So the two that I had mentioned briefly earlier but would like to show you are the Canvas Guides, and Ask the Community. When I click on Search the Canvas Guides, it brings us here and if you're just getting started and you're not one hundred percent sure what you need to do, then you can go in and click on Canvas Guides.

[01:07:28]
Or if you prefer to get training by video, you could click on Video Guide. This is also someplace you can go to send your students if they are unsure about what they need to do in Canvas. Most of them are pretty comfortable but that doesn't mean that it's not useful to know that there is a student guide here as well.

[01:07:47]
Or you can just search, and so if you're like, "OK, I would like to give extra credit; I'm not sure how I want to do that," I can just search the term extra credit and then these guides will come up and let me know in very nice detail exactly what it is that need to do, and in what order and that sort of thing.

[01:08:05]
So those could be super helpful. And then, the other, of course, that I mentioned is "Ask the Community". This is a great place to go if you want to see other questions that other instructors have, or if you just have a question and you're just not sure how to word it.

[01:08:18]
This is a great way to come in here; maybe you just didn't realize that that Conversations meant the messages that come to the Inbox, you can search and say, you know, what is this conversations? Or you are pretty sure you know how to do something, but you're not sure what Canvas calls it, you can search in the Canvas Community and this could be a great way to find those answers.

[01:08:41]
Any other comments about those help resources before we move on, Madeleine?
>> Madeleine: Nope, I think, again, they're very helpful. If you have questions after hours, certainly call the Support Center; otherwise, during business hours, do not hesitate to call your teaching center. We are happy to help you out.

[01:09:01]

>> Kim: Absolutely.
>> Madeleine: But we don't work at two A.M...
>> Kim: [LAUGH] No, no, we do not, but there's even a link if you want to send an e-mail to the UITS Support Center, you can do that, or you can just contact the Support Center directly, which is what I would recommend.

[01:09:16]
So, the other tool that I wanted to show you very briefly, since we have just a couple of minutes, is this Calendar tool. The Calendar tool has some really neat functionality. One of the things -- and I mentioned that it is global -- and so what happens is you can actually look at all of your course calendars at the same time.

[01:09:36]
I don't have anything going on in June; let's come back up to August and September and see if anything pops up here. I can see there's something on the 29th... Are you going to pop up for me? There it is. So here I have my Essay on Roman life that is due on the 29th of September.

[01:09:56]
Now if I want to come and take a look at this, I can't remember exactly which assignment that is, I can click on that name. I can get a quick sense of the instructions; if instructions aren't terribly long I might be able to see all of them. If I need to edit it I can open it from there, I can jump directly to the Course itself or to the assignment if I'm ready to turn it in.

[01:10:15]
The students see the same thing, but let's say for example that I'm looking at this and I'm thinking about my schedule, and I'm like, you know what? I'm a little worried that that's not going to give me enough time to get my grading done. Maybe I want to move that to Saturday.

[01:10:30]
Or maybe I need to turn that in early. Look at this: I can just drag and drop. Now it doesn't just drag and drop here; it drag and drops in the Assignments tool for that course, and it changes the syllabus page, that lower part, all of that gets updated dynamically when you do that.

[01:10:44]
[WHISPERS] I just love that! So there's some really things, including an online scheduler; if you're going to have office hours and you want to sign up, if you want more information about that, again, please don't hesitate to contact us. I know we say this a lot, but there's a reason for that, because Canvas is really rich, it has a lot of tools that can do a lot of things, and so it's just impossible to cover in 75 minutes.

[01:11:06]
And so we just wanted to give you enough of a taste to get you started and then encourage you to come to us if you have additional questions. That said, Madeleine and I are more than happy to stick around for a couple minutes and answer additional questions, show you how to do other fun things like personalize your dashboard or whatever it might be that you need to do.

[01:11:25]
Otherwise if you would take just a minute or two and fill out that webinar evaluation form, you'll find a link in the chat, that would be super helpful for us. All right, Madeleine, anything else you want to add as we round out the 75 minutes?
>> Madeleine: I just want to point out I've posted a Canvas@IU PDF in the chat, so that's a document that hopefully can help you as you go home and you're wondering, now, what am I supposed to do next?

[01:11:55]
That document actually takes you through some of the most important points that we made today and helps you set up your course. So have a look for that in the chat room and thank you, and yes, as Kim said, that we could probably spend days talking about Canvas.

[01:12:11]

>> Kim: Can, and have!
>> Madeleine: [LAUGH] Yes, and have! So there are many other tools available, so that's why it's really helpful for you to come to the teaching center, and if you have an idea of what you're interested in doing, we can help you figure out some of the most efficient way to do it, that will work both for you and for your students and not cause too many grading nightmares for you.

[01:12:31]
So, we are very interested in making your life more efficient, let's put it that way.
>> Kim: Yes, we are; and also making working with technology easier and less frustrating, so if we can help, please let us know. All right, we're happy to answer other questions; otherwise I want to go ahead and turn off the recording.

[01:12:50]
Thank you for joining us today and we hope you are excited to get started in Canvas, or, if you are someone has used Canvas, that you have learned something that will make your life easier in the future. Thanks.