If you are teaching Summer Session be aware that this change will be enforced on July 20, 2024. You may want to opt in to the change using the feature options area of your course prior to the session starting that encompasses this date so the change isn’t abrupt.
Here is the specific feature you will want to enable if you want to opt in prior to Summer Session:
If you have questions please contact the Center for Teaching and Learning – ctl@mesacc.edu or 480-461-7331
If you are not teaching Summer Session for 2024, but are assigned a course load for Fall 2024 you will see that the change will have already been turned on after you come back to campus. You may also wish to engage the feature if you are setting up your Fall 2024 Canvas shells prior to leaving for the summer break.
To our teaching and learning community who have stuck with the online assessment process:
You may have had students in the past who purchased their own Chromebook in lieu of a traditional Windows PC Laptop or macOS laptop simply because of the cost savings when being told that online learning at MCC was a requirement due to the campus being shut down in March 2020. When it came time for them to take a high-stakes exam, you may have elected to use Respondus Lockdown Browser + Monitor in Canvas.
In the past, personally owned Chromebooks were not supported, so your students would have had to borrow a device that Respondus Lockdown Browser officially supported or come to campus to use a computer that was supported.
We are pleased to announce that after a relatively short beta testing period, that personally-owned Chromebooks are now natively supported for Respondus Lockdown Browser + Monitor. There is nothing you need to do to specifically enter the Chromebook setting in the Lockdown Browser Canvas interface. Chromebooks just work now. Hooray!
Now that Fall Semester 2020 is over, you may have some questions about how the Canvas Grade Book is organized. Importing assignments and adding new assignments ad hoc may have you and your students scratching their heads on what grade they are going to be awarded in their transcripts. Let the CTL experts show you how to organize everything for the optimal student experience. There will be a total of 4 sessions on these dates and times:
Monday Dec 7, 2020 at 10:30am Monday Dec 7, 2020 at 2:30pm
Wednesday Dec 9, 2020 at 10:30am Wednesday Dec 9, 2020 at 2:30pm
Hosted by James Bowles and Jeffrey Anderson
All sessions will be conducted via Webex via this link: https://maricopa.webex.com/meet/jbowles1. Just pick a session from those listed above and click on the Webex link to join.
This video will also give you an additional overview of Canvas Quizzes.
Tips for online quizzes
The following tips can help you and your students be successful in completing and submitting online quizzes.
Create a low-stakes quiz to allow students to practice accessing quizzes and become familiar with the quiz interface. Check out the student guide for Taking an online quiz.
Setup a practice quiz to give your students an opportunity to check their knowledge on a topic. This type of quiz can be attempted multiple times. The practice quiz can show the correct answers after completion and guide students back to course content for additional learning.
Setup a graded quiz with a finite number of attempts for exams. You can also set a time limit for the exam to be completed.
Consider enabling the display one question at a time option for exams that build off previous questions.
Use a variety of question types (multiple choice, short answer, matching, etc.)
Be sure to check your questions for clarity, spelling, and grammar issues.
You can provide accommodations for students by using the Moderate this quiz button.
You can learn more about the many things you can do with online quizzes in Canvas by visiting the Canvas Instructor Guides.
Welcome to Masterpiece Canvas! In this episode we’ll be learning why accepting assignments online can be a valuable tool for us and how to setup your assignment in Canvas.
Accepting assignments online benefit us in the following ways:
Assignments are turned in to a single location.
The Learning Management System (LMS) manages due dates and flags late work.
The LMS automatically identifies the assignment author.
This video will also give you an additional overview of Canvas Assignments.
Tips for online assignments
The following tips can help you and your students be successful in completing and submitting online assignments.
Create a low-stakes assignment to allow students to practice submitting an assignment. Check out the student guide for submitting online assignments.
Be consistent with assignment naming and include academic language. For example Assignment 1: Informative Speech or Assignment 2: Persuasive Speech.
Be consistent with the assignment instructions. Include a description of the assignment and your expectations for full credit. A bulleted list is a very clear way to approach this.
Don’t put due dates in the assignment title nor the assignment instructions. Canvas has an additional field dedicated to the due date and will automatically notify students when assignments are approaching their due date.
Provide ample time for students to complete the assignment in a potentially new modality. This may be the first time your students are submitting an assignment online.
Consider permitting various forms of assignment submission like file uploads and video submission.
You can learn more about the many things you can do with online assignments in Canvas by visiting the Canvas Instructor Guides.
Welcome to a new semester. If you’ve been away from Canvas we’ve got a summarized list of what may be new to you when you return to getting your course content put together:
Module DuplicationPreviously, course content items could only be duplicated individually. With the recent Modules update, instructors can duplicate entire modules. If your module has a quiz in it the module cannot be duplicated. How Do I Duplicate a Module?
Section Specific AnnouncementsInstructors can now create section-specific announcements in their courses. When creating an announcement, instructors can select to send the announcement to all sections, one section, or multiple sections. How Do I Create a Section-Specific Announcement?
Section Specific DiscussionsInstructors now have the ability to invite specific sections to view and participate in a discussion so it can be focused to the right audience. How Do I Assign a Graded Discussion to a Course Section?
Inactive Role – (This behavior will begin Aug 25th) Statement from DO ITS: “Title IV Reporting Improvements (Last Day of Attendance) – ITS and the Office of the General Counsel’s Compliance division, with input from faculty and staff from around the district, developed an application that will assist faculty in reporting more accurate Last Day of Attendance(LDA) dates to the student information system (SIS). This allows for accurate reporting of Title IV funding to the federal government and reduces financial audits at the college and district levels. The system will query Maricopa’s online learning management studio presenting appropriate options to faculty and will launch the beginning of August – prior to the start of the fall semester.” To support last day of attendance and other operational issues regarding student activity not being available when a student has a withdrawn status in SIS, they have been getting deleted on the Canvas side.The DO ITS team in charge of SIS->Canvas interface has decided to make use of the inactive status in Canvas with the SIS interface so that students who are withdrawn will not have access to their Canvas course but their data will still remain in the course.Faculty will likely notice this in two areas of the course:
The people tab. All students who have ever enrolled in the course will always display here so this will make the list longer than it has in the past. This first semester is an introduction to this method and you may receive calls for support about the inactive tag showing up in the people tab or instructors wanting information about dropped students.
Here’s another institution’s description of the purpose and effect:
Stacking Replies in DocviewerWhen users view comments for a DocViewer-supported document, comments with replies are stacked together. The number of replies is indicated for the comment thread. Users can click the first comment to expand and view all additional comments.
Stacked replies is now in DocViewer
Badgr is the official Canvas badging solution supported by Instructure. Look for special communication about using Badges in your Canvas courses.
We are pleased to inform you that the UDOIT Canvas accessibility inspection tool is now available to scan and address accessibility issues within your Canvas course!
Please review the following resources to assist you in accessing and using UDOIT to improve the accessibility of your courses:
As always, contact us with any questions you may have and we will be happy to assist.
What is UDOIT?
The Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool, or UDOIT (pronounced, “You Do It”) enables faculty to identify accessibility issues in Canvas. It will scan a course, generate a report, and provide resources on how to address common accessibility issues.
What does it do?
UDOIT will identify “errors” and provide “suggestions” in the following areas of your course:
Announcements
Assignments
Discussions
Files (i.e., .html files)
Pages
Syllabus
Module URLs
It will check for the appropriate use of the following:
As you may be aware, there have been integration issues between Canvas and Turnitin® since mid-October, 2015. Neither Instructure nor Turnitin® have been able to fully resolve these issues due to the use of an older, soon-to-be deprecated, integration. To improve and stabilize this service, we are removing the old integration effective May 18. The new Turnitin® LTI integration gives Canvas users full access to all Turnitin® functionality (OriginalityCheck™, GradeMark and PeerMark) and ensures we will be able to utilize new features and fixes as they are released for the product.
What does this mean to you? You will need to download any originality reports you wish to keep before May 18, as you will lose access to them once the old integration is removed. You will need to re-configure assignments for Summer and Fall 2016 courses to use the new integration anytime before or after May 18. Follow this guide for step-by-step instructions.
If you have any questions contact the CTL via email: ctl@mesacc.edu or phone: 480-461-7331
