Canvas Tips and Tricks to Make Your Life Easier

Communication

In addition to the Canvas Inbox messaging tool, you can consider the following ways to communicate with students: 

• Instructor to whole class: Send out an announcement when you want to communicate with the whole class (Guide Links to an external site.). The default Canvas notification setting will allow students to receive the announcement message in their default email they set up in their notifications. Consider video announcement or delay post to be sent out on a specific date. Increase visibility of your announcements by enabling Show recent announcements on Course home page (Guide Links to an external site.).
• Instructor to a group of students(or individual) based on specific course criteria:  You can use the Gradebook to send messages to your students using Message students who feature based on specific assignment categories: Haven't submitted yet, Haven't been graded, Scored less than [point value], Scored more than [point value]  (Guide Links to an external site.). You can also enable New Analytics feature and send a message to students whose grades or submissions are among three specific analytics criterion: grades are within a specific percentage range, assignments are missing, or assignments are late (Guide Links to an external site.).
• Instructor-student and student-student communication through Canvas discussion board. Consider using Q&A or Help forum which reduces the amount of time instructors are required to spend answering questions multiple times. Consider using Group Discussions especially if you have a large class. It's an effective way to encourage students who are reserved and shy to actively participate as they feel comfortable knowing the discussions are within their small group, rather than the whole class (Guide Links to an external site.).
• Use the Canvas-Zoom integration from course navigation menu to schedule lectures, office hours and meetings from within Canvas (Guide Links to an external site.). Your students can also access Zoom directly from the Canvas navigation menu.
• Use the Calendar Scheduler tool to create appointment group with a block of time for student appointment (Guide). 

Content Management and Organizations

• Bulk upload files to your Canvas course: If you have a lot of files to add to your course, you can bulk upload them (Guide Links to an external site.).
• Setting a prerequisite on a module:  When you have more than one module, you can set one module as prerequisite so that a student must complete the first module in order to access the next module (Guide Links to an external site.). 
• Add requirements to a module: You can require students to complete all requirements in the module, or have them choose one item to fulfill a specific requirement. So students will have a visual cue (e.g., mark as done) of the items need to be completed in the module. (Guide Links to an external site.)
• Duplicate module items: You can duplicate assignments, graded discussions, and pages within a module (Guide Links to an external site.).
• Create a Course Resources module for items that don’t fit in a week/topic theme. Modules usually can be organized by week or by topic. Consider to creating a resources module to put additional resources or items hard to fit anywhere else.
• Hide unnecessary course navigation items to keep your course navigation clean: If you only want students to access course content from Modules, you can consider hiding assignments, files, and discussions from the navigation menu. (Guide Links to an external site.)
• Use Student View to see how your students view assignments, discussions, quizzes, and other areas of Canvas (Guide). 
• Use Course Link Validator to verify all external links throughout your course to ensure they are valid (Guide).
• Use the Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor to check common accessibility errors (Guide Links to an external site.).
• Request additional Canvas practice courses through Custom Course Request Links to an external site.. Using a sandbox practice course minimizes any potentially major issues that may occur during course building and guarantees that your students cannot gain access to anything that you don't want them to view during the course building process. You can copy course content from sandbox course into your live course when you are ready(Guide Links to an external site.).

 

Assignments, Quizzes, and Grading

• Due dates lead to students' to-do list. So put a due date for any graded assignment.
• Create No Submission assignments like presentations, and put a due date.
• Bulk update assignment due dates and availability (Guide Links to an external site.) 
• You can weight the final course grade based on assignment groups (Guide)
• Use the grade posting policy to hide or release the grades (Guide Links to an external site.).
• Use Turnitin external tool LTI option as Turnitin will eventually phase out the Turnitin "enable" integration method (Guide). 
• Moderate Quiz to grant students extra attempts, grant extra time for timed quizzes, and manually unlock quiz attempts (Guide Links to an external site.)
• Use Question banks to house questions that can be added to quizzes in Canvas courses (Guide) Then create a quiz with a question group linked to a question bank student will get a specified number of questions, pulled from the bank at random.
• Find right tool to ensure Academic Integrity in Online Courses.  Links to an external site.Tool options- TurnitIn, Canvas Quiz setting, Lockdown browser, Lockdown browser monitor, Proctorio, and Proctor U.
• Chrome is the most stable browser for SpeedGrader, with the voice-to-text feature to turn your spoken comments into text comments (Guide). 
• Use the Canvas Teacher App as alternative grading option. The app provides a To-do list and easy interface for assignment grading (Guide Links to an external site.).