On Saturday, February 20, Instructure will deploy the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notes are also available.
Courses – MathJax Equation Enhancements & Text Field LaTeX Characters: LaTeX equations can be entered in any Canvas text field, and MathJax is loaded if Canvas detects an equation image added by delimited LaTeX characters.
Rich Content Editor – Pretty HTML Editor: The Rich Content Editor includes a pretty HTML editor in addition to the raw HTML editor.
Can’t join at scheduled times? No problem, email ltc@uww.edu to request a personal or department session. Links to previously recorded sessions are also often available.
Don’t see a session on something you’d like to learn? Let us know! We look forward to meeting your needs as best we can — email ltc@uww.edu with your request. And, don’t forget, LinkedIn Learning offers on-demand classes on many topics!
Instructional Workshops:
Engaging Students in Online Courses:An interactive, collaborative workshop where participants will actively problem-solve struggles with engagement in online courses.
Online Teaching Institute: Faculty and full-time instructional staff are encouraged to apply for this asynchronous course designed to align quality course design with best practices in online teaching.
Exploring Impacts of Digital Transformation on Higher Education Series
On Saturday, January 16, Instructure will deploy the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notes are also available.
Notifications – Push Notification Types end of Life: When users open their Notification Preferences page or notifications in a Canvas app, Push notifications are only supported for specific notification categories. Users can adjust their notification preferences by setting up additional supported communication channels.
Settings – Feature Option Management: The buttons to manage feature flags at the account, course, and user levels have been updated in design and functionality. This change aligns design consistency with other areas of Canvas (specifically the Permissions page) and allows admins to better manage subaccount- and course-level feature defaults.
UW-Whitewater Updates
New Rich Content Editor: The New Rich Content Editor is an update to the previous Canvas Rich Content Editor. It provides a condensed, more intuitive toolbar that is grouped by common icons and interactions. We will be enabling the New Rich Content Editor on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020. For additional details or training schedule, please see our post.
Flash – End of Life: Beginning in January of 2021, the Adobe Flash Player has been uninstalled from campus devices. Previously, in July of 2017, Adobe announced that the Flash Player will no longer be distributed or updated after December 31, 2020. Additional information can be found on the Adobe Flash Player EOL General Information Page. We have details available to help you identify if this will impact you.
Respondus LockDown Browser – Chromebook compatibility: Chromebooks will soon be able to launch Respondus LockDown Browser, enabling their use for monitored quizzing across campus. More information to come soon!
There are many good ways to set up a Canvas course, but how can you know which things students want in every one of their courses? Well, to help you the LTC asked them! Based on multiple student panels, here are the most common requests for your Canvas course:
When deciding between timely feedback and deep feedback, choose timely.
Keep grades up to date, including entering 0s.
While each of these require additional work, none of them are outside of your reach. The recording below will walk you through making adjustments in Canvas to address the first four points.
Students understand their instructors can feel crunched for time, just like they do. When this occurs they’ve found that timely feedback best helps their progress through the course. They asked that if you are put into a position where you need to choose between providing timely feedback versus deep feedback, that you choose timely. Too often, by the time they received feedback on an assessment they had already moved on to the next lessons, building on a foundation they later found out isn’t as solid as they thought.
Keeping grades up to date ties in with providing timely feedback. Students want to know how they are doing, and when each instructor handles their grades differently, it means the only system that is going to feel intuitive to your students is an up-to-date grades area. This includes entering 0’s for any assignment that counts against their final grade. As a benefit, entering 0’s by setting a default grade at the time the assignment is being graded means less work for you.
On Saturday, December 19, Instructure deployed the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notes are also available.
Student View Changes: The “Student View” button has been removed from the homepage and has been re-added as an Icon to the top right bar of most Canvas screens inside of the course.This change allows instructors to access Student View quicker.
New Rich Content Editor – Upload Media File Placement: Newly recorded media and upload media is stored in the Course or User Files folder, according to user role, to ensure that users can reuse media. Previously, newly recorded and uploaded media could not be repurposed without being exported as part of course content.
People – Group Import CSV File: The Groups area within “People” will allow for CSV imports to create and assign currently enrolled users to Groups. This will be especially useful for instructors that have created groups in external tools and want to reproduce them in a course.
UW-Whitewater Updates
New Rich Content Editor: The New Rich Content Editor is an update to the previous Canvas Rich Content Editor. It provides a condensed, more intuitive toolbar that is grouped by common icons and interactions. We will be enabling the New Rich Content Editor on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020. For additional details or training schedule, please see our post.
Flash – End of Life: Beginning in January of 2021, the Adobe Flash Player will be uninstalled from campus devices. Previously, in July of 2017, Adobe announced that the Flash Player will no longer be distributed or updated after December 31, 2020. Additional information can be found on the Adobe Flash Player EOL General Information Page. We have details available to help you identify if this will impact you.
Each semester, grades need to be entered into WINS. While many instructors do this manually, Canvas can help automate some of the steps for you. The Learning Technology Center is providing training on the three steps needed to push grades from Canvas so they can be accepted in WINS.
The Fall 2020 WINS Grades Roster will be open on December 14 and close at noon on December 22. We have scheduled 60 minute hands on training sessions if you are interested in receiving live support.
Have you moved past the basics of how to get content into Canvas, and looking for a simple way to improve the learning experience for your students? The LTC will be offering synchronous trainings to go with our new asynchronous, self-paced resource designed to help instructors take lengthy modules, and turn them into sleek pages.
Not only is the content of the course about how to create more engaging pages, it also demonstrates simple steps you can take to do this with your own courses, by showing the transition from a typical course design to one based on a more dynamic page.
We have scheduled 60 minute training sessions if you are interested in receiving a live version of the materials offered above.
On Saturday, October 17, Instructure will deploy the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notes are also available.
Global Navigation – Recent History: The Global Navigation Menu includes a Recent History link, which displays recently visited pages in Canvas. This change helps users remember what page they last viewed in one or multiple courses.
Notifications – Notification Preferences Interface: The user-level Notifications page has been updated to match the design of the course-level Notifications page. Additional enhancements have been added to clarify notifications between each level..
MathJax Equation Improvements: The MathJax JS library has been improved to render equations in a more accessible format and promote ease of use. Math equations created anywhere in Canvas will be rendered as MathML. This change improves accessibility for equations throughout Canvas. Previously, equations were treated as an image and included title attributes and alternative text and were not available to keyboard users. Additionally, image views varied by browser and screen readers, equations could not be copied, and alternative text could be inadvertently changed or removed.
UW-Whitewater Updates
UDOIT Course Accessibility Checker is now available. The tool is designed to identify accessibility concerns and provide suggestions for improving course accessibility. There is an introduction and instructions for use available through the UW-System KB, and UWW trainings are available.
On Saturday, August 15, Instructure will deploy the latest release to the Canvas environment. The highlights of this release are listed below. The full release notes are also available.
Assignments – Bulk Editing Enhancements: The Edit Assignment Dates page will now allow you to select multiple assignments, batch edit dates, and will warn Teachers if the Start and End dates conflict with the Due Date. This should allow for faster date management of courses.
Pages – Bulk Page Delete: Multiple pages can be deleted at one time in the Pages Index. This allows outdated content to be removed more quickly.
People – Course Section Column Student Visibility: The course section column can be hidden from students in the People page when more than one section is in the course. This will prevent student from viewing the sections of other student in the same course.
User Navigation – Global Announcements Page: The User Navigation Menu includes a link to Global Announcements, which displays current and recent announcements for the institution. This will allow users to view announcements that were previously dismissed from the Dashboard.
During the Summer of 2020, the Learning Technology Center (LTC) will be offering opportunities to learn the Canvas basics, make simple changes to your courses to improve the student experience, and to dig deeper into Canvas features. For self guided assistance, please view the Canvas Service Page.
Canvas Basics Whether you are brand new to Canvas, or just want to brush up on the basics, this training will put you on the right path. We will focus on
Creating a new Module
Adding files to Modules
Adding Assignments to Modules
Setting up your gradebook
What Students Want in Canvas There are many good ways to set up a course. This training will focus on making a series of small, easy, and optional, shifts from your current course design to a setup backed by feedback from student panels conducted right here at UW-Whitewater. We will focus on
Matching your Assignments and Grades area to your course syllabus
Reorganizing Modules to a chronological layout
Getting assignments and tasks populated to student calendars
Utilizing the description area of Quizzes and Assignments
The goal is not to change how you teach, just how students view the course.
Canvas Deep Dives (1 Hour) We will focus on a single tool, and dive deep into various options and use cases for how that tool works.
Quizzes: This will touch on different question types, building in targeted feedback in auto-graded quizzes, and most likely spend the bulk of the time in the Question Bank area to help instructors get a feel for Canvas Question Bank.
Assignments: We will focus on tasks such as creating a place for students to digitally turn in work, and setting up your gradebook.
Discussions: We will look at setup (including threaded vs unthreaded), visibility, the lack of a “Forum” in Canvas (compared to how D2L had it), group setup, and grading.
Webex Tools: Webex is usable through Canvas, but does take some initial setup there. If you are interested in using Webex for your classes, this is the workshop for you.
