Tag Archives: Canvas

Updates to Cisco Webex in Canvas

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On Monday, December 27, 2021, Cisco released updates to the Webex Education Connector in Canvas that redesign the Office Hours experience for both instructors and students.

Instructor experience

Instructors now have a clearer view of their office hours settings and availability. In the Weekly Hours tab, instructors configure their weekly availability by setting their preferred meeting duration, meeting buffer, date range, time zone, days of availability, and hours of availability.

A Date range selector has been added that allows instructors to define a consecutive period of time for students to book office hours. Only dates within the date range indicated will be shown to students when scheduling. This provides the flexibility to restrict future bookings to a term, semester, or other time-defined period. In addition, instructors can modify their availability for a specific date without needing to update their general office hours availability, making it possible to reduce their availability on a date, increase their availability on a date, or mark themselves unavailable for an entire date.

The time zone selector allows instructors to set their preferred time zone for office hours meetings. This provides clarity and consistency for students when scheduling meetings. The default time zone for office hours is based on the time zone in the course where an instructor first enables office hours. If instructors are located in a different time zone, they can update the time zone for all their office hours.

Student experience

Students must now first select their instructor before available time slots are displayed, making it clear with which instructor a student is scheduling time.

For directions on how to set-up and use Webex Office Hours in your Canvas course, please see Setting Up Online Office Hours in Canvas (Instructors). Instructors may wish to share Scheduling Online Office Hours with your Instructor in Canvas with their students as an easy tutorial on how to use this feature.

If you have any questions or concerns about this update, please contact the UW-W Learning Technology Center.

Professional Development Opportunities

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This winter, the Learning Technology Center staff looks forward to providing professional development opportunities for instructional and non-instructional staff on a wide variety of topics.

Please view all of our workshops and the dates they will be offered.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Multiple sessions on different topics related to Canvas, Webex, HyFlex/Video Enabled Classrooms, and general campus technologies will help you learn new skills, enhance your use of technology, and implement new strategies.

If you have any questions, please contact the Learning Technology Center.

UDOIT Course Accessibility Checker Available!

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We are excited to announce the immediate availability of the UDOIT tool inside of your Canvas courses! UDOIT (Universal Design Online content Inspection Tool) is a cloud based tool designed to identify accessibility concerns and provide improvement suggestions for your Canvas courses.

The tool can be accessed by clicking UDOIT Cloud on the course navigation menu inside of your Canvas course.

Additional details on how to utilize the tool are located at: Canvas (Accessibility) – Using the UDOIT Cloud Accessibility Tool.

We will also be offering 30 minute training courses which will demonstrate how to use the tool in your Canvas courses. Workshop information is listed below.

EVENT NAMEDATE/TIMELOCATIONREGISTER
Creating Accessible Canvas Courses with UDOITThursday, October 15th
1:00pm – 1:30pm		WebexRegistration
Creating Accessible Canvas Courses with UDOITFriday, October 16th
11:00am – 11:30am		WebexRegistration
Creating Accessible Canvas Courses with UDOITMonday, October 19th
10:00am – 10:30am		WebexRegistration
Creating Accessible Canvas Courses with UDOITTuesday, October 20th
3:00pm – 3:30pm		WebexRegistration

If you have any questions about these sessions, please reach out to the UW-W Learning Technology Center.

Canvas Update (1/18/2020)

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Vendor Updates

On Saturday, January 18, 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.

  • Direct Share Course-Level Features: Instructors can copy individual course items to another course and share individual items with other users.
  • Personal Pronoun feature description: Users can select pronouns to associate with their account in Canvas. The initial set of options will be: He/His, She/Hers, They/Theirs.
  • Postable Submission Comments: Assignments with the “Manual” Posting Policy will now be able to have Comments posted for students to see before entering a grade.
  • New Quizzes – Answer Shuffling: Instructors using the “New Quizzes” tool will now be able to shuffle answers on multiple choice, multiple answer, and matching quiz questions.
    • Please note that “New Quizzes” is still in Beta and UW-Whitewater recommends the use of the standard quizzing tool.
  • Rich Content Editor Update: Instructors can start using the Rich Content Editor update early by enabling it in their settings area. Instructure plans to make the updates on by default in a future update.

UW-Whitewater Updates

Winterim 2020 grades are due 4:00pm, Tuesday January 21. Directions for eGrading are available for instructors who wish to use this process.

Remember to Publish your courses. Spring 2020 courses start Tuesday January 21. It is important to remember that students will be unable to enter the course, and instructors will be unable to us the Inbox to message students until the course is published.

If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.

Planned Maintenance Outage – Sunday 1/12

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There are two planned outages happening on Sunday, 1/12 that will impact a number of services including Canvas.

  • On Sunday, January 12th between 12:00 AM (midnight) at 8:00 AM, DoIT in Madison will be performing scheduled Network Maintenance. During this window, there may be periods of time where services are not available. This may impact some Canvas and Kaltura logins, as well as other services listed in the DoIT announcement.
  • On Sunday, January 12th between 12:00 AM (midnight) and 1:00 AM, Instructure will be performing maintenance on the Quizzes tool in Canvas. During this window, there may be periods of time where quizzes are not available.

If you have any questions, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.

What’s New in Canvas? (12/21/2019)

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On Saturday, December 21, 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 Announcements: The notifications area for each user now includes a space to set how you would like to receive notifications about a new Global Announcement being posted by Administrators.
  • New Quizzes – Numeric Question Invalid Input Warning: If a quiz question is set up to only accept the Numeric Question, a warning for an invalid entry will pop up if a student attempts to enter an invalid character. The warning should say “only numeric values are accepted”.
    • Please note that “New Quizzes” is still in Beta and UW-Whitewater recommends the use of the standard quizzing tool.

On Wednesday, January 1st, the New Analytics tool will be set to “On” for all of UW-System, making the Old Analytics tool unavailable. For details on the differences, Instructure has made documentation available.

Office 365 / Google Collaborations are now working as expected in Canvas. If you experience any issues using Collaborations, please contact Canvas 24/7 Support.

If you have any questions or concerns about the service pack updates, please contact UW-W Canvas Support.

Canvas Workshops – Fall 2019

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During the Fall 2019 Semester, the LTC will be offering opportunities to work on and learn about Canvas features.  For self guided assistance, please view the Canvas Service Page.

Canvas Open Lab 
We will be available to answer your Canvas questions during the sessions below! Whether you are working on your current course, or planning for the future – stop on by!

Date/Time Location Register
Tuesday, October 8th
8:00am – 10:00am		 McGraw 19c, Whitewater Campus In-Person Registration
Wednesday, October 16th
Noon – 4:00pm		 Williams 29, Rock Campus In-Person Registration
Wednesday, October 23rd
2:00pm – 4:00pm		 McGraw 19b, Whitewater Campus In-Person Registration
Tuesday November 5th
1:00pm – 3:00pm		 McGraw 19c, Whitewater Campus In-Person Registration
Wednesday, November 13th
8:00am – Noon		 Williams 29, Rock Campus In-Person Registration
Wednesday, November 20th
10:00am – Noon		 McGraw 19b, Whitewater Campus In-Person Registration
Tuesday, December 3rd
Noon – 4:00pm		 Williams 29, Rock Campus In-Person Registration
Wednesday, December 4th
1:00pm – 3:00pm		 McGraw 19b, Whitewater Campus In-Person Registration

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.

  • Groups: This training will discuss what the toolis, how it differs from what we are use to in D2L, when it should be used, and when it shouldn’t be used.
  • 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.
Event Name Date/Time Location Register
Groups Monday, October 7th
9:00am – 10:00am		 McGraw 19c, Whitewater Campus In-Person Registration
Webex Tools Monday, November 18th
9:00am – 10:00am		 McGraw 19c, Whitewater Campus In-Person Registration

If you have any questions about these sessions, please reach out to the UW-W Learning Technology Center.