Canvas Newsletter - October 2016
Last Moderated Teaching with Canvas Training for the Year
New Teaching with Canvas (Canvas Course #6) will begin on November 7. This will be the last moderated Canvas training for the semester. If you would like to enroll in this 4-week long workshop or have questions about it, contact Cynthia Alexander.
Discussion Forum Setting
It was recently brought to our attention that a default setting for Discussions may cause some problems. The setting is “Let students create discussion topics” which is set automatically as “checked”. This setting allows students to create their own topics rather than “replying” to a topic you have set up. When students do this, their postings will not show up in the SpeedGrader and you will need to manually grade each posting. It is recommended that you go into your Canvas course, select Settings and then at the bottom of the page, select More options. Remove the checkmark in front of “Let students create discussion topics” and click on the “Update Course Details” button.
Submit a Feature Idea
Under the Help button in Canvas is a “Submit a Feature Idea” link. Using this link, you can suggest improvements to Canvas and those will be posted to the Canvas Community for voting. You can go there to add an idea, vote for an idea, and view ideas that are currently in production. One idea that a Cerritos College instructor asked me about last summer was having a “word count” feature for student submissions. I noticed that this was an idea submitted last May by someone else and after the voting period closed, it had 114 “yes” votes. I’m happy to report that this feature is now in production.
Speaking of Cerritos College instructors, Chris Wilson suggested a feature idea a couple of weeks ago and the voting for that feature will open on November 2. His feature idea is to have the ability to download all of one specific student’s uploads from multiple modules. I encourage you to support Chris’s idea by going to https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/7202 and voting for it.
Bring Your Canvas Questions to “Tool Tips”
There will be two “Tool Tips” workshops offered in the CTX in November on Tuesday, November 8 and 22 from 1:30 until 3:00. Rather than concentrate on specific Canvas tools, we encourage you to bring your “how to” questions.
For more information please contact: TNfacultyhelp@cerritos.edu.
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