Boundless Learning Canvas Guide

Canvas Navigation

Canvas Homepage: Global Navigation (Left-Side Panel)

Getting Help

The “Help” option on the left-side panel of Canvas does NOT contain the Boundless Learning 24/7 tech support that directly supports your courses. Remember, this tech support is only offered to programs managed by the Boundless Learning/Institution partnership.

Where can you find Tech Support?

• In your “Getting Started” or “Start Here” pages of your course (usually found on your course homepage)
• At the bottom of your course homepage labeled “24/7 Helpdesk.”
• In your course syllabus

How do I use Tech Support?

• The toll-free number is a direct line to a support agent for any problem you’re having with content, Canvas, Zoom, or other third-party tool in your course. During peak times and early in the semester there may be a short wait.
• The Helpdesk homepage should contain an Ask a question area, a FAQ area, and a triaging tool at the bottom containing:
  • Live Chat (keyboard-based chat with a support agent)
  • Submit a Ticket (a form-based system to identify a course issue)
  • Call Us (the toll-free number used to talk to a support agent 24/7)
• Both students and instructors can use Tech Support
• Section instructors should notify lead instructors of issues they are facing before submitting a ticket
• Emergency issues that directly affect student performance should be called-in and the lead instructor should be notified immediately

Communication

Announcements

• Announcements are the main way to communicate with the whole class as email should be used to communicate with individual students.
• 1-3 posts per week minimum is a general rule of thumb

The Post to Area

• If you are teaching more than one section, choosing the correct section to post your announcement is key. This will ensure that only one section receives the announcement and not all other sections:
  • Go to the Post to section of Announcements.
  • If posting to all sections, leave the All Sections button enabled.
  • If only posting to one section or multiple, cancel the All Sections button and click the bar to open up a list of other sections to choose from. Then, choose the section that corresponds to the course you are assigned.
• How do you know you’ve posted to a section and not the whole class? Every announcement will say either All Sections or the number of sections you posted to:

Options: Delay Posting

This is a great tool because it allows instructors to create announcements that will show for a later date.

Syllabus

Besides the regular course-specific information, the syllabus should contain a Course Summary list at the bottom of the page with all activities and their respective due dates. These dates will also appear on both the global and course calendars. If an activity or deadline is not listed here, be sure to use the Calendar activity to add it.

Assignments

The Assignments page lists all graded activities and all non-graded activities that have deadlines in your course. This includes all assignments, discussions, quizzes, and more. Grading weights are provided on the far-right side for each category, as well as due dates and grade values. Both students and instructors can use this page for each access activity access.

Discussions

	Use this icon to determine how many read and unread posts have been made to a discussion.
	Click this icon to subscribe to the discussion. This will force Canvas to send you an email to your institutional inbox every time a new message is posted. Review your Notifications options in your Canvas Profile to adjust these settings.

The Rich Content Editor

The Canvas text editor allows an instructor to post text, images, video, and other media directly to students at any time. It would be helpful to review the Canvas Guides resources on using the Rich Content Editor to its fullest capability.

Tips for Using the Editor:

Icon	Tip
	If you copy text from an external source (website, document, etc.) use the Clear formatting button to ensure the text appears properly to students.
	Sharing URLs and links to websites is a common way for instructors to engage students. You can even share specific pages from a Canvas course like an assignment, content page, or quiz. Be sure to label your link properly so students know what they are about to click.
	Using images found online is a great way to enhance discussions, announcements, or feedback. Use this handy icon in Canvas to integrate the image into a response from a file you’ve saved to your computer.
	Like images, other types of media can really enhance communication. Use the media icon to either upload existing media from your computer or create your own podcast-style audio recording or webcam recording for your students. They love hearing and seeing you!
	Use the Attach button to add attachments to your responses.
	The first icon collapses all discussion posts so you can easily tell who started a discussion. The second expands all collapsed discussion posts.

Managing Groups

Many courses have group assignments that require the instructor to not only grade and evaluate a group’s performance but also to divide students within their course into their own private group. The method is easy and should be done before students are active or within the first few days of a course being live.

Note: All groupings and groups will be created by your Boundless Learning partnership. Instructors will only be responsible for putting individual students into specific groups.

Disclaimer: It’s imperative that you move students into their groups before they start to work on their projects and group work. Canvas will not allow you to move students into groups once they start to post discussions or submit assignments and this can severely disrupt grading and organization.

To Add Students to a Group

1. Click People from the left-side menu. You will see all members of your course including Instructors and Students.
2. Look to the top of the screen and note the project group names. Click the grouping you wish to use.
   
3. On the left-side panel you will see all available students. On the right-side panel you will see all available groups. Simple click and drag a student from the left side to the group of your choosing. The students are then loaded into a group that has their own mini communication area along with a discussion board.
   

Grading

Grading a Discussion

Grading a discussion occurs in the same way as grading an assignment or quiz: through the SpeedGrader application. It’s very important that you learn how to use this application because it affects all grading components of an online course.

To Grade a Discussion:

1. Click the vertical three dots in the top-right corner of your discussion screen and click the SpeedGrader link.
   
2. The screen you will see will show you ONLY the posts made by the selected student from the top-right corner of the SpeedGrader screen. This screen lacks the context of a full discussion with multiple student’s participation, but it helps instructors to evaluate the entirety of a student’s contributions, albeit out of context. Click “view the full discussion” to see all discussion posts.
   

Important Note:

If your institution uses nested sections (all sections of a course are accessed via one course link), instructors will first need to select their section from the same top-right pull-down menu where student names are found. This same process must be followed for all graded work in the SpeedGrader tool. See the image below:

Assessing Students in Discussions, Quizzes, and Assignments

Top-Left Menu

1. Grades (Door with Checkmark): Click this icon to go directly to the Gradebook
2. Show/Hide Grades (Eye): Click this icon to hide all grades or show all grades. This is a very useful tool to allow instructors to grade students without them seeing their feedback or grades too early. Using this tool affects all students in the graded item.
3. Graded Item Title: Click the title to go directly to the graded item screen that contains all instructions and guidelines.

Grading Assignments

Grading assignments in Canvas is handled in much the same way grading discussions and quizzes, with a few exceptions. Listed below are some unique elements to grading assignments:

The Assignment Page

At the top-right area of your assignment page there are some key elements to observe

• Quick access to the SpeedGrader tool
• The ability to download all student submissions at once, and
• A list of how many student’s submissions still need to be graded

Inside SpeedGrader

If a student submits one of the file types that allow for on-screen annotation, the entire document will show up for instructors to grade. If you need to review the standard communication tools for SpeedGrader, please see the section discussed for grading discussions. Listed below are the unique elements for grading assignments:

1. After you use any of the annotated features of this program, you can download a copy of the file by clicking this button in the top-left corner.
2. The annotation features will appear directly on the document and will be seen by both you and the student. You can:
   1. Make a comment anywhere on the document.
   2. Highlight text.
   3. Add text.
   4. Add strikethrough text.
   5. Use organic shapes and lines.
   6. Use boxes to highlight and select
3. Turnitin is a plagiarism detection tool. It is not meant to replace Canvas annotation or for instructors to use it instead of downloading a paper and adding TrackChanges, markup, or comments. It is meant to provide a general “score” that tells the instructor how much of a student’s paper has been found in other online sources and institutional databases. More information on using Turnitin can be found below.
4. Instructors can choose to ignore the in-line Canvas annotation tools and simply download the paper to their computer and use MS Word to add TrackChanges, markup, feedback, or comments.

Grading Quizzes

Just like grading assignments and discussions, grading quizzes in Canvas requires the use of SpeedGrader. Below are some unique elements to the quiz grading process:

At the top-right corner of a quiz, instructors can not only access the SpeedGrader tool but can benefit from viewing important quiz statistics and by allowing additional attempts via the Moderate This Quiz tool.

Once in the SpeedGrader tool, a quiz can be graded just like every other graded item. The unique features here are how essay style questions and manual grading can work:

• For every question answered by a student, the instructor has the ability to give a point value and to give additional comments. This goes for both automatically graded questions and questions that require instructor input.
• For most quiz questions, the instructor will not be required to provide any additional feedback to students but the option is still available to them.

Grades (The Gradebook)

The Canvas gradebook is best understood as a bird’s eye view of a class or student’s performance. While it does contain some very useful feedback tools, grading within the SpeedGrader application for assignments, discussions, or quizzes is the preferred method for evaluating students.

What if my course has nested sections?

• If there’s only one course with many sections, instructors will need to filter the gradebook so that only students from their section will appear.

Grading by Item

Click the three vertical dots on any grade item and you’ll see a menu with various grading options:

• Message Students Who: Uses a Canvas email system to message students who may meet four criteria. This is an easy way to identify groups of students without having to email each one individually:
  • Haven’t submitted yet
  • Haven’t been graded
  • Scored less than
  • Scored more than
• Hide grades / Post grades: This is the same switch used within SpeedGrader to either hide all grades and feedback from students or show all grades and feedback to students. Very handy!

Grade by Student

If you’ve ignored the SpeedGrader tool, this is the area where you should do most of your grading. Simply clicking the student cell will allow you to enter a grade.

Clicking the door with the arrow icon gives you even more control:

Zoom Meetings

Zoom Help Guides:

Zoom is a web conferencing tool that provides remote conferencing services for instructors and students at your institution. The Canvas-Zoom integration allows instructors to schedule online meetings from within Canvas and gives all users within courses access to meetings and recordings.

Signing In

IMPORTANT: How Do I Ensure I’m Using the Right Zoom Account?

With Zoom use accelerating for both personal and institutional use, there is a high chance that you may have a personal Zoom account or multiple accounts across multiple institutions. This is why it is imperative that you log-out of your Zoom account and fully log-in to your Canvas course before accessing or using Zoom. If your Zoom account does not load properly when you click the Zoom link on the left-side panel of your course, follow the instructions below and try again:

1. Go to https://zoom.us/ and click SIGN IN at the top-right corner.
2. Click the black key symbol at the bottom-right with the word SSO below it (Single Sign-On).
   
3. Enter the institutional domain of your Zoom partner. This might be Bradley, UNR, WSU, Regiscollege, Northeastern, or something similar. Chances are you were given a Zoom URL with this information when you started teaching online.
4. Return to your Canvas course and try clicking the Zoom link. It should now open properly like the screen below:
   

Scheduling a Zoom Meeting

1. Click Zoom from your course navigation (doesn't always appear at the top of the navigation).
   
2. In Canvas, click Schedule a New Meeting at the top-right.
   
3. Fill out the meeting settings:
   • Topic: the title of your meeting. This should be very explicit so that students don’t confuse your meeting with other instructor’s meetings. Your name / date / time are very helpful.
   • When and Duration don’t mean much. If you plan on having your meetings at the same time every week, it doesn’t matter if you fill this section out. If your meetings occur at different times throughout the semester, try creating individual meetings instead.
   • Recurring meeting: This is an important setting. If your meeting occurs on the same date and time, follow these instructions:
     • Click Recurring meeting
     • Under Recurrence, change it from Daily to No Fixed Time
   • Passcode: You may or may not have any control over this setting. If it’s automatically selected for you, copy the passcode so you can communicate it to your students via discussion/announcements
   • Waiting room: This is a valuable tool to prevent students from joining before you arrive and especially useful for Office Hours.
   • Meeting Options Recommendations:
     • If you'd like automatic recordings of the meeting, select Record the meeting automatically to save the recording in the cloud. This will start recording as soon as the first student arrives. All recorded meetings will appear under the Cloud Recordings tab.
4. Click Save. You will now see the conference appear under 'Upcoming Meetings.'

Accessing Recordings

To record a meeting to the cloud manually (you can also start your cloud recording automatically):

1. Start your instant or scheduled meeting as the host.
2. Click the Record button.
3. Select Record to the Cloud to begin recording.
   Note: If you are muted, a Recording Alert pop-up window will appear indicating You are muted.
4. To stop recording, click Pause / Stop Recording or End Meeting.
   Note: Once the meeting has ended, the recording must be processed before viewing. Zoom will send an email to the host's email address when the process is completed. There will be two links in the email, the first will be for the Host-only to manage the recording. The second link will be for the participants.
5. Manage your cloud recordings:
   • Download, share, or delete cloud recordings.
   • Trim the playback range of a shared recording.

Student Notifications

By default, once your meeting is scheduled, students will receive an email notification. In addition, the meeting will appear on students' Canvas Calendar.