College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Canvas goes live

I am very pleased to announce that Canvas is now available in the

University and you will be able to dive in and begin populating your

courses very shortly.

The Educational Technology Team are now working with Programme

teams to roll these out as soon as possible based on appropriate and

agreed templates. We expect all courses to be available by mid-August.

If you are concerned about these timescales please do get in touch

with one of the Programme teams below.

Is there anything I can do now?

Feel free to sign up for the CLAD-led Canvas training courses. These hands-on

courses will give you a good overview of the main features of Canvas and an

opportunity to discuss how your own teaching materials can be used.

Sign up at: http://www.weblearn.bham.ac.uk/training_courses/.

Find out more

There are extensive guides on using Canvas on their website,

http://guides.instructure.com/ these step by step instruction on all

Canvas tools and features.

Contacts Project Lead – Dr. John Couperthwaite, email: j.couperthwaite@bham.ac.uk, tel: 58172

CollegeInstructional Designer – Peter Rainger, email: p.rainger@bham.ac.uk, tel: 47154

eLearning Consultant – Dalbir Kang, email: d.kang@bham.ac.uk, tel: 46936

Academic Lead for eLearning – Prof. Giles Perryer, email: d.g.perryer@bham.ac.uk

Director of Education – Prof. Prem Kumar, email: p.kumar@bham.ac.uk

This document has been adapted from a CoSS newsletter by kind permission of: Prof Mike McLinden and Danielle Hinton

This guide is designed to

give you a brief overview

of the key features of

Canvas.

It particularly focuses on

the following:

- User profiles;

- Page design;

- Mobile app;

- Analytics;

- File management;

- Communication tools;

- Groups;

- Multimedia;

- Accessibility

We shall be developing

further instruction and

training support

information within Canvas

over the summer, so

please look out for further

news.

College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Canvas Sneak Peek: User Profiles Canvas accounts all have an associated User Profile area that allows you to (settings dependent)

set your contact details (including email, SMS, Twitter and Facebook)

upload a profile picture

access personal files and ePortfolio area

link to tools you might already use (including Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, Google Docs, Skype and LinkedIn).

decide which communication channel you wish to receive Canvas notifications by and the frequency (Right Away, Daily, Weekly, or Never).

User’s profile pictures are displayed when they post to discussion messages bringing an important human dimension to blended and online learning (especially for those studying at a distance).

An exciting associated tool that is available for all users via each “course” area is called People. This tool allows

you to see who is enrolled in the course (both students and teaching and related staff), view individual profiles as well as access the exciting group functionality. In addition, those with staff roles can access detailed analytics or tracking data from this area.

College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Canvas Sneak Peek: Web Look and Feel As students enter each “Canvas Course” (programme or module) they will see the Front Page type that has been selected and designed for them. Canvas itself is divided into a three column display, with the left hand column containing the Canvas Tools that the instructor has made available to students, the middle column displaying “content” and the right hand column containing context specific information and options.

The top grey bar provides global navigation access to specific services that are personal to the user (eg. Courses and Groups, Personal Profile and Inbox) as well as aggregations that provide “at the glance access” to specific tools (eg. Assignments, Grades and Calendar). The Educational Technology Team is currently developing a range of College templates that will provide an accessible, clean and professional look and feel for blended and online learning and teaching. Templates will cater for the needs of programmes and modules whether undergraduate or postgraduate, campus or blended distance learning.

Canvas Sneak Peek:

Mobile App Look and

Feel Downloading a free Canvas app will allow access to your enrolled “courses” on both tablets and smart phones (platforms include the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, Android, WebOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phone). Canvas uses minimal instances of Flash, so most features are supported on your mobile devices. The app can be downloaded via either the Apple iTunes App Store or the Google Play App Store.

College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Canvas Sneak Peek: Analytics and Statistics Canvas Analytics evaluates individual components of a course and student performance. Anyone with a Teaching related role can access a range of analytical and statistical data both at “course” and student level. At “course” level you have access to “at a glance” analytics in regards to activity, assignments and grades. Staff can also view at a glance “high level” individual student analytics before drilling down to specific information about a student’s activity in the areas of Page Views, Communication, Assignments and Grades. If you need to view a student’s progress through materials presented in the (Learning) Module area of Canvas, a report is available that indicates whether a Learning Module section (eg. Week 3 or Introduction to Marxism) and its contents still need to be completed, is in progress or has been completed. More information about this feature can be obtained via http://guides.instructure.com/s/2204/m/4152/l/102031-how-do-i-view-the-progress-of-my-students-in-modules

College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Canvas Sneak Peek: File Management Canvas users will find access to files (documents, images, media, etc.) in three different places:

Personal files, located in each user's profile (students, teachers, and TAs)

Course files, located in each course (students, teachers, and TAs unless files are locked by the teacher)

Group files, located in each group (students and teachers who are enrolled in groups)

Some web browsers (Firefox and Chrome) contain a unique feature which

allows the user to simply drag and drop the file(s) from your local

computer window directly into the web based Canvas file repository window.

Another interesting feature is the ability to lock folders and files. The

default setting locks access to anyone not enrolled as a “Teacher” or “TA” (teaching assistant). A nice alternate setting allows students to download or view locked files only when the teacher links to them.

Canvas Sneak Peek: Communication

Tools Canvas communication tools include:

Personal notifications Announcements Calendar and Scheduler Discussions (asynchronous (time delayed) system for focused and

threaded discussions) Collaborations (users can work together on a document in

something like Google Docs and EtherPad) Conferences (synchronous (real-time) conversations with up to 50

users)

Canvas supports notifications through a variety of methods (you decide

from the options provided) which may include email, SMS text message, Twitter, and Facebook. You can choose to receive notification alerts immediately, daily, weekly, or never for up to 21 Canvas activities. One of the first activities you should complete when first going onto Canvas is to change your notification settings. It is advisable that for the “Announcements” category you consider the following settings (depending on your role):

Daily or Weekly Summary Module or Programme leads where multiple staff maybe posting

announcements Students that enrolled in multiple “courses” or where RSS feeds

are incorporated into individual “courses” Do not send anything support staff (including technical, library and admin roles)

College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Canvas Sneak Peek: Communication

Tools Canvas has a very powerful announcement tool (below) that allows you

to send easily tailored messages to your students that link to internal or external resources and services. For those interested you can also add external news feeds into the announcements via RSS or Atom feeds (see right). A word of caution though – talk to the Educational Technology Team first before you potentially alienate your colleagues and student groups! If you decide to incorporate a feed it is suggested that teaching staff alert students and ensure that they know what will appear, reason for its use and where possible limit these types of posts to those with specific phrases in the title. Canvas contains a very user friendly calendar that incorporates a

Scheduler feature. This allows anyone with a teaching role to set up and

manage office hours or personal tutor appointments. You define the

time slots and their length within the meeting students individually or in small groups.

.

College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Additionally, you can also message specific groups of users in

relation to individual office hour calendar postings as in the following examples:

Canvas Sneak Peek: Groups Canvas Groups features a facility to create private areas that has its own Discussions, Pages, Files,

Collaborations, and Calendar for real-time collaboration. You can use groups for grading if so desired.

Groups can be used to:

Set up student group configurations for seminar/regional groups, assignments and in-class work.

Facilitate module-long projects so that students can communicate and iterate on documents together.

Facilitate staff professional development and institutional committees or activities.

Facilitate student-run study groups within courses.

Any groups you have joined will appear on your list of Courses & Groups from the top global navigation bar. This means that you can easily move between the course and group level at any time. Please talk to your E-Learning Canvas Rollout Lead as early as possible if you need or wish to utilise this feature during the next academic year.

College of Social Sciences Vol 6 No 2, 2013

Canvas Sneak Peek:

Multimedia Canvas’ Rich Content Editor (just like the toolbar

in Microsoft Word) makes it very easy to mix text, images, math equations, audio or video all together in a single page, file, assignment, announcement, discussion posting. You can also quickly record and embed audio or video comments almost anywhere in a “course” (as long as you have access to a Web cam or headset). Adding a YouTube video only requires you to paste the link (via the link tool), Canvas then automatically embeds the video. When you link to a PowerPoint presentation or Word document, Canvas also talks to Scribd to create an embedded preview that you can browse without having first to download it to your computer.

Canvas Sneak Peek:

Accessibility (Screen

Readers) Canvas (in 2010) became the first learning management system to receive "Gold" certification from the National Federation of the Blind (US) for paying special attention to ensuring it is accessible via screen-readers. The Rich Content Editor also encourages users to create accessible content pages (i.e. text formatting is accomplished using styles). For this reason, Canvas allows limited customization of colours and schemes. Canvas also conforms to the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WAI WCAG) 2.0 AA and Section 508 guidelines (US). However, this doesn’t mean that Canvas ticks all the screen reader accessibility boxes. A report compiled by the OCAD University in August 2012 grades Canvas features (pass or fail). They report areas for improvement (mainly around keyboard access) for particular student facing components of Canvas.