Issue Contents
Announcements
Reminders
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Announcements
Fall 2026 Canvas Workshop Recordings
Following a highly engaging week of workshops on Canvas and related tools, OAT is pleased to share links to the recordings for those sessions.
Have a question about any of these tools? Contact OAT!
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Top 5 Canvas Tips for Fall 2026
Below are five things to consider as the Fall semester gets underway.
Tip #1 - Adding students: Instructors can add anyone with a Stan State account into their course - no need to request access from OAT. Use this to give to a late-add student access to the course while their enrollment is processing. Just click the People link in the course navigation and then click "+ People".
Tip #2 - Course name: Instructors can modify the display name of the course if desired by clicking the Settings link in the course navigation. The course name field is at the top of the page.
Tip #3 - Combine sections: Teaching multiple sections? Instructors can merge the enrollments of one section into the course shell of another section. Update course content only one time while maintaining differentiated due dates. Learn more...
Tip #4 - Assignment visibility: Publishing an assignment and adding it to a module (or adding it as a link to Canvas page) is all that's required for students to access it. No need to make the whole Assignments silo visible!
Tip #5 - Add a link: Need to add a custom link directly into the course navigation? Open the "Navigation" tab of the Settings page and click "Add Link". Provide the link name and the URL (including Canvas URLs). Drag to reposition the link within the list like any other item.
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Fall 2026 Online Training Courses via OCS
Presented by the Online Course Services (OCS) division of the Chancellor's Office, registration is now open for fall CSU OCS training courses. OCS provides professional development training opportunities for FREE to prepare faculty, lecturers, and staff to design quality online and hybrid courses and use Artificial Intelligence in innovative ways. All of the courses are 3 weeks in length and in an asynchronous format.
Courses to design and deliver online and hybrid courses include:
Courses for using Artificial Intelligence in innovative ways include:
Course dates:
- Fall Session 1: October 5-25, 2026
- Fall Session 2: November 2-22, 2026
View the full schedule and course descriptions
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Reminders
New "Pacing" Feature Available Hypothesis
Now available in Hypothesis! (what is Hypothesis?)
Paced Social Annotation is a mode in Hypothesis that lets instructors hide student annotations until a checkpoint date they choose, rather than displaying annotations as soon as they’re posted. Students complete their own close reading and annotation first, working through the text without seeing what classmates have written. Once the instructor opens the checkpoint (e.g., after a reading deadline or at the start of the next class session), all annotations become visible and students return to compare interpretations and respond to each other. Pacing is designed for instructors who want the collaborative benefits of social annotation without students anchoring their thinking to the first few comments that appear.
How it works:
- Students read and annotate independently
- Annotations stay hidden while reading is in progress
- At the instructor’s checkpoint (specific date), annotations become visible
- Students return to compare ideas and discuss
Why it matters:
✅ Independent thinking: students form their own ideas before anyone else’s, or AI, can shortcut that work.
✅ AI-resistant by design: no detection or monitoring, just a structure that makes genuine reading the first step.
✅ Built for scale: instructor-set checkpoints replace an open stream, making large courses easier to manage.
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Alert! Respondus Lockdown Browser Issue with Copied Courses
After copying a Canvas course that contains at least one quiz requiring students to use Lockdown Browser (LDB), the instructor must do one important thing: they must access the Lockdown Browser dashboard in the new course before students can take any LDB-required quiz. This is necessary to register the new Canvas course with Respondus's servers.
Simply click the "Respondus Lockdown Browser" link in the course navigation to automatically register the course. The following message will appear, confirming the course is ready to go!
Until this step is completed, students will receive an error about an "Invalid Profile" when they try to access a Lockdown Browser quiz.
For more assistance using Lockdown Browser in your course, contact OAT!
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UDOIT Summer School for Educators
In the 25-26 academic year, Stan State instructors made impressive strides in ensuring the accessibility of their course materials. Although the federal deadline for compliance was extended until April 2027, it's important that we keep up the momentum!
To that end, everyone is invited to join Cidi Labs for UDOIT Summer School for Educators on August 12 & 13 (10:00 am – 11:00 am) and learn time-saving ways to improve accessibility directly inside your Canvas courses.
Whether you're new to accessibility or looking for more efficient workflows, these live sessions will walk you through the UDOIT accessibility tool and the techniques that make remediation faster and easier.
Day 1: Improve Canvas Content Accessibility
Learn how to identify and remediate accessibility issues in Canvas pages, assignments, discussions, and more.
Day 2: Simplify Course File Remediation
See how UDOIT helps you review course files, generate accessible alternative formats, and improve document accessibility.
Can't Attend Live?
Register anyway! Everyone who registers will receive the session recordings, so you can watch whenever it fits your schedule or revisit the material later.
Save Your Spot For Summer School
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Improved Grading in VoiceThread
As instructors begin working on developing their fall courses, OAT is pleased to share that VoiceThread has enhanced its grading tools thanks to the addition of rubrics!
At the end of the VoiceThread assignment creation steps, the instructor specifies a rubric as the the grading mechanism and then assembles the rubric. Later, while reviewing a student's submission, the instructor clicks the appropriate score level for each criterion (exactly how rubrics work in Canvas). The final score is then transmitted back to the Canvas grade book. Simple!
Below is a screenshot of what the grading interface in VoiceThread, with the rubric area at the bottom.
Use cases
Use VoiceThread's rubric interface in assignments such as:
- Evaluating final course presentations from a "Create" assignment - the rubric's criteria could relate to the various aspects required in the presentation
- Grading the structure and content of student comments in a Commenting assignment (including student slides added to a shared VT) - how much were the comments meaningful or perfunctory?
Canvas Rubrics vs. VoiceThread Rubrics: Which to use?
Technically, a VoiceThread assignment in Canvas can already have a Canvas rubric attached to it for grading. Grading in that case is done by opening Speedgrader and then clicking through the rubric criteria to give the student their grade.
However, Speedgrader cannot directly display the VoiceThread content itself. Thus, to use Speedgrader's rubric, the instructor needs to open two tabs in their browser, one for the VoiceThread content and another for the Speedgrader interface. They then flip back and forth between the Speedgrader tab and the VoiceThread tab to complete the rubric grading. Arguably cumbersome!
The new VoiceThread rubric tool eliminates the need for multiple tabs. As part of the assignment setup within VoiceThread, instructors enable its rubric setting and build their rubric criteria and levels there (so: no Canvas rubric is used). Then, simply launch the VoiceThread activity and rubric grading is part of the grading interface within VoiceThread. As before, the final score is transmitted automatically back to the Canvas grade book. Students can review the rubric scores by visiting the VoiceThread activity. No Speedgrader use is necessary when using VoiceThread's rubric tool!
Learn more about VoiceThread rubrics
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Extended! Turnitin Clarity Pilot
To meet demand for deeper testing, the Turnitin Clarity pilot has been extended through the Fall 2026 term.
What is Clarity?
View the Clarity demo now
Turnitin Clarity gives instructors visibility into the student writing process, from first draft to final submission. Rather than just turning in a finished document created outside the LMS, students use the Clarity writing space to do their composition, editing, and submission. Akin to Microsoft Word or Google Docs, Clarity's text entry interface contains standard writing and formatting tools. Instructors can also enable/disable grammar and punctuation checking and citation formatting assistance.
Importantly, Clarity is not a "lockdown" environment. Instead, students' work in Clarity is saved automatically and they can return to the assignment as often as needed until the Due Date passes.
Clarity also allows instructors to guide students toward responsible use of A.I. in order to help them improve their writing. When enabled on an assignment by the instructor, the A.I. chat assistant is trained to guide rather than simply provide answers the way an LLM does (e.g., ChatGPT). Instead, Clarity can provide feedback to students on their progress based on a supplied rubric or help brainstorm topics and structure an outline. Compare student writing using Clarity vs using a popular LLM
Clarity's writing reports to instructors include insights into the student's writing process as well as flags for further review, such as the appearance of pasted text coming from outside the document. Instructors can also play back the version history of the document to gain visibility into the evolution of their students' writing. Any A.I. chat activity is included in the report along with Turnitin's existing similarity score and A.I. writing score. Additionally, the writing reports also provide peace of mind for students that there is data to show the originality of their work.
Why Use Clarity?
It's 2026 and instructors need to be adapting to the reality of AI tools being available to students. Sometimes those tools are obvious and sometimes the AI component in them isn't clearly highlighted but the result is AI-generated prose. Despite syllabus statements saying "no AI usage allowed", students and instructors remain confused and uncertain about what that actually means. This uncertainty leads to difficult situations regarding accusations of academic dishonesty that often leave students without means of establishing their innocence.
As such, instructors have two options if they are to continue assigning traditional long-form academic writing (i.e., essays, research term papers, etc.) in the era of AI:
Option 1: Retrofit and adjust the assignment design so that AI cannot reliably complete it.
Option 2: Provide students with a clear and explicit process for demonstrating the authenticity of the ideas and writing in their submission.
For those instructors not interested in Option 1, Clarity is the best way to accomplish Option 2, providing everyone with clear evidence of a student's writing process and their original thinking.
Instructor Resources for Clarity
The Clarity Pilot
Clarity is available in every course in Canvas right now, accessed as part of the Turnitin tool set found on the Assignments home page.
Steps to create a new Clarity assignment: Step 1: Open the 'three dot' menu. Step 2: Select "Turnitin". Step 3: Click "Student Writing".
The pilot will last until the end of the Spring 2026 Fall 2026 semester with feedback gathered in order to guide the possible future licensing of the tool. Interested faculty are therefore invited to assign at least one writing assignment using the Clarity interface. Information on providing feedback will be announced at a later date.
Questions? Contact OAT!
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Regular & Substantive Interaction in Online Courses
Federal regulations require that online ("distance") courses, primarily those that are asynchronous in their delivery, contain adequate opportunities for regular and substantive interaction between the instructor and the students, as well as between students.
How to get started
OAT has developed a template module that can be downloaded and installed into any Canvas course through the Canvas Commons tool. Once added to a course, all of the content in the template can be modified. The template is also a starting point - its content does not conform to an officially sanctioned body of requirements. However, it's a great way to get started!
On Canvas, click the Canvas Commons icon and then search for "Regular & Substantive Interaction". Click the "Download" button to choose the course where the module will be added.
Review the module contents
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Turnitin A.I. Detection FAQ
Stan State provides access to Turnitin's AI Detector tool for all instructors. Normally, the detector is used as part of a Canvas assignment that uses Turnitin in some way. However, it is possible to have a stand-alone file uploaded to Turnitin for analysis.
When submitted to Turnitin, a paper is given a 'score' that corresponds to the percentage of long-form prose (i.e., sentences contained within many multiple paragraphs) that the detector has high confidence was not human-produced. Longer submissions are more accurately scored, while shorter submissions may be more frequently incorrectly flagged. The A.I. detector does not reliably detect AI-generated text in the form of non-prose, such as poetry, scripts, or code. Nor does it detect short-form/unconventional writing such as bullet points (short, non-sentence structures) or annotated bibliographies.
Remember: Turnitin's A.I. score is a flag for further consideration, not an accusation of misconduct in and of itself.
How does it work?
What parameters or flags does Turnitin’s model take into account when detecting AI writing?
What does the percentage in the AI writing detection indicator mean?
If students use Grammarly for grammar checks or paraphrasing/rewriting, does Turnitin detect it and flag it as AI?
How should instructors interpret the results?
Complete FAQ
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