THIS IS NOT THE CURRENT EDITION OF THE OAT UPDATE
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New Announcements
- End of Term: Handling incomplete student work in Canvas
Reminders
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New Announcements
Handling Incomplete Student Work and Closing Courses
For Fall 2022, Instructors can continue to accept late or Incomplete work into their Canvas course under whatever terms they and the affected student(s) have agreed to.
OAT does not disable courses until one calendar year from the end of a term, which is the university's default deadline for students to address an Incomplete grade. Until that point, Instructors have full control over when their Canvas course becomes closed. Therefore, OAT will not close any remaining open courses for Fall 2022 until late December 2023, the end of the Fall 2023 term. After that, Instructors may continue to view the course and copy it into future courses, but no new activity or changes (student or instructor) can take place in that shell once it is closed. Before that time, Instructors can manually close their course to new activity via the Settings page, and, additionally, to entirely prevent students from viewing the course after it is closed.
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Reminders
Canvas Teacher App
It's the Modern Era, so everything has an app, even for Canvas instructors. In addition to the app for Students, instructors can install the Teachers app to help manage courses when you're not in front of a laptop or desktop computer.
Use the Teacher app for the following situations:
- Create a course Announcement (will be pushed to students based on their account notification preferences)
- Send a message to a specific student or class (will be pushed to students based on their account notification preferences)
- View your course and/or module content
- Grade submitted assignments and discussion posts
The Canvas Instructor guides have full details on the capabilities of the app (available in the app stores for iOS and Android)
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Canvas Operational Protocols
As part of its administration of the Canvas system, OAT maintains a set of "protocols" it uses to guide the implementation of the LMS. While not official "policies", these protocols are operational in nature and represent best practices in LMS administration.
Review the protocols
Questions or comments? Contact oat@csustan.edu.
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Don't Delete Students' Work: Using Differentiated Due Dates in Canvas
One of the most common misunderstanding of any graded activity in Canvas is the Assign To field, where Due Dates and Until Dates are configured. That field allows you to specify who an activity is assigned to. By default, Canvas selects Everyone, but it's best to think of this selection as merely one possible "window", and you can have any number of differentiated windows for the activity in order to meet the submission needs of your course.
Don't Change! Do Add!
When you need to give someone a specific due date on an existing activity (perhaps as an extension), it's all too easy to change the "Everyone" in the Assign To area to just the specific student and then modify the dates. Panic usually ensues once you're done because any previous submissions to that activity suddenly seem to be deleted from Canvas!
However, all you've done by changing the "Everyone" window is to unassign the activity to everyone else. Because it's now unassigned, Canvas has no need to display anything for anyone else, even if they'd previously submitted. Without an assignment window, those student(s) aren't responsible for the activity at all, and so Canvas doesn't show those students in SpeedGrader. This is why they seem to have been deleted.
The solution is simple:
- Never change the existing Everyone field.
- Always add another window to the assignment to match the requirements for the specific student. Click the +Add button below the existing window to create a new window. From there, click in the Assign To field and select the students who will be governed by this window. You can add as many specific students as you want. Thanks to differentiated assignments, Canvas will keep the existing window in place and no submissions will go missing.
- Phew!
Questions or comments? Contact oat@csustan.edu.
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Canvas: Removing Previous Instructors from Rosters
Has your teaching assignment changed? If you are no longer listed as the instructor or a course or section in PeopleSoft, please contact oatsupport@csustan.edu and ask to be removed from the Canvas roster for the prior course. Currently, changes to the instructor-of-record field in PeopleSoft are not automatically reflected in Canvas so that any previously assigned instructors are removed from the course roster (only added). Remaining on the previous roster when courses begin means you'll receive notifications about the course, and students may also be confused about whom to contact.
Removing you from a previous course is very easy to do, but it must be requested first!
OAT and OIT have begun working on a solution to automate these removals, but there is no ETA for delivery at this time.
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2022-23 Faculty Ambassadors for Canvas
This year, OAT is again sponsoring the FAC program, which makes experienced Canvas instructors available to each college, as a supplement to OAT staff. Instructors may find it more helpful to work with other instructors in their general discipline on questions related to Canvas, and are encouraged to contact these individuals.
2022-23 Ambassadors
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Accessible PDFs
Supercharge accessibility scores for your Canvas courses!
Now that the Fall semester is rapidly approaching, now is the perfect time to have our Document Remediation team make your PDF files accessible.
- Were your PDFs created by scanning printed pages?
- Is the image quality of your PDFs less than ideal? (e.g., skewed pages, handwritten notes)
- Is the PDF your only copy of the content?
If your answer is yes to any of the above questions, the PDFs are a perfect fit to submit to our Document Remediation team.
- Submit a document remediation work order: Select "Accessibility Work Request" in the Request Type drop-down menu, and "Make my document accessible for me" in the Service Type section
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