Start and end of semester

Three Tips for Carmen Course Setup

We have only a few days between spring and summer semesters to set up summer Carmen courses, so it’s important to be as efficient as possible during course setup.  These tips might help.

  1.  Page History:  Your Carmen course pages might have beautiful pictures and text formatting that can be ruined with just a single swipe of a misplaced cursor.  If you save changes on a Carmen page that you later regret, there is a solution!  Access Page History at the three-vertical-dots menu on the right side of the page (see 1 in the image below).  You can go back to a previous version of the page where you last saved changes you actually want.  For more detailed instructions, see the Canvas documentation.
  2.  Auto-open File Viewer:  Sometimes, you want a file that is attached to a page in Carmen to open automatically for students so they view it in the Carmen page rather than needing to download it and open it as an attachment.  Enable the “Auto-Open for Inline Preview” option to make this happen.  See the Canvas documentation on this feature.
  3.  I often hear requests for image sources where instructors can find “free” pictures to use in their courses.  Keeping in mind that many pictures on the internet can be copied at no cost, images should always be cited just like written resources are.  If you aren’t sure whether you should use an image or not, please contact your CON-IT team or your copyright librarian for more information.  You can find images that are designated for reuse by others at the following sites:

OSU Photography – scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Browse signature photo gallery”; mainly OSU-themed and higher-education-themed pictures
OSU Digital Storytelling – suggests sites that enable searches for content labeled for reuse
Unsplash – beautiful images on general topics (very few medical pictures)
Pixabay – another site with general image topics
HSL image resources – specific medical images for teaching related purposes; these have very specific terms of use listed here

Many thanks to Sarah Rusnak in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences for sharing these resources and collaborating on these important Carmen tips!

Link Validator in Carmen, and other tools to double-check your course

At the beginning of each semester, instructors often wonder if the pages and links they copied from their previous semester’s course transferred in good working order to the new, current-semester copy of their course.  There are many reasons a link that worked perfectly last semester might not work this semester, so it is best practice to check your Carmen course links at least once per term. Carmen has a handy link validator that will do this (mostly) automatically for you.  In your Carmen course, go to Settings > Validate Links in Content. The link validator will cause a process to run that identifies links in your course that may be problematic, and it will even tell you the reason for the problem.

If you have questions about using this tool, please let us know in the CON-IT department.  Also, check out the additional ways you can double-check your course for errors and usability according to the Canvas community.

Course Link Validator

Course Link Validator

Submit your Final Grades for Spring ’18

You’ll be submitting final grades for SP18 soon. If you need a reminder of how to submit final grades, or a step-by-step tutorial, we’ve provided some resources you might find helpful below. Please contact the CON IT instructional design team if you need additional assistance.

Additional resources

Get your Carmen Gradebook Ready for AU17 Final Grades

You’ll be submitting final grades for AU17 in just a few weeks. Are you ready? Now is the time to double-check your Carmen gradebook setup and prepare it so grade submission goes smoothly. The CON instructional design team presented a Flash Friday webinar on 11/17 on how the gradebook and assignment tools in Carmen are connected and how to organize one to rearrange the other. Find out how weighting grades, dropping grades, muting grades, and bonus assignments/points work in the gradebook in the recording of this webinar at http://carmenconnect.osu.edu/p9ndq89j1wb/

Additional resources

Time to Submit Final Grades

If you’re using old Carmen (D2L) this autumn semester, you can use this step-by-step guide to submit your final grades. 

If you’re using new Carmen (Canvas) this semester, you’ll submit grades by clicking on the little red gear icon to the right of your course title on the Canvas landing page.  First, make sure you are using the right grading scheme for final grades. When you’ve done that, you can follow these steps (click on the Details tab) to submit final grades.

Questions or problems with grade submission?  Contact us at CON-InformationTechnology@osu.edu. 

 

Launch your Canvas Course for Autumn 2016

Are you ready to launch your Canvas course for the autumn 16 semester?  Here are a few tips that can get you started on the right foot.

  1.  You need to publish your course so your students can view it.  The Publish button is on your course home page.  Read more about how to publish your course.
This course is unpublished.

This course is unpublished.

This course is published.

This course is published.

2.  Make sure your Module items are published as appropriate.  Gray items with a gray cloud (and an X in the cloud) are unpublished.  Green items with a green cloud (and a checkmark in the cloud) are published.  If a module is unpublished, everything in that module is unpublished, even if individual items appear published.  In other words, the unpublished status of a module overrides the status of the published item within it.  Read more about publishing modules and items within modules.

Items in red boxes are unpublished. Items in green boxes are published.

Items in red boxes are unpublished. Items in green boxes are published.

3.  View your course from the student point of view and go through each item to make sure it appears the way you intend for it to appear.  Check your links, even if (especially if) you imported them from your old Carmen course, to make sure they work.  It is particularly important to make sure your Panopto and CarmenConnect synchronous session links work and they all lead to the appropriate site.  Click on Settings > Student View to see your course as a student would.  Read more about the Student View in Canvas.

Student View button on Settings page

Student View button on Settings page

4.  If you need to add users to your course, you can do so from the Canvas landing page.

  • Go to carmen.osu.edu >
  • click on the little red cog wheel to the right of your course title >
  • under Add Participants, type the name-dot-number of the user you want to add >
  • click on their name >
  • choose their role (instructor, student, etc.) >
  • work through the prompts to add and enroll the user and confirm.

Read more about adding users to your Canvas course.

Carmen – Copy course material

  1. Go into Carmen and enter the destination course.
  2. Click on “Edit Course”.
  3. Click on Import/Export/Copy Components.
  4. Under Copy Components from another Org Unit, click Search for offering.
  5. Type in the course number (or leave blank to see all courses) and click on the magnifying glass.
  6. Check the button next to the course and click on Add Selected.
  7. Click on Copy All Components (to copy everything) or choose Select Components to pick and choose what to copy.  Generally, copying all components is a good choice for moving from one semester to the next.
  8. Wait while the course components copy.
  9. You will see a green checkmark when the copying is finished. (If you don’t, see the NOTE below.)
  10. Click on View Content or any other link in the navbar to see what’s been copied over.

NOTE: If the course copy process produced an error, stop and send an email to CON-InformationTechnology@osu.edu with the following information:

  1. The course name and number in parentheses as it appears in Carmen that you are copying into (the new course).
  2. The course name and number in parentheses as it appears in Carmen that are copying from (the old course).
  3.  A screenshot of the error or the text of the error message you received.

Errors in course copying are sometimes caused by blank content modules or submodules in the old course from which you are copying, or they can be caused by content files that are “broken.”  Look for red exclamation marks in your Carmen Content items in the old course.  Removing those items may resolve the error encountered during the course copy process.

Red exclamation in Carmen Content