The Office of Teaching and Learning has been hard at at work getting your master courses ready, so you can being working on Autumn 2017 content when it’s convenient for you!
Based on your feedback throughout the academic year (our first year with Canvas), we have begun rethinking how we approach master courses and moving to a process that allows for you to work on a master throughout the year for the next offering.
- Previously, we recommended masters only contain the course structure and content that stays the same each time the course is offered (“evergreen” content).
- Masters are now recommended to be the most up-to-date staging copy of your course. For example, you would make all of your edits for Autumn 2017 in the master prior to the start of the semester, then we copy the master into the Autumn 2017 shell for your students. (This is the production copy or working copy of the course where students are enrolled and active throughout the semester).
This summer:
- We archived a copy of your existing master, and created a new, updated version of your master. The most significant changes include the following:
- Your course homepage is now, well, an actual homepage, rather than the Syllabus page.
- There is now an area on the Syllabus page where you can include your course schedule and link to appropriate content; previously it was simply a list with links to individual modules.
- We have removed the “Instructor Resources Module” and replaced it with a single page. We have also significant reduced the size of the OSU, CVM and Course Resources modules.
- Then, we did a reset on your masters so we could load in the latest version of the CVM template.
- Finally, we reconstructed your masters based on your Autumn 2016 offering.
- We were excited to see some of you taking advantage of the tools in CarmenCanvas to make your course shells unique! We have preserved such customizations.
- Based on how you structured your course in Canvas and as described in the CMT, we made some changes to how your CarmenCanvas modules are organized.
To get ready for your Autumn 2017 edits:
- Note that in your updated masters, we have moved your old files into a “course materials (AU2016)” folder. In order to meet CarmenCanvas’ new file storage quota, please do/consider the following:
- If you are reusing certain files, please move them into the “course materials” folder. This helps you and us determine which files we can delete if we do run into a storage space issue.
- Learn more about how you and optimize your course files.
- We encourage you to follow the suggestions below to better organize your course files.
- The easiest way to upload files is through the Files Tool, which has drag-and-drop functionality.
- If you use Content Pages to present your files, the uploader in the sidebar of the Rich Content Editor lets you choose a destination folder.
- We do not currently recommend using the file uploader in the Modules tool because it only lets you choose top-level folders to upload your files to.
- If you have an Autumn 2017 graduate course that you would like to use CarmenCanvas for, please let us know as soon as possible! We do not currently keep track of graduate courses.