Canvas LMS

Online course tips for success

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In this post I cover some basic online course success tips to help educators as they develop their courses. These tips cover some basic, standard components of online courses that are occasionally overlooked. The Canvas learning management system has a lot of amazing course tools that can aid in online learning.

Course modules:

Courses in Canvas are divided into ‘modules’ which are like lessons containing several components like course pages, quizzes, or surveys. Links to PDF handouts or slide sets can also be posted in course pages. Course modules and pages organize course content in a more visual way than just putting it in a ‘Box’ folder.

Course pages and video lessons:

Course pages can be a combination of text, images, and video. Video lessons can be recorded ahead of time and posted via a lecture hosting service like MediaSite. Video lessons are a way of making course modules more engaging than just text. When participants are more engaged with an online they better retain the knowledge covered.

Including learning objectives:

It’s best practice to include your course-level learning objectives in the first module, like a welcome module. You can optionally put instructor bios in the welcome module to let your participants meet your educators. For some types of continuing education courses, you may want to include a pre-test quiz. You can also choose to have module-level learning objectives if it fits that course content.

Course evaluation surveys:

It’s a good practice to include a Qualtrics course evaluation survey in the last module of the online course. Sometimes it’s called the course completion module. Scarlet Canvas can be set to auto-issue a course completion certificate after the course completion module is completed. Depending on the type of course, a post-test quiz can be included as a requirement for completing the last module.

Assessing knowledge learned from video lessons:

Occasionally some participants will skip through course pages and video lessons in a rush to complete an online course. If you want to encourage them to fully watch lesson videos you can assess what they learned with quizzes at the end of the module. Canvas can be set to not open the next module until a passing score on a quiz is achieved. See my Using quizzes as learning checks to assess that videos are watched post for more information on setting this up in Canvas.

You can also embed more informal learning checks in course pages which can act as learning checks without being graded. Questions types from H5P can be embedded and used as more informal learning checks.

Discussion boards and the ‘People’ roster:

If you want participants to interact and learn from each other you can use Canvas course tools like the discussion board where you pose a question or topic and have people discuss it. Open discussion boards can become like a knowledge base for your course, answering frequently asked questions. In some types of courses however, participant privacy may be essential so in those cases you can deactivate the course ‘People’ roster so participants don’t interact. The ‘People’ roster will still be available to your Teacher role but the Student role in Canvas won’t be able to see it. How much you want participants to interact with each other depends on the type of online course you are developing.

 

Posting an announcement in a Canvas course

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Below is an example announcement in a Canvas course. Announcements can be used to share important information with all users in your course. You could use announcements to remind students of important dates, point students to internal and external resources, celebrate student success, and highlight events of interest.

example announcement

To an announcement to your course:

  • Click on the ‘Announcements’ link in the left-nav.
  • Click on the ‘+ Announcement’ link on the right side.
  • Enter your announcement text. Announcements can also include multimedia and links to files.
  • Adust your announcement’s settings. You can choose to delay posting for a scheduled time.
  • Click Save.

You can also choose to post an announcement to the whole course or a specific section. For example, some courses have county sections. It’s also possible to allow students to comment on announcements. This can be enabled in your announcement’s settings.

For a demonstration of adding an announcement, see the How to post an announcement to a course MediaSite video.

What is Canvas Blueprint?

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Canvas Blueprint makes it easy for LMS administrators or instructional designers to deploy, update, and maintain template courses that push content to associated courses. It allows admins to lock specific settings or content items and push updates to all associated courses through course syncing.
Here are some Canvas Blueprint resources:

Working with course sections in Canvas

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What are course sections?

Course sections in Canvas are a potential way to group participants by county or by a cohort beginning a course at a certain time.

 

To add a new section to a Canvas course:

  • Go to ‘Settings > Course Sections’ to create a section.
  • Give the course section a name.

 

Adding a participant to a section:

  • To add a participant to a section, edit the person in the ‘People’ list and click ‘Edit Section’.
  • Start typing the name of a section, select it, and then click ‘Update’. Note: People have to be in at least one section.

See courses and sections info in the instructors guide in the Canvas Community for more information about course sections.

 

Limiting users to only interact with other users in the same course section:

  • Go to ‘People’, edit the person you want to only interact with a particular section, and choose ‘User Details’
  • Under Privileges in the Membership area, click: ‘limit user to only fellow section users’

See How do I limit a user to only interact with other users in the same course section? in the instructors guide in the Canvas Community for more information.

Using quizzes as learning checks to assess that videos are watched

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Mandating watching a whole video isn’t a feature that’s built into Canvas but you can encourage course participants to fully watch it by testing their knowledge. After the video in a course module you can place a quiz to act as a learning check. Then you can assign a passing score that’s required to open the next module. To add a passing score from a quiz to be a module prerequisites, edit the module and go to the requirements and prerequisites area.

See the How do I add requirements to a module Canvas Community article for more information about adding prerequisites for unlocking a module. See the Modules Overview video for more info about how course modules opperate.

Here’s some information about editing questions in a Canvas quiz or in a question bank. Storing questions in a question bank becomes useful if you want to import/export questions to several similar courses.

See this Quizzes Overview video for more information about quizzing in Canvas. You can also use a series of quizzes to assess the participant’s overall knowledge of a course. Scores for quizzes and other assignments are stored in the course gradebook. See the GradeBook Overview for more information.

How to remove a student from a Canvas course

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4/19/21 Update: Teacher role persmissions have changed. If you need to remove or deactivate a student in Scarlet Canvas, contact the Canvas admin for your department. The following procedures may or may not be possible depending on how the Teacher role is configured in an instance of Canvas.

If you are running a term course in another instance of the Canvas LMS, you may want to remove past term students from the course roster. To remove a student:

    • Go to the People roster in your course.
    • Find the student your want to delete. If there are a large number of students you can use the search.
    • Click on the three-dot menu beside their name and choose ‘remove from course’.

 

Last updated on: 4/19/21

Messaging in Canvas

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To message all people in a Canvas course:

  • Go to your Canvas InBox.
  • Click on the ‘Compose new message icon’.

  • 1) Click the people icon to the right of the ‘To:’ field.

  • 2) Choose the name of the course in the options that pop up to message all people in the course.
  • Compose your message and send.

 

Last updated on: 11/13/20

Canvas Links & Resources

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The full Canvas Instructor Guide from Instructure is a great resource of how-to articles about all features in the Canvas LMS. Instructure is the company behind Canvas.

The Ohio State CFAES Canvas Instructor’s Community course is a Canvas course of resources about the LMS for CFAES instructors teaching courses in Scarlet Canvas. Scarlet is Ohio State’s public-facing LMS platform for non-credit, professional development, continuing education, and enrichment courses. This learning management platform is powered by the Canvas Catalog product from Instructure which can provide automated course completion certificate issuing and public course listings in a course catalog. Canvas courses in the system may be unlisted or publicly listed in the catalog.

The CarmenCanvas section of the Teaching & Learning Resource Center provides a wealth of articles and tutorials about Ohio State’s academic LMS know as Carmen. Many of the concepts are applicable to working in Scarlet Canvas or the Canvas LMS in general.

The Ohio State Keep Teaching Teaching Tools section outlines how to use teaching tools like CarmenCanvas to continue teaching academic courses online or through a hybrid approach. Many hybrid and online teaching concepts are applicable to Extension teaching in Scarlet Canvas.

Screencasts about various Canvas course running topics

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Here are some quick screencasts about various Canvas course running topics. They were made so they are generally applicable to educators or staff involved in Scarlet Canvas courses. Scarlet is Ohio State’s public-facing LMS platform for non-credit, professional development, continuing education, and enrichment courses. The screencasts are protected in MediaSite by an OSU login but they are just using an empty course-shell:

Seeing something visually in a screencast can save time. Captions to these videos were made with Otter.ai.

Last updated on: 4/19/21