Get Ready for the Spring Semester!

January 19, 2023

Dear Mona,

Before winter break we surveyed faculty and instructional staff on how well Canvas and integrated tools such as Gradescope, Ed Discussion, and Perusall meet your teaching needs.

The feedback we received helps us understand the ways in which Canvas works well (most of you are fairly happy with it!), as well as some of the ways in which it falls short on usability and functionality.

One takeaway is that seemingly small issues, like not receiving an email copy of your announcement, can cause big frustrations. We completely understand and agree that Canvas is not always intuitive and we continue to advocate for improvements.

In an effort to make the use of Canvas a bit smoother, we also include a list of suggestions below for how you might approach some common tasks.

We know that a number of people are involved in managing a Canvas course site. Whether you are the instructor, a graduate student AI, the course coordinator, or a faculty assistant, the McGraw Center is happy to help you. A quick email or conversation with us might not only save you some time and headaches, but also show you how Canvas can be more useful in your course.

PS. If you didn’t have a chance to submit a response to the survey, it is not too late. Please take the survey here.

Spring ’23 courses

Spring courses are available in Canvas. To access them, go to canvas.princeton.edu and sign in with your NetID.

Combine your course sites

If you wish to combine to course sites, please email canvas@princeton.edu.

Import a past Canvas course

To import a previous version of your course into your spring ’23 site, select Import Course Content and then Copy a Canvas Course under Settings.

To avoid overriding the basic settings of your course, choose Select specific content and then select everything but Course Settings.

Please note that Reserves not be imported. To learn more, see Reserves in the Canvas Field Guide.

Set up your Gradebook and grading scheme

If you are using letter grades, Canvas allows you to set and apply a grading scheme to individual assignments and students’ final grades in a course.

Send an announcement

Communicate with your students by sending an announcement. Use the Post to feature to send the message to specific sections. If you’d like a copy of the announcement to your email, enable the Notification Settings under Account and select Notify immediately under Announcement Created By You.

Review and publish your course

Review your course in Student View to make sure your students see what you intend for them to see. When you are ready for your students to access your course, click Publish on the course home page.

Gradescope

We recommend that you Unpublish All Grades to limit students’ access to past assignments in Gradescope. The feature can be located in Course Settings. Once you unpublish all grades, students will lose access to grading (e.g. grades, feedback, and rubrics) but will still have access to their submitted files for non-online assignments.

Students’ alias email addresses may create multiple Gradescope accounts. We recommend that you remind your students to not change email addresses during the semester. If they plan to set up an alias email, they should do so at the beginning of the semester. Students can follow the Merging Accounts instructions to ensure that their Gradescope courses and assignments are in one place.

To reuse and copy existing assignments from a previous semester, you can select Duplicate Course from Course Settings. You can also use Duplicate Assignment to reuse or duplicate individual assignments for the same or a different course.

We recommend checking the assignment release and due dates after duplicating a course or assignment to ensure they are accurate.

Attendance tool

For small-enrollment courses, you can use the Attendance tool in Canvas to track course attendance electronically.

Using the Attendance tool will create an assignment in Gradebook. Every time you take roll call, the Attendance assignment column will be updated. You can enable the Attendance tool from the Navigation tab in Settings.

Office hours

As an alternative to Bookings, you can use the Scheduler in the Canvas Calendar to create office hours appointments for your students.

Go to Calendar in the left global navigation, then select the Assignment Group tab. Click the checkbox for the calendar to which you wish to add the appointment group. Set the time range and split it into multiple time slots by clicking the Go button. Additionally, you can specify how many students can sign up for each time slot by clicking the Limited each time slot checkbox and entering a number.

Once you publish the appointment group, your students can reserve time slots from the course calendar.

Meet McGraw’s Canvas team

Our instructional designers are happy to help course teams prepare their Canvas sites for teaching. We can help you strategize on how to take advantage of Canvas and integrated tools such as Gradescope, Ed Discussion, Perusall, iClicker Cloud and Panopto. We can advise on how to move content over from a previous semester on Canvas, help set up assignments, and configure the Gradebook. No question is too small or too big, and anyone who uses Canvas should feel free to get in touch with us!

You are welcome to e-mail us at canvas@princeton.edu with your questions or schedule a time to talk further.

Katie Bertel

Sr. Instructional Designer

Marie Li

Sr. Instructional Designer

Marija Naumoski

Sr. Instructional Designer

Courtney Volpe

Support and Training Analyst

Canvas Field Guide

Our Princeton-specific guide to Canvas has lots of useful information for faculty, preceptors, and staff.

Canvas 24/7 support

You can also reach Canvas’ 24/7 support by phone, email, or chat. You can find their contact information by clicking on the Help icon in the global navigation bar in Canvas.

Training sessions and office hours

We offer a range of training sessions for faculty, instructional staff, teaching assistants, and departmental staff.

During the first week of classes, we also offer daily open office hours on Zoom from 11:00 a.m. to noon and from 1:00-2:00 p.m. For the Zoom link, please look for the announcement inside Canvas.

Join a training session