What is Your Favorite Feature of Canvas?
By Cynthia Rutz, Director of Faculty Development, CITAL
Many of you are trying the Canvas LMS for the first time this semester. So we asked you what features of Canvas you have found work best for teaching and learning in your classes. Twelve of you responded. Here are some of the features that your colleagues liked best.
Canvas Studio
Sara Story (OT) is a big fan of Canvas Studio, which allows “cloud-based storage of videos as well as transcripts of the videos/lectures.” (Note that automatic captioning only works for content created in Studio.) Sara especially appreciates the “Insights” feature that helps instructors track which students have viewed the recordings and how much time they spend on them. Betsy Burow-Flak (English) has found that Studio works well for making instructional videos, “especially if you want to use both webcam and screen capture.” Sonja Streuber (CIS) likes that her students can use Studio to “post demonstration videos of their homework, such as coding assignments, and they can comment (by text or video) on other students’ videos as well. All they need is a webcam.”
Calendar and Due Dates
Scott Guffey (VUE) has found the calendar feature useful for making color-coded due dates for assignments. Jesse Sestito (ME) appreciates the ability to have multiple due dates for different individuals, groups, or sections. Assignment due dates can easily be changed by using the drag and drop feature on the calendar.
Modules
Alberto Lopez Martin (WLC) appreciates how intuitive and clean the Modules section is. He is teaching a class for the first time without a textbook and he likes that “the Modules allowed me to use a combination of links, embedded videos, and course files to quickly post all the content for the first unit.” He finds that the Modules make it easy for students to navigate, “resembling the interface of an electronic textbook.” Natalie Krivas (English) also likes how user-friendly the Modules are. Once she creates a Module for a given week, “all I have to do is hit the ‘+’ sign and I can create an assignment, upload a file, or attach a link directly from that Module.” Jesse Sestito (ME) uses Modules to set up self-guided training for his students in the 3D Printing Lab. “I can lock progress in a module until students satisfy certain requirements. Students can go through a checklist of training as they become certified in the lab.”
Grading
Abbie Thompson (Psychology) reports that “in the past my students have struggled to understand weighted grades, so they really love the ‘What If?’ feature. This feature lets them see what their grade in the course would be if they got a different score on a given assignment.” The grading feature that Tiffany Bell (Communication) likes best is “that we can record video/audio to give student feedback. It’s cool!”
Student View and Test Student
Stacy Maugans (Music) likes that the Student View feature is available on any page,which helps her “identify any problems, such as when I forgot to indicate ‘file upload’ for an assignment or forgot to publish an entire module.” She also uses the Test Student feature so she can, for example, take a quiz as one of her students “to see exactly what feedback is given for correct and incorrect answers.”
Push Notifications
Betsy Burow-Flak (English) likes this feature that allows you to know when students are using the Inbox to contact you. She has two tips: (1) download the Canvas mobile app if you want to get these notifications via text. (2) Note that these notifications do not come from an individual student’s email address, but rather from Canvas@Valpo (notifications@instructure.com).
Roll Call Attendance
Lauren Sestito (ME) has found this feature useful because “you can easily record attendance where both you and students can see the records. You can even arrange student names based on where they sit in the classroom to help make taking attendance easier.” Terri Gingerich (CONHP) also likes this new seating chart feature because “it allows me to learn names and faces of students quickly.” Terri points out that this feature works great if you have only one section, but it does not work for merged (cross-listed) sections.
Assignments
Jesse Sestito (ME) appreciates how the Assignments page is laid out so that you can easily see how the assignments are divided among different categories: “This is useful for me when adding assignments and useful for my students when they are viewing them.” Alberto Lopez Martin (WLC) has his students use the built-in Record/Upload Media Tool to record speaking assignments. He finds that this feature works much better than it it did in Blackboard. Natalie Krivas (English) appreciates that assignments can be grouped and then weighted by group: “This takes a huge chunk of manual labor in calculating weights off my plate.”
Peer Review Groups Using the People Tab
Scott Guffey (VUE) says that his biggest experiment has been organizing student groups by using the People tab on the main page. “For our peer reviews, each group has access to their own separate web page, including a private discussion board. This made it much easier to set up peer review groups than it was in BlackBoard.”
Final Note:
Canvas prides itself on being a collaborative platform with users. So if you’d like to suggest features that Canvas should add to the platform, just click on this link: Canvas Ideas and Themes
Also, if you are new to Canvas and would like to learn more about any of these tools, please contact us and we can walk you through some of these exciting features. Just email us at CITAL@valpo.edu.