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Daily Progress Updates

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

  • Action: eLearning was able to get Cengage, MacMillan, Labster, and WAMAP integrations working in Canvas.

    Terre and Doug are working with vendors as fast as they can to get LTIs up and running - the hold up is often on us waiting on the vendor to get back to us. For many LTIs, faculty can continue to work by logging directly into the vendor's site and setting up their classroom there. So, no need to wait on us.

  • Update: Canvas has moved to LTI 1.3, which causes vendors to change how they integrate their products with Canvas. So, the faculty's LTI may actually be installed, but the faculty will need to add it to their class differently. This is another change that would have happened without the merge - another coincidental timing issue. LTI 1.3, requires us to install at the top level using a Developer Key.

    What does this mean for you and the faculty?
    It means that they will most likely find the LTI when building an assignment by choosing External Tool under Submission Type and then looking for their Tool while some tools are still added to classes with a navigation button, and some are added by clicking the three dots next to the green +Module button at the top of the Modules page. There's not a lot of consistency from app to app. Therefore, it may be best for faculty to check in with their vendors direct for new instructions.

Wednesday, August 31, 2022

  • Action: eLearning sent out an email updating the community on the project's progress.

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

  • Action: eLearning worked with multiple departments to move more community shells over to the site.

  • Action: eLearning was able to get Connect4Education (C4E) connected and working inside of Canvas.

  • Action: Based on user feedback, eLearning updated the new Discovery Page to better explain how to log into Canvas and what to expect based on whether you use ctcLink credentials or guest login and password.

    Screenshot of Canvas Discovery Page with Login Information

Tuesday, August 30, 2022

  • Action: eLearning moved over some community shells and employee training/resource courses.

  • Action: eLearning continues to collaborate with vendors on getting our LTIs up and running. We are currently working on getting Cengage, McMillan, Packback, GG4L, SimNet, GDP, Connect, Labster, Norton, Voice Thread, Exam Soft, Aleks, Elsevier, and Pearson connected.

Monday, August 29, 2022

  • Action: eLearning turned on the new themes for archived sites. When accessing courses in the old sites, users will see clear yellow branding indicating that they are in the old site and content is read-only. eLearning also created the ability to brand courses extending beyond the Summer Quarter End Date to the new site theme so students who need to complete work do not feel they are in the wrong place.

  • Action: eLearning turned on integration with ctcLink. Courses will dynamically be added to Canvas as they appear in ctcLink. Enrollment will be turned on September 19, 2022 - one week before classes begin. For all intents and purposes, this means that Canvas is fully functioning and we are working on final integrations over the next few weeks.

  • Action: eLearning has Pearson and Videos on Demand integrations working in side of Canvas at this time.

  • Action: eLearning sent out a message reminded staff of drop-in hours if support is needed.

Friday, August 26, 2022

  • Action: eLearning sent out it's standard Friday Update email to all faculty and staff while also adding updates to Canvas Announcements.

  • Decision: With the Canvas Merge, eLearning has decided that it was time to activate Canvas New Quizzes! We want to assure you that using New Quizzes is still entirely optional for you. In other words, existing (“Classic”) quizzes are still active and available to you. When you open Quizzes, you will have a choice between Classic and New Quizzes. To activate the choice for New Quizzes, follow this tutorial.  

    Classic Quizzes will eventually be phased out by Canvas. Canvas is expected to stop supporting them in 2024. For that reason, we wanted to start a slow rollout and give you lots of time to start transitioning to New Quizzes.  

    To start our slow transition, your Instructional Designers will host a series of workshops introducing New Quizzes. The first workshop, focused on an overview of New Quizzes, will be Friday, October 7th, 1-2:30 pm on Zoom and will be recorded. Stay tuned for a calendar invite closer to the quarter. We will follow up that workshop with hybrid sessions at each college that will be focused on practicing and playing with New Quizzes. 

  • Action: Help menu in old sites reduce to a single link to the new Canvas site so that all help request go through it as a way of transition all interactions to the new site.
     
  • Action: Turned off the ability to create courses in the old sites so that course creation is limited to the new site by Canvas Administrators. Faculty can request Development and Sandbox shells as needed.
     
  • Update: As of this morning, we have 244,815 users ported over to the new site. This process took much longer than expected, but there was no disruption to service. Faculty and students were able to continue working in the background while this was going on.

Thursday, August 25, 2022

  • Action: eLearning met with McGraw Hill about Connect, GreatKeyboarding, and Simnet. These integrations will also be turned on soon. Faculty can still login directly to McGraw Hill Portal to work and eLearning and McGraw Hill will work to connect to Canvas soon.
     
  • Action: eLearning met with McGraw Hill about Aleks integration. The team is working to get the integration with Canvas turned on soon. However, faculty can continue to log into Aleks directly and connect to Canvas later.
     
  • Action: Zoom integration with Panopto was turned on and tested. Zoom video recordings are automatically transferred to a folder for the user in Panopto.
     
  • Action: Canvas Scheduler and Attendance tools were turned on and are now available in Canvas for tracking attendance and allowing students to schedule appointments with their instructors.
     
  • Update: As of this morning, we have 184,000 users ported over to the new site and still going.

Wednesday, August 24, 2022

  • Action: eLearning sent out a communication to the entire district with updates about what to expect when logging into the new site.
     
  • Action: eLearning drafted a new version of the login page for the old sites so that it will help people redirect to the new site if they accidentally find their way there. A draft example is below of what you will find if you end up at an old login page. 

    Old Login Page Updated Look with redirect to new site.
     
  • Action: eLearning updated main college websites' Canvas links to go to the new login page. eLearning will work to replace other links as we can. However, our backup plan of having redirects and links on old login pages should help everyone find their way to the new site if they happen to find themselves at an old page. We notified both our Website Team and IT of these updates directly.
     
  • Action: eLearning tested Panopto and accounts, access, and video linking between courses responded successfully. eLearning has contacted Panopto and asked for our accounts and North and Central to also be unified so the team can help faculty connect videos to their Fall 2022 courses.
  • Update: eLearning met with Panopto to unify accounts at South for testing purposes. This process took 30 minutes and we will begin testing immediately. If all goes as expected, we will ask Panopto to unify the accounts at both Central and North as well this evening. Once Panopto is up and running, we will look to connect the Zoom Pro Integration app with Canvas so all Zoom recordings forward to Panopto.
     
  • Update: As of this morning, we have 130,580 users ported over to the new site and still going.
     
  • Update:The new ctcLink login is now available for the new Seattle Canvas site. This will require all users to enter through a ctcLink portal and use their ctcLink ID and Password to access Canvas via a new login page called the "Discovery" page. We need to test this and once tested, we will forward all previous URLs to this page to ensure users are able to log into Canvas correctly. The Discovery page has a second "Guest" login link for those without ctcLink credentials. The goal is to reduce the number of guest login accounts to as few as possible. 
     
  • Discovery Page
    All Canvas users will be taken to this page first. Students, Faculty, and Staff with a ctcLink ID and Password will use the ctcLink Login while others will use the Guest Login.

    Screenshot of Discovery Page Screen
     
  • ctcLink Login Page
    From here, Students, Faculty, and Staff will use their ctcLink ID and Password to log into Canvas. We do not recommend bookmarking this page. If you wish to bookmark a URL, bookmark https://canvas.seattlecolleges.edu. 

    Screenshot of Login Screen
     
  • Guest Login Page
    Guest who do not have a ctcLink ID and Password will be provided a guest login account and provided with their Login ID and Password. Guests will use this login page to access Canvas.


    Screenshot of Guest Login Screen

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

  • Decision: It was decided that we will keep Course Name and Short Name locked so that there is consistency in name convention for students when looking for their courses in their Dashboard. Faculty wanting a different name can create or request help creating a Course Card that will display on their students' dashboards with a different title if desired. For example:

    Example Course Card Template with North Test Course and North's Mascot Treefrog on it.
     
  • Update: Canvas got our consortium logon trusts updated, to accommodate our new Canvas. This enables cross-college enrollments, such as into academic Direct Share courses and professional development trainings including ctcLink and EdTech courses.
     
  • Update: Our user accounts are still processing and may fully complete sometime Thursday (to guess based on current performance). After they complete, we’ll be able to re-enable Canvas Integration.  
     
  • Update: As of this morning, we have 98,430 users ported over to the new site and still going. We have received a few reports of faculty who have lost a portion of their Inbox messages. We were able to locate the messages in the Beta version of our sites, and have reported the issue to Canvas. This issue did not come up when testing the porting over of users two weeks ago.

Monday, August 22, 2022

  • Decision/Action: eLearning decided to turn on New Quizzes - this feature enhances the Canvas experience for quizzing. When this flag is enabled, the New Quizzes tool will be available. When creating a new quiz, faculty will be prompted with a question as to whether they want to build a Classic Quiz or New Quiz. Classic Quizzes will sunset early in 2024 and we want to give faculty plenty of time to convert their quizzes and try New Quizzes before making the switch. eLearning's Instructional Design Team are putting together trainings and support times to help faculty with New Quizzes. Note: It was tested that quizzes imported from an old site created in Classic Quizzes will import to the new course in the same format.
     
  • Action: eLearning submitted a request to Canvas to have our new site accessible from the Mobile App. 
     
  • Decision: eLearning decided to turn on the ability to Download Course Content as a set of HTML files. This allows for students having difficulty navigating the internet (connectivity issues, accessibility, etc.) to download content (pages, assignments, discussion descriptions) without the ability to interact. Quizzes and unpublished content is not included in the download. Faculty have the ability to turn this feature off at the course level as well. 
     
  • Action: eLearning added Fall 2022 term dates to Canvas so that students have access to their courses one week before the quarter begins - if instructor has published the course. 
     
  • Action: State Board manually added Fall 2022 shells to Canvas for now and enrolled faculty. We only had four account errors in doing this. eLearning is spot-checking shells and testing functionality at this time. 
     
  • Action: Development and Sandbox shells successfully uploaded. When enrolling faculty into these courses, there were only 4 accounts that caused an error out of 2,803 enrollments. Initial thought is that this is due to change in faculty assignment since last week when we created the upload file. 
     
  • Action: Fall 2022 Faculty accounts have been uploaded. Beginning to test now. Next steps are to upload Fall 2022 class and then enroll faculty into them. This will be more of a manual process as we wait for the remaining accounts to port over in the next few days.
     
  • Action: eLearning sent out an email message informing faculty and staff of the need to delay Fall 2022 course creation. Delayed until August 24, 2022. 
     
  • Update: User accounts are still be created and should be done sometime today. Currently, over 66,000 accounts have been added to the new site. Once all accounts are created, we will turn on integration for Fall 2022, which will create the Fall 2022 shells for faculty. We will also upload the Development and Sandbox shells once all users are in the system as well.

Friday, August 19, 2022

  • Action: eLearning team developed a communication plan for rollout that includes communicating 3 times per week with students, faculty, and staff for the first few weeks and tapering off as users fully transition. This supports a more structured approach to the existing communication we have been providing via email and our newsletter.
     
  • Action: User accounts continue to be ported over. 
     
  • Action: eLearning team corrected an error with Ally integration.
     
  • Action: eLearning created .csv upload file for creating Development and Sandbox Courses and automatically enrolling faculty into their respective courses and assigned the teacher role. Test both creation and enrollment uploads using one course from each college successfully. We will upload these files and create these courses early next week once user accounts are ported over.

Thursday, August 18, 2022

  • Action: User issue resolved and a sample of users added to the system successfully.
     
  • Update: Student, Faculty, and Staff user accounts will default to having our institution email as their default email in Canvas. Additional email address for notification purposes can be added in Canvas - Profile Settings.
     
  • Update: All Student, Faculty, and Staff who wish to use a preferred name in Canvas, will need to update their preferred name in ctcLink. The sample accounts ported over correctly included preferred names.
     
  • Action: eLearning team provided test faculty and student logins and two practice courses for testing purposes. 
     
  • Action: eLearning created a "Extended Access" sub-account in each of the college sites and themed each sub-account to the new college them inside the new site. This sub-account will be used for courses that extend beyond the quarter so that the "Archive Theme" doesn't make students feel they do not have the ability to complete classwork.

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

  • Update: Waiting for Canvas to fix user issue. Backup plan determined if needed. 

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

  • Update: Attempts to port accounts over to new site made.
     
  • Update: Attempts unsuccessful. Canvas contacted. 
     
  • Decision: eLearning will create Development shells for all courses faculty teach. For example, if I teach one section of ENG&101 and two sections of ENG&102, I will receive one Development shell for each subject (ENG&101 and ENG&102) to develop my content in. Faculty will have a process for contacting eLearning to create additional development shells if needed. eLearning will use the Enrollment report from ctcLink to determine courses and faculty.
     
  • Decision: eLearning will create one Sandbox shell for each faculty member to play in--a course shell that isn't connected to your official course.

Monday, August 15, 2022

  • Action: Canvas data integration from ctcLink turned off for existing three sites. This means that no enrollment additions or subtractions will be added to Summer 2022 courses. Faculty can contact eLearning for support if student enrollment adds or removals are needed.
     
  • Update: The goal for this week is to get accounts ported over to the new site without having to create new accounts while still providing access to the current sites.