Newsletter Archive - Edition 10

We wanted to remind you that with the upcoming merge from three Canvas sites to one you will not be seeing your fall shells until we move to the new site in mid to late August.

In March of 2021, the Presidents and Chancellor made the decision to merge the three eLearning teams. Though merging Canvas has been in discussion for several years, this move to a single team provided the resources necessary to bring the project to fruition.

By combining our three Canvas sites into a single site, we provide:

• A single-entry point for all courses at Seattle Colleges.

• A reduction of multiple accounts for students and faculty across the colleges.

• The ability for eLearning to provide faster support to students, faculty, and staff.

• Greater consistency across student and faculty experiences in Canvas.

If you want to start working on your fall classes now, we can create new master shells for you. Just submit a request to eLearning@seattlecolleges.edu

More information about the merge project as well as videos demonstrating our testing of different scenarios, including course copying from your old Canvas site to the new one.

See the project homepage and this newsletter for future updates.

Start of Quarter Canvas Checklist

Course Set-Up

Import content into your course shell

You can import content into your new shell from a previously created course, or a course export package.

When importing content, you can select what content you want to import. You can leave out old announcements and strip out due dates. These options can save you considerable time.

• How do I import content from another Canvas course?

• How do I import a Canvas course export package?

If using the Adjust Beginning and Ending Dates option end up overlapping the due dates for some assignments, add an extra week for the ending date.

Course Settings

Student Options

Make sure that the options for the following are set up the way that you want them. These are global options for the course, and can be found on the Course Settings page, on the Course Details tab, at the bottom, under “more options” How do I change additional options for students in my course?

• Let students attach files to discussions

• Let students create discussion topics

• Let students edit or delete their own discussion posts

• Let students organize their own groups

• Hide totals in student grades summary

• Hide grade distribution graphs from students

• Disable comments on announcements

Course Navigation

Make sure that the course navigation is customized correctly.

• How do I reorder and hide Course Navigation links?

Pages

• Check to see that all pages that should be published are published.

• Test to see if links are still functional.

• Links to outside content may be dead, and content may need to be replaced.

• Links to internal content should be stable, but it is worth checking them.

Modules

• Check that all modules that should be published are published. If a module is unpublished, all the content in the module will be locked and unavailable to students.

• Check that unlock dates, prerequisites and completion requirements are configured correctly.

• It is worth double-checking Modules in Student View—you will be able to clearly tell what is locked down (it will be grayed-out, and you will not be able to click on it), while unpublished modules will be completely invisible.

• Check that external URLs and external tools are still functioning properly.

Assignments

• Make sure that all assignments are published, are in the correct group, and that group weighting, if used, is configured correctly.

• How do I weight the final grade based on Assignment Groups?

• Check that all due dates are correct.

• Update “Available from” and “Available until” dates if you use them. The date change tool does not change these dates when you import content into a new course shell.

• Delete any empty assignment groups that are called “Assignments.” A new, empty group is automatically created when the course shell is created. This empty group can create a confusing view on the Grades page for students.

Announcements

• Delete previous announcements that you do not plan to reuse. Old announcements are imported from previous versions of a course.

• Change the “Delay posting” dates on announcements that you plan to reuse.

• Note that any announcements that you reuse will still have the original date that you composed the announcement as their posting date. This can create confusion for students.

Discussions

Delete any discussions that students from a previous course may have started. Student-initiated discussions become a part of the course and may need to be removed.

Files

Check file availability settings. If you release files based on dates, make sure that the dates are correct.

Groups

Recreate any necessary group sets. Groups do not export/import as part of your course and must be recreated each time. If you have group assignments, those assignments must be associated with the recreated group sets.

Panopto

• If you have integrated Panopto videos into your course, you may need to change the permissions on your videos or move the videos from the Panopto folder for your old course into your new course.

• How do I move videos in Panopto
  Note that it is better to move videos to Panopto than to copy them. Copying will create an updated version of the video, which takes time. Copying will also require you to update all your links in your course. Moving videos will just shift the permissions of the existing video files to the new course.

• If you are recording a new Panopto video, you must “Publish” your Canvas course first before you are able to record a new video.

Publish your course by the first day of the term.

Be sure to publish your course. Otherwise, students will not see your course.

In fact, publishing the course before the first day of the quarter gives the students enough time to get ready with textbooks and so forth. The students will not be able to post or submit until the first day.

Please note that once courses are published, they cannot be unpublished. Although you may add updated content to your course, students will still have access to any content in the course that you have made visible to them.

In early July 2022, we find ourselves, once again, in a time of great unease in the world. On multiple fronts we see rights being taken away, continuous gun violence impacting communities, and all with the COVID pandemic still looming over us. All this is hard, and while these moments of political unrest and violence occur seemingly every day, we are asked to keep on going, even though they all have deep impacts on our everyday work and educational lives. For those of us teaching and/or directly working with students in many ways, we must both take care of ourselves and consider the context in which students are living. We live in a world of constant trauma, that everyone experiences differently, in both direct and indirect ways. While we cannot control what is happening in the outside world for students, we do have the ability to create spaces that respond to trauma and acknowledge its existence, while helping students reach goals.

Janice Carello’s principles for trauma-informed postsecondary teaching and learning offers the basic tenets of thinking about trauma while working with students. The principals are paraphrased as:

• Physical, Emotional, Social, & Academic Safety. Foster an atmosphere that respects individuals’ needs for safety, respect, and acceptance, including feeling safe to make and learn from mistakes.

• Trustworthiness & Transparency. Establish trust by making expectations clear, operating transparently, being consistent and reliable, and maintaining appropriate boundaries.

• Support & Connection. Facilitate peer support and connection with appropriate resources.

• Collaboration & Mutuality. Create opportunities for input, power-sharing, and cooperative decision-making.

• Empowerment, Voice, & Choice. Build-in flexibility and choices where possible so learners can build competence and confidence making decisions for themselves.

• Social Justice. Strive together to be aware of and responsive to intersecting dynamics of privilege, power, and oppression to honor each person’s experiences and identities.

• Resilience, Growth, & Change. Emphasize strengths and resilience over deficiencies and pathology. Provide feedback to convey optimism and facilitate growth.

The ACRL also offers more strategies to consider as smaller everyday practices that help students feel safer in their educational spaces and allow for learning to happen as we navigate this stressful world. As always, Instructional Designers are available to faculty over the summer, and you can book a time with us on our faculty support page.

Recommended Reading: Building a Trauma-Responsive Educational Practice: Lessons from a Corrections Classroom By Em Daniels