New to Canvas and not sure where to start? In this one-hour workshop, we will walk you through the essentials for building your first module! Learn about the features you might need to prepare your class including pages, assignments, discussions, and quizzes.
Instructors at UWGB can use Kaltura My Media to create, upload, and share videos in Canvas courses. Join us for a one-hour session where we will cover how to create and share engaging instructional videos with Kaltura’s easy-to-use media tools and unlimited storage space.
Maintaining an accurate gradebook in Canvas benefits students in any class modality. Bring your questions to this session as we explore the ins and outs of using the feature-rich Canvas gradebook.
Creating a Canvas course from scratch is a lot of work. That is true whether you are teaching fully online or using your Canvas course to supplement in-person instruction. Thank goodness, then, that Canvas courses don’t have to be one-time use! When you teach a course with Canvas for the second (or third, or fourth…) time, you can easily import your previous course’s content into the new term’s course to reap the benefits of your past hard work. Of course, the continuous iterative improvement you’ll strive to make in the new version of the course will still be important hard work, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from celebrating the ability to reuse content and work smarter. While importing content from a past course is easy, there are enough fine points and useful tricks that are worth knowing about to warrant a guide (like this) that can help you most efficiently bring your content forward and prepare it for the start of the new term. Even seasoned Canvas instructors may learn a few new tips for speeding up their semesterly workflow! Read on to learn the best ways to bring your course forward and get it ready for your new class.
When you want to import most of the content from a past course into your new Canvas course, Canvas’s Course Import tool makes the job quick and easy. It may be tempting to do so, but you should never manually copy and paste content from one Canvas course to another—copying and pasting between courses commonly results in images and links that seem to work for you but will be broken for your students. Always use the Course Import tool (instructions below) or Canvas’s “Copy To…” feature to copy content between courses.
While researching for this article, we discovered an excellent video tutorial on importing Canvas content and preparing it in the new course produced by Chapman University. This video truly hits all the major points we want to make with this article, so we highly recommend it for anyone who prefers to watch a video over working through text-based instructions and for anyone who’d like to reinforce what they have read on this page.
To begin importing content into your new course with the Course Import tool, navigate to the home page of your new (blank) Canvas course and select the Import Existing Content button, which can be found in the stack of buttons on the right side of the page.
On the Import Content screen, perform the following steps:
If you followed our recommendation and chose the Select specific content option, Canvas is now waiting for you to make your content selection (if you instead chose All content the import process begins running immediately). Carefully selecting which content to copy during the import process can save you time in the long run because it is easier to omit content during the import than it is to individually track down and delete unwanted items in your course later. To choose which content to import, select the Select Content button found next to the top item in the Current Jobs list. This button opens a menu where you can make your selections.
You can select entire content types to import or expand each content type to select items individually. Use the checkboxes to select the content types and individual items for import.
Here are a few things to consider while selecting content:
Once you’ve checked the boxes of all the content you want to import, select the Select Content button to start the import. Most import jobs finish within a few minutes.
Now that you have a new course full of content from the past term, here are the next steps for getting that course ready to launch:
The most important thing to take care of after your import is adjusting the dates of the assignments, events, and to-do list items copied over from your previous course. Canvas has two great tools to help you adjust dates quickly.
An extremely useful tool for adjusting course due dates hides within the options menu of the Assignments Index page of your course. Select Assignments in your course navigation menu and then select the three-dots Options icon and Edit Assignment Dates to open a page that shows a list of all assignments with fields for adjusting each assignment’s due date and availability dates. You can adjust dates for all your assignments on this single page and then select the Save button to apply the changes. This page also has a Batch Edit button with which you can quickly shift the dates of all or a subset of selected assignments forward or back any number of days. To find out more, read the Canvas Instructor Guide page on batch editing assignment dates.
Your course’s calendar is another place where you can quickly adjust due dates for assignments and to-do dates for pages, ungraded assignments, and calendar events. This method is great if you like to work with a visual representation of your course’s schedule. A quick way to open your Canvas calendar with only a single course’s items shown is to select the View Calendar link that can be found next to “Coming Up” in the right-hand sidebar of that course’s home page.
In the monthly calendar view you can drag and drop an item from one day to another to change its due date (for assignments) or its to-do date (for ungraded items). If you want to adjust the time of day of a due or to-do date or change the date itself without dragging and dropping, select it on your calendar and then select the Edit button in the pop-up window to reveal a menu where you can quickly make those adjustments.
When changing assignment due dates from the calendar, keep in mind that dragging and dropping an assignment only changes its due date and it does not also adjust the availability dates. If you try to drag and drop an assignment to a date that falls outside of its availability dates, Canvas won’t accept the change and will show an error message which references “locked dates.” When working with assignments that use availability dates, we recommend that you make the date edits from the batch edit page or while editing assignments individually.
After you have edited the due and to-do dates, we recommend that you skim through your course content to check for any dates that you have manually typed in pages and assignment instructions. If you uploaded your syllabus or any activity instructions as a file, replace those files with updated versions. Deleting a previously imported file from your new course does not also delete that file form its original course, so you can keep your course tidy by deleting outdated files while still having the peace of mind that the old files are safely backed up in your past course. While reviewing your course page by page may be the most thorough way to scan it for written dates and other outdated content, searching for prior years or months (or month abbreviations) with the Search tool may speed up your ability to identify content that needs updating.
Run the course link validator from your course settings page to check for any links that may have broken during your course import or while you were replacing files. We recommend running the validator each time you make a significant change to a course.
If you imported announcements from your previous course, edit them and enable the delay posting feature to schedule them to post at a future date. Using the delay posting feature with imported announcements is important because it ensures students receive a notification for the announcement. For students to get a notification for an announcement, you need to pick a delayed posting date that will fall sometime after you publish the course.
Check any external tool assignments and links in your course to make sure that they imported properly and are working as intended in the new course. Most tools support being copied from course to course with the Canvas Course Import tool, but exactly how each tool handles being copied will differ.
If you schedule Zoom meetings in your course, those meetings do not copy from course to course, so you will need to schedule new Zoom meetings in the new course. If you pasted any Zoom join links in a page in an introductory module, make sure to replace those links after scheduling the new meetings.
If you prefer to prevent students from working too far ahead by only having a few modules available at the start of the course and then releasing additional modules as the course progresses, you can add “lock until” dates to your modules to schedule the release of course content. Keep in mind that, while both features control student access to course content, module locking works separately from publishing and unpublishing content items. For the “lock until” date setting on a module to release content as intended, you must keep the module and its module items published.
If you prefer to release content manually instead of scheduling it by date, you can unpublish the later modules of your course and then manually publish them as you go. If you choose to keep modules unpublished and then publish them gradually as you go, we recommend keeping the module items within those modules published. This technique makes sure that while students won’t be able to access those items, they will still be able to see the due and to-do dates for those items on the course calendar, which will help them plan for upcoming weeks.
Before publishing your Canvas course, we recommend quickly checking your assignments and gradebook to make sure the following settings are configured as you need them:
We hope this guide helps you go from a blank course to being publish-ready more quickly each term. If you get stuck while working on any steps in this guide, reaching out to Canvas 24/7 support is often the fastest way to get immediate help and overcome technical obstacles. Spending less time on these term-to-term Canvas housekeeping tasks can free up more of your time to work on improvements and new ideas for your instruction. If you need a partner in thinking through the design of your courses, CATL is here to help, and we encourage you to sign up for a consultation or to send us an email at catl@uwgb.edu.
What language practices do your students bring to our UWGB community? How do you value and sustain those language practices in your classrooms and other interactions with students? This follow-up to the “Language Inclusivity at UWGB” workshop led by Dr. Cory Mathieu, 2022-23 EDI Consultant, on April 14, 2023, includes the session recording, an event summary, key takeaways, and resources for further reading.
Text by Edith Mendez and Cory Mathieu
Language is fundamental to the teaching and learning that occurs in every classroom at UWGB. All academic content is construed by language. However, our students use language to not only communicate academic concepts and ideas, but also as a representation of their identity, their culture, and their sense of belonging. When our students’ language practices – the myriad ways they use language – are not upheld, uplifted, and valued in our classrooms, they can feel that they themselves are unwelcome or unaccepted in our academic spaces.
Standard language ideologies, or beliefs that certain varieties of language are more academic, more intelligent, or, simply, more correct, are deeply ingrained in our society and, especially, in academia. Students who do not speak or write ‘standard English’ are often expected to adjust their language practices to be successful, both in academics and beyond. This causes many issues, not only because their language is deemed inferior but because of the intersectionality of language and identity. Our students’ character, who they are as individuals, is then also linked to these negative connotations. Considerable research has shown that students of color and multilingual students are most frequently affected by these ideologies as their language practices are most regularly deemed to be ‘non-standard’ by those in positions of power.
Through this workshop, we further describe and debunk standard language ideologies while also offering insight as to how this issue is actively affecting UWGB students, not only academically but in terms of their identities and sense of belonging. We do so in order to offer alternative perspectives, policies, practices that are linguistically inclusive, actively welcoming and valuing the language, experiences, knowledge, capabilities, and strengths all students bring to our classrooms.