Fall 2024 has started, bringing with it exciting new features in Canvas to enhance your classroom experience! The Instructional Technologies team has got your back and is ready to help with any Canvas needs and questions as you get your courses up and ready to publish. We offer a variety of services, including workshops, individual appointments, general assistance, and other resources to get you ready for the new semester. Check out the guides and tips below to get started.
- Publish your syllabi and courses:
- Have you created your syllabus yet? Simple Syllabus is a recent update to our set of tools that integrates with Canvas and allows instructors to edit and publish syllabi with ease. We’ve got written instructions and other guides to help you through the process.
- Make sure your courses and syllabi are published by the first day of classes, as this allows students to begin creating their schedules for the semester and understand your expectations for the course.
- Remember that you don’t need to finalize all of your course materials before publishing your course in Canvas. Selectively publish matierials throughout the term by leaving specific modules, discussions, pages, assignments, and quizzes in a draft state until you are ready for your students to see them.
- Check out these new Canvas features:
- Discussions/Announcements Redesign: On July 20th, Canvas released an update that gave the Discussions and Announcements tools a new look. The update also came with a few new features as well, such as the ability for teachers and students to mention each other using an @ symbol followed by the person’s name; instructor-side discussion history to track edits/deletions; as well as quoting other users within your response.
- Assign-To Update: Canvas also released an update to their Assign To feature. This now allows instructors to assign non-graded items such as modules, pages, and announcements to specific students/sections in a course. This comes in handy when you need to assign course content to a specific set of users.
- Zoom Meeting Imports: Zoom’s Canvas integration is now able to import meetings across various courses with ease as well as disassociate meetings without having to delete the entire meeting. The feature could be very helpful when it comes to setting up your office hours amongst multiple courses.
- Keeping up with AI:
- We also have a new webpage dedicated to keeping you and your students up to date about anything AI. This includes various workshops, proper AI citation, as well as a running list of potential AI platforms that can help make tasks such as research a little easier. Interested? Click here to view more.
- Need a refresher of how Canvas works? Check out this video from Instructure on the functions of the Canvas interface.
- Stay up-to-date with our team:
- You’re already reading our blog- why not subscribe while you’re at it? Scroll to the bottom of this page, enter your FAU email address in the box to the bottom-left, and click that red Subscribe button.
- Visit our TechEvents Calendar frequently to see our schedule of workshops and events covering topics from beginner Canvas tutorials, to new update to our systems, grading, video lecture recording and video conferences in/out of the classroom.
- Do you feel like you need some help with your course(s)?
- Get one-on-one help from our staff by scheduling an appointment.
- If you’re facing a specific issue or have any technical difficulties, put in a help request with our team and get that problem solved!