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Canvas Help

Canvas Help and Tutorials

Take advantage of the Canvas Community for additional guidance. 

Dr. Dan Guo has also put together this one page document for the important links to get you started. 

Dr. Tracey Lamont (winner of the 2020 Creative Canvas Course Award) has provided a demonstration walk-through of her courses here

 

Each of these sections can be expanded or collapsed by clicking on the (v) icon to the right of each section. 

For more extensive directions, please see this page

 

All users sign into Canvas using the Microsoft SSO. If you cannot sign into the SSO, please contact the help desk from your Loyola email (support@loyno.edu). 

 

Faculty systems access instructions can be found here. 

Student access directions to all systems can be found here

 

 

Troubleshooting:

1. If your SSO password does not work, you may not be in the system yet (especially true if you are not teaching). Please contact the help desk. 

2. Faculty, if you can get into the SSO, but not Canvas please contact Erin Dupuis (edupuis@loyno.edu) or Jim Dugan (jdugan@loyno.edu). If you are a new faculty member, you will not have Canvas access until you are officially in the system. 

 

 

 

Canvas Instructor Guides: Beware, this is an extensive list of topics.  

Canvas Student Guides

Jim Dugan has also compiled a curated list of the more important guides/videos available here

We also have a Loyola video walkthrough for students. 

Also, see these webinars provided by Canvas and available on YouTube:

Create Quizzes in Canvas

Using the Gradebook

How to Use Assignments

Dan Guo has provided step-by-step instructions here (you must be signed into your Loyola Gmail)

If you would prefer a visual walkthrough, a video is also available

If you are having trouble with the templates, please refer to this guide

Glad you asked! You can use this very handy "Beginning and End of Course" checklist. 

If you are preparing to get your course ready, please see this checklist developed by Dan Guo. 

Can students see my course?

 

Keep in mind that you can also lock/unlock each module until a certain date. 

module lock

module lock

module lock

Canvas has removed the deadline to switch to New Quizzes according a most recent update on the New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes timeline page.

New Quizzes and Classic Quizzes Feature Comparison

Classic Quizzes Guides

New Quizzes FAQs and Guides

More information can be found on the Canvas New Quizzes Hub page.

Videos added to Kaltura will be auto-captioned. We strongly recommend using Kaltura for all videos added to Canvas. 

 

Adding via Canvas Editor

Adding Captions via Google Slides (video tutorial provided by Sheila Wilkinson)

Please refer to this guide for integrating zoom meetings with the calendar. 

 

For all things zoom, please visit our zoom help page. For canvas specific help, please scroll down on the zoom help page until you reach "using zoom with canvas". 

 

Note, if you receive an error on zoom within canvas that states, "user not found", you need a zoom account. Please contact edupuis@loyno.edu.

We often refer to the yellow global navigation. Does yours look blue? You probably have High UI checked off in your settings. If you want the Loyola branding and yellow navigation, you can turn this off under profile settings. Alternatively, you can always turn it on if the yellow/black text contrast is difficult for you to read. 

 

high contrast ui

If you do not want students to create their own discussion board threads/topics, you can disable this feature in one of two ways. 

1. In the course, go to "settings" in the blue navigation. Under description, click on "more options" and uncheck "let students create discussion topics".

more options

 

2. You can also edit this setting by clicking on "discussions" in your blue navigation. 

discussions

discussions

 

discussions

Do you want to allow students to contact you, but don't want to use your own personal number? The SSC is allowing faculty to use their Mongoose account. Fill out a request using this form

1. Faculty and students should never share their QR app code with others. This allows other people to sign into the account. 

2. Faculty can use self-enrollment in manually created courses by clicking that option under the course settings. You then share the URL, but that URL will only work for users in our Canvas system. This won’t be useful for regular courses courses, but might be useful for say, manually created department-level courses, student group “courses”, etc… For example, departments/faculty may want to create a course for all their advisees or majors to replace any in person "meet the major" or other similar events that build community and provide information.

3. Faculty cannot change their course names. 

4. Faculty can disable comments on their announcements. We do not have this disabled at the university level. If you don’t want students commenting on a course announcement, you should uncheck the “allow users to comment” box. 

5. Course storage quotas are set pretty high. Most faculty should not be exceeding that quota as it likely means you are posting large videos directly into Canvas, which you should not be doing. You should be streaming your video from the storage site (such as Kaltura). Student data (grades for example) are not counted toward course storage. 

6. If you receive a comment that a student wants to change their name, students should still be doing that in Colleague. That will get imported into Canvas. 

8. Faculty may find the scheduler really useful, especially since so many will have virtual office hours. You can use “You Can Book Me” or one of the others, but it’s also possible right in the course calendar: 

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-12920-how-do-i-add-a-scheduler-appointment-group-in-a-course-calendar

9. We have "quiz log auditing" turned on. This means faculty can view each student and what their behavior looked like while taking a quiz - including navigating away from the quiz screen. You may want to tell students this is an option if they want to encourage academic integrity. 

10. If you want updated syllabus language for Canvas, Dan has updated that in the graphic syllabus template and the standard syllabus template. Dan says that it's always good to go through everything and edit the content to suit you own courses as long as you have those sections there which were designed to align with QM standards. 

11. If faculty do not want to complete the full Canvas 101 course, they can go to “Help” and then “Training Services Portal”. This provides access to a shorter course called “Preparing to Launch”. These quicker training videos are also a good option for late hires or new adjuncts. 

12. Make sure students know about the “help” feature on the global navigation. We have added more resources there including chat and a hotline.