Countdown to Canvas: 10 weeks to go

To: All faculty

Blackboard and Moodle will no longer be options for instruction after the spring semester. The official end of our licenses providing access to Blackboard and Moodle is June 30. Please make sure you have extracted all content from all classes for rebuilding in Canvas by then.

This week the final 4-week online MiraCosta Introduction to Teaching with Canvas class begins. Learn more and sign up if you’re interested.
For those who have signed up, watch for an email later today or tomorrow on how to get started.

Next week I’ll start sending more detailed tips about moving classes into Canvas for those who still have that work ahead of them.

Jim Julius, Ed.D.
Faculty Director, Online Education

Filtering your Roster List by Role in Canvas People

By default the People tool will display all users enrolled in your Canvas course. You can filter the users by role to obtain the count of users in that role as well as Last Activity and Total Activity.

From within a Canvas Course:

  1. Click on Peoplepeople-1
  2. Click on All Rolespeople2
  3. Select the specific role. The count will be displayed to the right of the role name.people3

 

Selectively Subscribing to a Canvas Discussion Board

Here is a video, from Dr. Robert Kelley, that covers how faculty can selectively subscribe to a discussion board in Canvas (choosing immediate or daily/weekly summary).  The hack is to use a separate student Canvas account, with notifications set up in the student account as desired (immediate or daily/weekly summary).

Video: https://youtu.be/21VOacuxjl8

For example, this approach has application for faculty who would like to provide an ‘Ask A Question’ discussion board for their class (and receive notifications in their inbox for request for help) without being notified all the time for any discussion board post.

Copying into Canvas from Blackboard or Canvas

MiraCosta College has transitioned from Blackboard to Canvas. Starting in summer 2018, Canvas is the sole supported course management system for MiraCosta classes.

Canvas to Canvas

If you are teaching with Canvas, and/or you have created content within a Canvas course you can copy the entire course or parts of the course into one Canvas course from another.

Blackboard to Canvas

When moving your course from Blackboard to Canvas, it is recommended to only export parts, not all, of your Blackboard course. Hopefully you exported what you needed prior to the close of Blackboard at MiraCosta. If you discover you still need to export material from Blackboard, contact Karen Turpin for assistance.

These documents will help explain the process.

Content from Blackboard that is most likely to import well into Canvas

  • Announcements
  • Assignments
  • Discussion Boards – Only discussion prompts will transfer over.
  • Tests, Surveys and Pools – These will transfer and be located in the Quizzes section of Canvas. Only multiple choice, fill in the blanks, essay, matching, numerical and formal will transfer. If not supported by Canvas, the question becomes a text only question.

For most other content and activities, it’s best to re-create/re-upload within Canvas. If you try to import entire courses or content areas into Canvas from Blackboard the work to re-organize and clean up the results generally exceeds the work to rebuild. Keep in mind that you can copy-paste text from Blackboard into Canvas – you don’t need to literally retype everything. It’s recommended that you use the “Paste and Match Style” command in your browser’s Edit menu, or first paste into an intermediate program where you can convert to unstyled text, to ensure that you don’t paste in unwanted code.

We have training classes and videos with ideas for Canvas. Check out the Canvas Information & Resources page.

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