Important details

Contents

Your dashboard

Log in at http://canvas.ucdavis.edu/. You will see a list of all your courses for the next two quarters. If you have courses with multiple sections, you may wish to combine these into a single Canvas course. Afterward, you may wish to declutter your dashboard by hiding next quarter's courses:

Courses list

To only show this quarter's courses, click on "Courses", then "All Courses", then click on the stars next to the courses that you'd like to have visible. More detailed instructions.

Notification settings

Canvas provides lots of options for where and how often you are notified of various kinds of student activity on Canvas. More importantly, Canvas provides students with these same options; it is reasonable to require that students keep up with the information you post on a Canvas course page.

Click on "Account", then "Notifications". You can choose to receive immediate updates, daily updates, weekly updates, or no updates about each kind of student activity. Hover over the name of an activity for a brief explanation.

The only activities likely to be relevant to you are "discussions" and "conversations"; nothing else is likely to generate any notifications.

Do be aware that students can choose to be notified any time you post grades, upload a file, etc. They can also choose to not get any notifications, but you should warn them not to do this. (See more under Communication, below.)

You can choose to receive email or text notifications at any email address or phone number you choose: to add addresses or numbers, click on "Account", then "Settings", and then see "Ways to Contact" on the far right.

Setting up your course

Students can't see the course in Canvas until you publish it. If you want to combine multiple sections into a single Canvas course, you should do this before entering any grades; everything else can be done at any time during the quarter.

Click on "Dashboard" or "Courses", then click on the course you want to start setting up.

Add TAs

To add TAs to your course, click on "People", which is your course roster tool in Canvas. Click on "+People" on the right, then enter a comma-separated list of TA email addresses. Change "Role" to TA or Lead TA, then click "Next".

The Lead TA role can do everything that you can do EXCEPT submit final grades.

The TA role can do everything that a Lead TA can do EXCEPT publish/unpublish the course and add other TAs to the course.

More details on permissions and roles.

Combine sections

If you have multiple sections of the same course, you should almost certainly combine them into a single Canvas course. After doing so, you can still set different due dates, view grades separately, email sections separately, and so on, if you like.

Customize student grade display

Canvas's default behavior is to show students letter grades based on a 90-80-70-60 scale, and to show students some basic statistics about other students' grades. You may wish to change this.

If class grades are likely to be curved, you might turn off letter grade display until you've decided the curve (e.g., at the end of the quarter).

To turn off letter grade display: Click on "Settings", then "Course Details". Then uncheck the "Enable course grading scheme" box.

To set your own letter grade cutoffs: check the "Enable course grading scheme" box from above. Then click on "view grading scheme", then "manage grading schemes", then "+Add grading scheme". Choose your cutoffs, then save it. Then go back to "view grading scheme", click on "Select Another Scheme", and choose what you just saved.

Beware: Even though your letter grade cutoffs are not explicitly shown to students, clever students can figure them out by playing around with the gradebook.

To hide statistics from students, click on "Settings", then "Course Details", then "more options" all the way at the bottom. Uncheck the "Hide grade distribution graphs from students" box. You may also uncheck the "Hide totals in student grades summary" box; if you do this, then students will be able to see any of their grades that you've posted, but won't be able to see their overall percentage.

While you're here, you may wish to check the "Disable comments on announcements" box.

When finished making changes, be sure to click "Update Course Details" at the bottom.

Set course homepage

When you (and students) open your Canvas course, the first thing you see is a list of "Recent Activity". You can change this to whatever you like. The easiest option is to make your own page within Canvas, but you can also embed an external website:

When you (and students) open your Canvas course, on the left is a menu with many tools. Some of these are grayed out because they have no content yet, but you can still access them. However, it's a good idea to hide from students any tools which you don't plan on using or don't want them to access. To choose which tools students can see, click on "Settings", then "Navigation". Here are brief descriptions of what each tool does, to help you decide which tools to let students access:

Inclusive Access electronic textbooks

Many lower-division courses now use "Inclusive Access" textbooks, so that students may have electronic textbook access. Students in these courses receive an email from the bookstore with information about this, though they often don't read it. If you teach MAT 16, 17, or 21, you should've gotten information from the bookstore about steps you need to take within Canvas to make the e-textbook available.

Set up gradebook

Setting up the gradebook is done through the "Assignments" tool, not the "Grades" tool. Each gradebook column corresponds to a Canvas assignment. So, for example, you'll need an assignment called "final exam", an assignment for each midterm exam, an assignment for each homework assignment, and so on.

It's helpful to create a group for each type of item. For example, you might have a group called "midterm exams", a group called "homework assignments", and so on. Click the "+Group" button to create a group.

If you plan to assign different weights to different types of items (e.g., final exam is 40% of grade, midterms are 30% of grade), click on the top-most settings wheel (next to "+Assignment"), then "Assignment Groups Weight". Check the box and assign percentages.

Creating individual assignments can be done later, either when you post a homework assignment within Canvas or when it's time to enter grades for an exam.

Important: there is NO way to "weight items equally" within a group, as there was in SmartSite. If you want each homework assignment to be worth the same proportion of the final grade, then each homework assignment must be out of the same total number of points. A 20-point homework assignment will be worth twice as much as a 10-point homework assignment. See below for some strategies for dealing with this.

Publish course

After you publish the course, enrolled students will be able to see the Canvas course. Publishing is reversible; you can "unpublish" a course as long as no grades have been entered.

To publish or unpublish, click on "Home" or the course title, then click on the "Publish" or "Unpublish" button under "Course Status" at the top right.

Using your course

Communication

Student view

To see what the Canvas course looks like from a student's perspective, click on "Settings", then "Student View" in the top right. This will create a "test student" and show you their perspective.

After you use Student View, your gradebook will create a row for "test student". You can enter grades for this test student from the gradebook, and then go back to Student View to see what grades look like from a student's perspective.

The test student's grades are not included in Canvas's own statistics. But if you're using an external spreadsheet to compute your own statistics, be sure to remove the test student row from your spreadsheet.

Enter grades

Each gradebook column corresponds to a Canvas assignment. So, in order to enter grades for any item, you must first create the item as an assignment. You can either create the assignment directly within Canvas, or import a spreadsheet into the gradebook.

View statistics

Canvas is not very good with this.

Grade student work in Canvas

Instead of having students turn in work on paper, consider having them upload it to Canvas. You (or your grader) can then grade it within Canvas from a computer or tablet. Advantages include saving paper, saving time on paper collection and distribution, and the ability to re-use comments.

To have students upload work to Canvas, create an assignment as above, but set "Submission Type" to "Online". You will also need to set a due date.

Once students start submitting their work, Canvas will notify you that their work needs to be graded, and will give you a link to start grading. It can be helpful for you (and for students) to create a basic rubric within Canvas.

Final grades

In order to submit final grades, you must replace any blank entries in the gradebook, un-mute any muted assignments and then decide on letter-grade cutoffs.

When ready to submit final grades, click on the settings wheel in the gradebook, then select "Sync grades to SIS". You will then be taken to the old final grade bubble sheet, at which point you can change grades to I or Y as appropriate.