Navigating Canvas at Columbia College: A Comprehensive Guide

Canvas is the central learning management system (LMS) used by Columbia College faculty to manage their courses. It serves as a hub where students can access and engage with all course materials, including syllabi, assignments, resources, grades, and other essential information. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of utilizing Canvas and its integrated tools to enhance the teaching and learning experience at Columbia College.

Leveraging Canvas Course Templates

Academic Technology has developed several course templates to aid instructors in building their courses within Canvas. These templates, available on Canvas Commons, include options for a full 15-week course, an 8-week course, and a single course module. Instructors can import these templates into their courses from the Canvas Commons and customize them with their own content. Previewing the templates in the Commons before importing them into a course is also possible.

Enhancing Engagement with Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)

One of the key benefits of Canvas is the variety of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) tools that can be integrated into courses. LTI is the practice of linking external content, resources, and applications to learning platforms. Some of the LTIs currently available in Canvas include:

Auralia & Musition
Big Blue Button
Cengage Learning MindLinks
GoReact
Khan Academy
LibGuides
McGraw Hill Connect
Microsoft Office 365
NoteFlight
Panopto
Pearson MyLab & Mastering
Pearson Revel
Vimeo
Wiley Plus
YouTube
Zoom

Integrating Textbook Providers

Academic Technology has facilitated integrations within Canvas with multiple textbook providers, including McGraw Hill, Cengage, Wiley, and Pearson, streamlining access to course materials for students.

Utilizing Microsoft Office 365

All faculty, staff, and students at Columbia College have access to Office 365 accounts, which include several downloads of Microsoft 365. To download these copies, users need to log in to their Office 365 account, click on the circle at the top-right with their profile link, and then select the "Office apps & devices" option. From there, they will find an option to install Office 365. The Adobe Creative Cloud applications are also available to all faculty, staff, and students and are accessible through Office 365. An instructional guide demonstrates how to access the Adobe Creative Cloud within Office 365.

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Employing Panopto for Lecture Capture and Streaming

Panopto is a lecture capturing and streaming service for audio and video-related content that includes interactive features. Fully integrated with Canvas courses, Panopto offers a central location for digital assets, including Zoom cloud recordings, lecture recordings, screen capture recordings, and other audio or video recordings. Key features of Panopto include screen and lecture recording capabilities, robust video search, closed captioning, and video statistics. As a reminder, for video files that you have created, you may upload them to Panopto and then post it to your Canvas course.

Leveraging Zoom for Video Communication

Columbia College Chicago provides Zoom Pro accounts to all faculty, staff, and students. Zoom is a video communications tool that enables users to host video conference calls with students, staff, and classmates. Features such as screen sharing, white boards, polling, chat, and captioning make Zoom a valuable tool for remote communication, collaboration, and online lecture delivery. Zoom is also integrated within each Canvas course, allowing instructors to schedule meetings directly from their Canvas courses for students to join.

Understanding Qwickly for Attendance Tracking

Qwickly is an attendance-taking tool that can be used within Canvas courses. It offers multiple attendance-taking methods, including a feature that allows students to check in on the Canvas Student app or a browser. Qwickly also allows instructors to clearly view holistic records of student attendance, as well as total counts of absences within a course.

Using YuJa for Video Management

YuJa is a video tool embedded into every Canvas course. It can be accessed by clicking "YuJa" from the course menu. YuJa allows you to enable auto-captions from the Accessibility menu. Once enabled, captions should be edited for accuracy by going to the video, clicking "Edit" to go to the video editor, and then turning on captions with the captions button.

Utilizing Turnitin for Plagiarism Detection

Once Turnitin is enabled, a "Similarity Report" becomes available, indicating areas where text has been copied, as well as the source. It's important to remember that a high score may not always indicate intentional copying but could instead reflect a student learning how to cite sources.

Exploring Online Collaboration Tools

Online collaboration tools, such as Miro, Mural, and Padlet, can effectively facilitate ideation, collaboration, group work, project management, and research mapping. These tools are used by professionals in various industries and fields.

Padlet

Padlet allows you to ask questions and poll students in real time, both in the classroom and during an online class. You can host asynchronous discussion and voting, and create kanban boards and concept maps. Columbia College will not be renewing Padlet in 2025, so be aware of this change. Right now, there is a private portal for Columbia College that you can embed on Canvas. If you want a license to create private padlets for your classes, you should request it.

WeVideo

WeVideo is a browser-based video-editing tool that can be useful for creating short, snappy edits of recorded video content. If you would like to use WeVideo in your class, make sure that there are enough licenses.

Ensuring Accessibility

Zoom has automatic captions that you can enable to make sure your video is accessible. The college has a limited number of Zoom licenses. To see if a license is available, reach out to the provost's office.

LockDown Browser Troubleshooting

If you've set up your quizzes with New Quizzes in Canvas, the biggest difference is in how your students must access the browser. If you'd like access to this tool, please reach out to Educational Technology to request the link to access. If you encounter issues when downloading or installing the LockDown Browser, consider these troubleshooting steps:

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Are you downloading from the correct site?
Is there an error opening the download?
Does it indicate you don’t have permission to download? Ensure you’re on a device you own or have admin control over.
Are you trying to download on an iPad?

If you encounter another error when installing the browser, write down the error exactly as written, then search for the error in quotes on Google (e.g., "error" lockdown browser).

Comparing Zoom and Teams

Academic Technology has created a Zoom and Teams comparison chart to provide a comprehensive comparison of the features available within Zoom and Microsoft Teams. This can help faculty and staff choose the most appropriate tool for their needs. An introductory course for Microsoft Teams shows the essentials of using Teams, starting with basic setup, creating new teams, and joining existing teams. To learn more about Microsoft Teams, visit the Microsoft Teams section of the Information Technology site.

tags: #columbia #college #canvas #guide