Canvas Editing Guidelines and Flowchart

With the migration to Canvas from d2l, you might have noticed that instructors can now directly edit courses. If you spot a typo, you now have the ability to fix it, without having to make a special request to Extended Campus. The attached flowchart, which resulted from the work of a Canvas Editing Workgroup (comprised of members of different IL partner campuses), explains what items we can quickly and easily edit by ourselves, which items should involve discussion, and which need to wait until a course revision.

Collaborative Editing Flowchart

Canvas Migration Experience

Greetings from IL Instructor/Facilitator Rich Freese! I recently had the opportunity to review two courses as they migrate from d2l to Canvas. A few thoughts and observations:

1) Comparing the Canvas course in one tab and the d2l course in another makes for a very efficient way to check course content/layout accuracy. I also found this process was a great way to better understand how to navigate courses in Canvas.

2) If you find something that needs editing, click on the edit button on the top-right of the screen.

3) A very cool Canvas feature: if you’ve included links to youtube videos, you can preview and play them within Canvas. With d2l, links would simply open in YouTube in a new tab.

4) In general, the instructional designers did a great job importing the courses I worked with, and they also noted issues they encountered during the export/import for review. If you have quizzes/exams in your d2l course, that will require some additional reviewing, as the quizzes/exams don’t import/export smoothly.

For more resources about migrating to Canvas, go to:
https://ce.uwex.edu/dle

IL Canvas Webinar Recap

Independent Learning recently offered a webinar for our upcoming transition to the Canvas learning management system. That webinar can be viewed here:

https://ce.uwex.edu/dle/webinar-information-schedules

Scroll to the section titled “Recordings” and click on “June 1, 2018: Independent Learning.”

The webinar introduced how to navigate Canvas (view grades, course content, etc), some differences in terminology from d2l Brightspace to Canvas (Canvas has a “Dashboard” instead of “My Home,” “Assignments” instead of “Dropbox,” etc).

There was also an important discussion regarding the migration process from d2l to Canvas:

1) Instructional Designers will export courses from d2l and import them into Canvas, doing a first wave of clean-up; during the transition, items like hyperlinks, discussions, and quizzes might get messy or broken.

2) Instructional Designers will reach out to Instructors/Course Facilitators to help clean up those items above. In some cases, we’ll be making direct fixes – perhaps replacing a quiz question. In other cases, we’ll be providing clarification about course content. Please note: we’ll have three days to complete this. Given the tight time frame, Independent Learning will reach out to Instructors/Course Facilitators in the near future about when we’ll be available to complete this step.

3) A reviewer/editor will then look through each course.

4) After the review, Instructors/Course Facilitators will have one last chance to review the course and sign-off that the course is operational.

Various learning resources about navigating Canvas will be made available in the near future.