Blog

Karen Brennan

 

Like most faculty at HGSE, Karen Brennan has made some significant adjustments in the transition from iSites to Canvas. She reminisced, “I really came to love iSites, in a perverse way.” Karen’s first Canvas site honored The iSites Way, with many page links in the left-hand navigation column. As she has iterated on that design, working within the constraints of the Canvas platform, she has come to develop one of the most popular site designs here at HGSE.... Read more about Karen Brennan

Limitations of Blind Grading

Description: Blind grading works well so long as you only grade within SpeedGrader. While you are able to hide the student names in the Gradebook (Grades), student names will appear again if you refresh the page within the SpeedGrader.

Workaroound: Coordinate with teaching staff such that all grading remains in the same space.

Custom navigation links

Description: If a course has implemented custom navigation links to the left-hand navigation menu, those links will not transfer over if the course is copied/migrated to a new course shell.

Workaround: Centralize all custom links that are intended to appear on the left-hand navigation menu on a single page such as the course homepage to allow students to easily access the links as needed. This will also improve ease of administration for teaching staff when needing to make changes to links. In addition this results in a less cluttered left-hand...

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Kristin Foster

Ever since the beginning of the Canvas migration, it was clear that Kristin Foster found something fulfilling in her work with Canvas. "It's really a creative outlet for me, someplace where I feel that I have a lot of freedom." Kristin has harnessed this enthusiasm for design, informed by her past experience in HTML, to venture far beyond the scope of her role as Faculty Assistant.

In our work with faculty and staff transitioning from iSites to Canvas, we have come to appreciate the importance of creating a Canvas experience that is similar enough to be familiar to iSites. Kristin,...

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Transition To: The New Canvas UI

Released by Instructure in August 2015, the new Canvas user interface (UI) provides a more streamlined view of Canvas by restructuring navigation menus and offering a more content-centric focus. Currently the new UI is only available as a option that must be enabled by administrators of the institution. The new Canvas UI will replace the current (legacy) UI on May 31st, 2016.

The current Canvas UI has navigation divided into two areas: Global navigation on the top, and Course navigation on the left-hand side. See the image below for reference:

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Introducing the Course Information Tool

We are excited to announce that the days of copying and pasting your course description and meeting times are now over!  Starting now, you are able to populate Canvas sites with course information that will automatically feed and update with any changes directly from the registrar. 

You can add any or all of this information almost anywhere in your Canvas site because the Course Information Tool is inserted within the Rich Content Editor. 

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New Canvas Features Coming Soon

We are excited to announce two new Canvas features that are nearing release by our friends at Harvard Teaching and Learning Technologies. 

The first feature is a tool to provide more autonomy to Faculty when migrating files from previous course iSites.  Once released, anyone with a teacher-level role in a Canvas course (this includes Faculty, FSS, and TFs) will be able to copy the files from a previous semester's iSite, into the current semester's Canvas course.  Once copied over, files and readings can be re-used without having to upload everything manually.

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