Teaching Teams & Staff

Not natively but we have written a tool to do this for you. Just send an email to canvas@gse.harvard.edu with the course name and assignment name and we'll send you a document and/or csv file with all the comments for an assignment, divided student by student.

The default behavior for Panopto is to have one assignments folder operating for a course at any one time. You can close an assignments folder, preventing further student submissions, and then create another one.

A workaround allowing for more than one open assignments folder to exist at the same time is to create subfolders within the base folder, each of which can have its own assignments folder.

During course preview period, course sites should be set to "Institution" visibility. However, we appreciate that some courses have significant interest from students from partner institutions such as MIT and faculty may wish to allow such students to access their Canvas course site during the course preview period.

In order to do this, you have two options:

1. Set the course site "public", but only publish the Homepage. In other words, your site must be setup so that students of any stripe can only access a single page -- the homepage.
2. Set the course site limited to "course", but set the "Syllabus" page to "public".

In either case, only one page will be available, but will be available to all students inside and outside the institution.

You must also inform our team, as an automatic job runs to remove public visibility from all sites unless a manual exception is made.

Yes, but you need to be careful. You may be interested in using moderated assignments - see the Canvas guide on How do I add a moderated assignment to be graded by multiple reviewers - Instructure. Moderated grading allows multiple reviewers to grade a students work and create draft or provisional grades for an assignment. For instance, you may want to allow two TAs in your course to grade all assignments, and you can review their assessments before determining the final grade.

If you do not want to use moderated assignments and would like multiple instructors to be able to comment/annotate submissions, then you need to be aware that the SpeedGrader is designed only for one instructor to be grading at one time - you will lose comments/annotations if multiple people are commenting/annotating on the same assignment at the same time. A workaround may be to assign timeslots for graders to prevent overlapping grading.

"400 Bad Request" errors can be solved by clearing cache and cookies. The cause is very difficult to identify and will differ from user to user. Anecdotal information leads us to believe Chrome is more susceptible to these errors and may be connected to extensions installed, and the length of the current browser session. If you are experiencing this issue often, you could consider trying a different browser such as Edge, Firefox, or Safari.

• Canvas's Guide to clearing cache on PC
• Canvas's Guide to clearing cache on MAC.

Atomic Search is a tool that lets you search text content within Canvas course(s). You can access Atomic Search by clicking Search in the left-hand navigation menu or from the search box at the top right corner of the screen (see image below).

Atomic Search allows you to:

• Search within the Canvas course content (including discussion prompts, assignments, announcements, pages, files, syllabus, quizzes). As students, your search results will only include published content that you have access to.
• Search for a word, wildcard, or phrase across all Canvas courses that have Atomic Search enabled.
• Filter your search to only search for Pages, Files, or Syllabuses and sort the search results by "Relevance" and "Recency".
• Start a search by clicking Search in the course navigation or entering a term in the search bar in the top right-hand corner of the screen in a course.

What types of content does Atomic Search allow you to search?

You can search the following types of content:

• Pages
• Files (PDF, MS Office format files, text files, and HTML documents)
• Assignments
• Quizzes (Cannot search questions or answers)
• Modules
• External pages
• Announcements
• Discussions (Title and the prompt; no posts)
• Syllabus

What types of searches does Atomic Search let you do?

You can do keyword, wildcard, and phrase searching:

Searching * will return all results.

Sorting: Recency vs Relevance

 Results are default-ranked according to relevance. The titles of items are weighted heavier than items in a content body. You can sort your search results by “Relevance” or “Recency”.

• Sorting by Recency will return the items most recently added to Canvas first.
• Sorting by Relevance will return the results that are most relevant to the search terms you entered first.

Can I search all my Canvas courses?

Yes, if Atomic Search is enabled by your course. Not all courses will choose to enable Atomic Search but for classes that you are enrolled in with Atomic Search enabled, you will be able to search across multiple courses.

Can I search courses that have ended?

Yes, if the course remains published and you are still enrolled in the course (meaning that it still shows up on your Canvas dashboard). 

Please take a look at our detailed guide here: Access & People Management

In some cases, you might want to add a custom link from the course menu on the left side of your course site. You can do so with the Redirect Tool.

Note that student surveys reveal that custom links are confusing and contribute to frustrating inconsistencies between Canvas sites. Please consider using Modules and our brief guide to Organizing Content. Note also that links generated with the redirect tool:

• Do not work well in the Canvas mobile applications.
• Will not work after importing from another/a previous course site.

To add a custom link:

1. Navigate to your course settings by clicking on the Settings button in your course navigation menu.
2. Click on the App tab. Either look for the blue arrow icon, or search for the Redirect Tool, and then click on the blue arrow.
3. After clicking on the blue arrow, fill out the Add App prompt and click Add App to confirm.

Name: The title of the link as it will appear in the menu.

URL Redirect: The URL of the link you'd like to add.

Checkboxes: If the link is to a different site, check "Force open in new tab" and uncheck all others. If the link is to a page in your Canvas site do the opposite: uncheck "Force open in a new tab" and check all three navigation options.

The anonymous posting application called Abot is approved for use and can be installed by the teaching team: Add apps to your Slack workspace | Slack. Abot provides a week long trial period after which it must be paid for by the teaching team.

The Poll Everywhere application is free for use and provides a feature that can enable students to post anonymous questions in response to a post.

After installing the app, typing "/pollev" into the channel will bring up a multiple choice question or an open Q&A prompt, the latter of which you can set for anonymous responses.

It would look like this:

The student would click "Respond" bringing up this dialogue screen:

Then in Slack the anonymous responses would look like this:

If the auditors have a current Harvard affiliation -- a current student, faculty, or staff member with an active student or staff role anywhere at Harvard -- then adding them as a Guest to the Canvas is sufficient to enable Slack access via the same method as a "true" enrollee.

If the auditors do not have a current Harvard affiliation -- such as someone from another university who isn't cross-registering, alumni, a former staff or faculty member -- then they will not be able to acquire "Full Member" status in Slack. You will need to invite them as a guest and be sure to add them to all channels you would like them to have access to -- guests do not have the privilege to add themselves to channels. See the Slack guides here on working with multi-channel guests:

• Understand guest roles in Slack | Slack
• Permissions by role in Slack | Slack

If the auditors were formerly in a Harvard Slack workspace as a full member (e.g. when they were an active student) then they cannot be invited as a guest using the email address that was used for their full membership. A personal email will suffice. 

Follow the directions to "hide videos from students using a private folder". This will leave you with a folder that does not allow any/every student to view its contents. From there, if you wish for a particular student or students to have viewing capabilities, you can add them individually as "Viewers" by email in the section labelled "Add people and groups".

This may be useful in cases in which you wish to share recordings only with a subset of students (e.g. those who couldn't attend a live session).

Please review the instructions here: How do I assign an assignment to a course group? - Instructure Community

Here are some important things to bear in mind:

• Always set groups in stone before allowing submissions.
  • A lot of issues can arise if students submit assignments without being in the correct group. If group memberships are altered after a submission, the submission will appear to "disappear" completely and in practice will require the affected groups to resubmit. 
  • The best practice is to force students to establish the correct group membership well in advance of any submissions. If group membership needs to be amended later, then they should do so in concert with the instructor who can inform affected students of the need to resubmit work, if applicable.
  • Note that individuals should be in a "group", even if they're submitting as an individual.
• If the assignment gives students the option to submit by group or individual, the best practice is still for the student to be assigned to a group (either by themselves or by an instructor).
• For multiple group assignments:
  • If you have multiple group assignments within a course, you can choose to have a different group set for each assignment. This is perhaps the "cleanest" way to arrange things but if the groups are the same, or nearly the same, across multiple assignments, then it may seem inconvenient to ask students or instructors to reassign groups for each submission.
  • One option is to use use "Clone Group Set". After each assignment, clone the previous group set and edit the next assignment to align with the clone. You will have different group sets for each assignment, but you this prevents the need to re-do all the group memberships each time.
  • Another alternative is to keep the same group set throughout. However, this does require some management if groups may change between assignments. Let's assume you have a group set and everyone has submitted the first assignment and you've graded all the submissions. The next step must be to edit that first assignment and check the box that says "Assign Grades to Each Student Individually" then click "Save". This won't change anything but essentially locks in that assignment's grades. Do this after every assignment, even if there are no changes to groups for the following assignment, because all previous assignments need to be locked in if you ever make future changes to the group set. Then, when you want to make changes to a group set, go to People, the relevant group set, then make changes. You'll receive a pop-up that asks if you want to clone the group set. You do not. You want to instead "Change Groups" (one of the two options you'll be faced with).