Looking to refresh your assessments in Canvas? New Quizzes is the platform’s next-generation tool, designed to make building and delivering quizzes more flexible, interactive, and insightful—and it’s a feature option you can enable right within your course. With new question types like categorization and stimulus-based prompts, plus cleaner workflows and improved analytics, it opens up new possibilities for engaging students and understanding their learning.
If you’re used to Classic Quizzes, you’ll find New Quizzes feels familiar—but with more room to experiment. Classic Quizzes is still a solid, straightforward option, and contains features like anonymous surveys that are still missing in New Quizzes, but New Quizzes is where Canvas is investing for the future. If you’re curious about new ways to design assessments or want deeper insight into student performance, it’s definitely worth turning it on and giving it a try. Contact Brandon Bucy or Helen MacDermott with your New Quizzes questions (or really any of your Canvas questions!).
Attention faculty: are you looking for a way to manage attendance in your classes? The Roll Call Attendance tool in Canvas provides instructors with a simple way to track student attendance directly within your course site. With just a few clicks, faculty can mark students as present, absent, or late for each class meeting. The tool automatically records attendance and can calculate a running attendance score that appears in the course gradebook if you choose to use it. Because it is built directly into Canvas, Roll Call Attendance helps streamline record-keeping and makes it easy for you to monitor participation and identify patterns in student attendance throughout the term.
Want to learn more? Need assistance activating Roll Call Attendance in your course? Contact Brandon Bucy today!
High-quality audio is one of the most important elements of professional-looking video production. Whether you are recording a lecture, creating instructional content, producing interviews, or assigning video projects for your classes, clear and consistent sound makes a significant difference in how your and your students’ work is perceived and understood.
To support high quality academic video production across the Washington and Lee University community, the Harte Center offers a selection of professional audio equipment that faculty, staff, and students can request for use in their projects. These tools are well-suited for a wide range of recording environments and experience levels, helping elevate the production quality of your videos without requiring specialized audio expertise.
Available Audio Equipment
We currently maintain the following audio gear, all available for request:
Sennheiser Shotgun Microphones (8 available)
Shotgun microphones are ideal for capturing focused, high-quality dialogue while minimizing background noise. They are commonly used for interviews, lectures, and narrative-style video recordings where clean, directional audio is essential.
RODE Wireless GO II Microphone Sets (8 available)
These wireless systems provide a compact, wireless solution for recording clear audio without restricting movement. These are especially useful for presenters who need hands free, or for interviews or film scenes requiring audio capture from two speakers at the same time. They are well-suited for both indoor and outdoor recording scenarios.
Sennheiser Boom Pole Sets (8 available)
Our boom pole sets allow microphones to be positioned just out of frame, providing professional-quality sound capture while keeping the focus on the subject. Boom poles are commonly used in interviews, demonstrations, and film scenes.
Boom Pole Stands (8 available)
For situations where holding a boom pole is not practical, boom pole stands offer stable, hands-free microphone placement. These stands are particularly helpful for longer recordings, panel discussions, or static interview setups.
Audio-Technica Studio Monitor Headsets (8 available)
Monitoring audio during recording is critical to ensuring clean sound. Our studio monitor headsets allow you to listen in real time, catch issues early, and ensure consistent audio quality throughout your project.
Supporting Professional Academic Video Production
All of this equipment is available to support professional-looking video production projects for academics and students across the W&L community. To request audio equipment or learn more about availability and usage guidelines, please contact Senior Academic Technologist Brandon Bucy via email at bucyb@wlu.edu. We are happy to help you determine which tools best fit your project and ensure you have what you need for a successful recording.
We have just updated our Perusall reading annotation app to take advantage of additional features and functionality. To activate Perusall in your Canvas course, follow the instructions at Canvas Instructor Quick Setup. Additional information regarding Perusall setup is available at Getting Started for Instructors.
If you have used Perusall in the past, please note:
If you were originally integrated into Perusall with LTI 1.1, the first time you launch into Perusall via LTI 1.3 integration, it will prompt you with a one-time “confirm merge” email. You will need to confirm the merge and relaunch to officially join LTI 1.3.
If you have any questions or experience any issues activating Perusall in your Canvas course, or want to learn more about Perusall, please contact Brandon Bucy.
ITS has just implemented a connector linking our Zoom web conferencing tool with our video capture and media management system, YuJa. Moving forward, all recordings made in Zoom will automatically import into your personal media space within YuJa for storage and sharing.
What does this mean for you? First off, you are no longer limited by the 30-day retention policy for recordings within Zoom. You can feel confident that any recordings made during Zoom meetings will automatically and seamlessly transfer to YuJa for permanent storage and retrieval. In addition, you can take advantage of many features within YuJa to autocaption, edit, clip, and share recordings with individual students, classes, external colleagues, or to the public. If you use the Zoom tool within Canvas to schedule your class Zoom sessions, resulting recordings will even automatically publish to your course channel, making them immediately accessible to your students from within Canvas.
You can access your imported recordings by navigating to YuJa from your MyApps page or by clicking the YuJa link in any of your Canvas courses. Once in YuJa, look for a folder in your personal media area titled “Zoom Recordings”.
Questions? Want to know more? Contact Brandon Bucy or drop by my office in the Harte Center (Room 117, Lower Level 1 in Leyburn Library).
In order to accommodate the dramatic increase in usage for our YuJa video management service due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to adjust some of the default settings for video recordings and uploads to the service. In particular,auto-captions will no longer be generated for all recordings and uploads by default.
All videos added to YuJa still will have the option of auto captioning — it will just need to be requested by interested faculty on a video-by-video basis. The request is made through YuJa and an email will be sent to you when captioning is complete.
Sakai is officially retiring on May 31, 2020. Note that you will NOT have access to any Sakai courses or content after May 31, 2020.
We are now opening up our third and final bulk migration request to move your course and project sites from Sakai into Canvas. Beginning now and continuing through May 4, 2020, you may request to have your course or project sites migrated from Sakai into Canvas by filling out the form available at https://go.wlu.edu/migrate.
At this point we are accepting migration requests for ANY needed course or project sites from ANY term. Courses will be ready in Canvas by May 18, 2020. You will be notified when your courses are available. This will give you time to check the final migrations for accuracy and completeness by the May 31, 2020 deadline.
Note that you will not have access to any Sakai courses or content after May 31, 2020. All materials you wish to save from Sakai need to be downloaded to your own computer or migrated into Canvas by that time.
Please contact Brandon or Helen directly (bucyb@wlu.edu or x8651; hmacdermott@wlu.edu or x4561) or via help@wlu.edu to ask any Canvas questions or to request personal training.
We apologize for asking you to do one more thing during this unprecedented time of virtual instruction here at W&L, but rest assured there will be only a few more emails related to the Sakai-Canvas migration, as our year-long process finally comes to a close at the end of May.
As part of our continuing transition from the Sakai learning management system to Canvas, ITS Academic Technologies is initiating our first round of bulk migration requests to move your course and project sites from Sakai into Canvas. Beginning now and continuing through October 28, 2019, you may request to have up to 10 course or project sites migrated from Sakai into Canvas by filling out the Sakai-Canvas Course and Project Site Migration Request form.
This first round of migrations is intended to facilitate faculty in migrating content for their Undergraduate Winter 2020 and Law Spring 2020 courses into Canvas, although you are welcome to request course or project sites from any term.
We will have two additional rounds of migrations to accommodate Undergraduate Spring 2020 courses, as well as any remaining courses or project sites that need to be migrated out of Sakai before it is retired at the end of June 2020.
Please refer to the following bulk migration schedule for more details and deadlines:
First round: Requests due by October 28, 2019. Courses will be ready in Canvas by November 4, 2019
Second round: Opens January 27, 2020. Requests due by February 17, 2020. Courses will be ready in Canvas by February 24, 2020
Third (and Final) round: Opens April 1, 2020. Requests due by May 29, 2020. Courses will be ready in Canvas by June 15, 2020
If you request to have courses or project sites migrated, you will be notified when the courses will be available in Canvas. Please note that you must check your courses after migration to ensure that they are set up properly. While the migration pathway from Sakai to Canvas is robust for Resources, Assignments, Forums, Tests & Quizzes, and Lessons, there are a number of items and settings that will not migrate over and will require positive action on your part in Canvas to correct or address.
You are also welcome to migrate your own course content from Sakai into Canvas at any time. The first step is creating a sandbox course in Canvas to host your migrated content. After that, you may follow these detailed migration instructions.
For those of you beginning with Canvas, we have daily Canvas sessions scheduled for faculty during Winter Academy (December 9-13), and are also offering a 2-day Camp Canvas workshop during Undergraduate Reading Days (October 10-11). As always, Academic Technologies staff will also be available at any time for one-on-one faculty training, migration requests, and support sessions.
Please contact Brandon or Helen directly (bucyb@wlu.edu or x8651; hmacdermott@wlu.edu or x4561) or via help@wlu.edu to ask any Canvas questions or to request personal training.
You may now access the Canvas Learning Management System at https://canvas.wlu.edu. Fall 2019 courses have been imported and are available for you to begin building out.
During the 2019-20 school year, both Canvas and Sakai will be available, and you are free to use either platform until the end of Spring 2020 when Sakai will be retired. However, professors who wish to use lecture capture as part of their classes will need to use Canvas in order to do so. Tegrity has been discontinued by their parent company, McGraw Hill, and we are employing a new lecture capture software called YuJa, which is available only through Canvas.
In preparation for the upcoming school year, Academic Technologies will be conducting numerous Canvas training sessions. We have daily Canvas sessions scheduled for faculty during Fall Academy (August 19-30, 2019), and are also offering a 3-day workshop called Camp Canvas (August 13-15, 2019). Participants in this workshop will leave with a thorough understanding of the new LMS and a Canvas course ready to go for the 2019-2020 academic year. Additional training opportunities will be provided the week of August 5-9 for Law School faculty. As always, Academic Technologies staff will also be available at any time for one-on-one faculty training, migration requests, and support sessions. Please contact Brandon or Helen directly (bucyb@wlu.edu or x8651; hmacdermott@wlu.edu or x4561) or via help@wlu.edu to ask any Canvas questions or to request personal training.
To view further details about the transition timeline, upcoming events, and migration/training resources, please visit our Canvas website at https://canvas.academic.wlu.edu.
Washington and Lee is transitioning to YuJa as the university’s official lecture capture service. YuJa is a recognized leader in enterprise video solutions, serving over 4 million clients at universities, school districts, and institutions around the world. YuJa is an innovator in video capture and management, and their lecture capture and media management platform is recommended for being customizable, adaptable, and reliable.
W&L has used Tegrity as our lecture capture service since 2009. Originally Tegrity was a very innovative and responsive privately-owned company, but it was bought by McGraw-Hill several years ago and development has since stagnated. Earlier this year McGraw-Hill notified W&L that they were suspending future licensing of their Tegrity service, which would be completely shuttered by June 2020. The selection of YuJa was made after consideration of multiple lecture capture replacement solutions. It was determined that YuJa offers the best pathway to preserve our existing Tegrity assets while at the same time dramatically improving the lecture capture and media management features available to faculty and students.
YuJa will be up and running as a part of our new Canvas LMS by mid-July 2019, and will be available for all faculty and in all lecture capture-enabled classrooms beginning in the Fall 2019 term. Beginning in the Fall 2019 term, professors who wish to use lecture capture as part of their classes will need to use Canvas and not Sakai in order to do so. As of July 25, 2019, all Tegrity services and functionality will be terminated on campus.
All current recordings marked for migration in the Tegrity environment have successfully been migrated over to YuJa and will be available to faculty when they log in to the new system. Please do not use Tegrity recorder to record any further sessions between now and July 25, as newly recorded sessions will not be migrated.
In preparation for the upcoming school year, Academic Technologies is preparing detailed documentation to assist faculty with their use of lecture capture in the classroom, and will be conducting several YuJa (and Canvas) training sessions before the start of the term during Fall Academy (scheduled for August 19-30). Additional training opportunities will be provided earlier in August for Law School faculty, and Academic Technologies will be coordinating with Law Technology ensure a smooth transition and personal training opportunities. As always, Academic Technologies staff will also be available at any time for one-on-one faculty training and support sessions. Please contact me directly (bucyb@wlu.edu or x8651), or via help@wlu.edu to ask any questions about YuJa or to request personal training.
Be on the lookout for additional information as the summer progresses. We will continue to send updates via email and Campus Notices. To view further details about the LMS and lecture capture transition timeline, upcoming events, and training resources, please visit our Canvas website. We will also post additional information and updates about Canvas and YuJa on our blog page located at this site.
