Tag: canvas

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New Quizzes: Enhancing Online Assessment in Canvas

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!).

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Roll Call: Taking Attendance with Canvas

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!

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New Zoom YuJa Connector Makes Saving and Sharing your Zoom Recordings Easier!

YuJa and Zoom company logos being added together
 

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).

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How to Add a Faculty Member to a Canvas Course from a Past Term

 It’s definitely possible to add another instructor to a Canvas course that has concluded IF you know this trick:

  1. Go to Settings in the Course Navigation of the past term Canvas course.
  2. In the Course Details tab, change the Participation: dropdown from “Term” to “Course”.
  3. Type tomorrow’s date (or any date in the future) as the End date.
  4. Scroll down and click the “Update Course Details” button on the right.
  5. Go to People in the Course Navigation.
  6. Click on the “+ People” button on the right.
  7. Add the email address of the faculty member you want to add. Choose “Teacher” in the Role dropdown.
  8. Go back to Settings in the Course Navigation.
  9. Change the Participation: dropdown back to “Term”.
  10. Scroll down and click the “Update Course Details” button on the right.
  11. Tah-dah! You did it! Pat yourself on the back.

Need help? Have questions? Contact the ITS Information Desk at 540.458.4357 (HELP), email help@wlu.edu, or stop by the ITS Information Desk on the Main Level of Leyburn Library.

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Images in Canvas aren’t appearing in Safari!?!??

 

Sadly, there is an on-going issue with Safari 13.1 and later versions with displaying images and downloading files. Canvas engineers are currently working on a solution for this issue.

Until Canvas releases a fix, you may avoid errors by disabling cross-site tracking prevention in Safari when using Canvas:

On Mac:

  1. Open Safari.
  2. Go to the Safari menu and select “Preferences…”
  3. Click on Privacy.
  4. Uncheck “Prevent cross-site tracking”:

    Prevent cross-site tracking in Safari on a Mac

On iOS:

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Scroll down the list of headings on the left and choose Safari.
  3. Uncheck “Prevent Cross-Site Tracking” (under Privacy & Security).

If disabling cross-site tracking doesn’t resolve the issue, please try the latest version of Chrome or Firefox. (Stinks, we know.)

Need assistance with Safari or Canvas? Contact the ITS Information Desk at 540.458.4357 (HELP) or email help@wlu.edu.