Faculty Forum - February 16, 2024 - Strategies for Organizing your Canvas Course

On Friday, February 16th at noon, Academic Technology Services hosted a Zoom Faculty Forum on strategies for organizing your Canvas course.

The most-visited pre-recorded presentation at SITT 2020 came from veteran Psychology professor Victoria Cross. Dr. Cross taught us about “Configuring Canvas for Clarity” back in an era when we all desperately craved clarity. As we have all learned so much since then, this February we will return to Canvas, the teaching tool all of us depend upon to help our students achieve their learning objectives.

Rather than depending on individual invited faculty speakers, we invited all UC Davis faculty to join us to share their diverse perspectives and concerns, with a focus on strategies for setting up and implementing our courses using Canvas. Some of us use modules, some visuals, some calendars, and some units that are purposefully and sequentially revealed to our students.

• Our hub for Canvas support is Canvas Help: https://canvashelp.ucdavis.edu/ 
• Find extensive guides on the Canvas Instructor Guide
• Here is a recording of a webinar we have taught about using modules
• Accessibility Canvas features: 
• SensusAccess
• Immersive Reader
• UCD Canvas Supported Tools
• Here’s a page with recorded webinars and curated resources about these topics, including using Modules
• iClicker Knowledge Base article for instructors
• Bulk update “due” and “availability” dates
• Managing notification settings in Canvas
• Regarding difficulty with publishing modules and module items - In an attempt to reduce these difficulties, Canvas implemented a bulk publish feature in June
• Instructor Guide now incorporates this feature
• How to change course availability dates
• Course shells are loaded on this schedule