[ARCHIVED] Things to avoid doing!

[jen]

We are all using (and mostly loving, I'm sure) Canvas, but sometimes there are things we try to do that we really shouldn't be doing "that way."

As there is always more to learn, I was hoping that you would share with me the things that you've tried to do in Canvas that you realized later didn't work out as you had planned, and better yet, the solutions you found that worked better!

Thanks!

[kona]

I think some of these really depend on the grade level taught, subject, and personal pedagogy, but here are some of my top don'ts!

1. Hide as many of the navigational links on the left as possible. The fewer you have visible the less likely students are to get confused about where to go and what they should be doing. For me I add everything students need to the course Modules. Then there is no confusion about where students should go to find things. (ex: Hide --> Discussions, Assignments, Quizzes, Pages, Files, and anything you aren't using like --> Collaborations, Announcements, & Chat). See the following guide: How do I reorder and hide Course Navigation links?

2. Any navigational links you leave visible need to be used. Ex: Don't leave the syllabus link visible and then not add your syllabus to it!

3. Make sure and put a zero in when a student misses/doesn't do an assignment (unless of course you are excusing them and then put in an EX). If you don't put in the zero then the student will think they are getting a much better grade than they really are!

4. Front page or Modules as your course home? My rule of thumb is unless you've got something awesome going on for your front page, students will find it a lot easier to navigate and find things if you just make the course home your Modules. See the following guide: How do I change the Course Home Page?

5. Chat seems awesome, but beware! You can't delete anything that gets posted in Chat and everything is public to everyone in the course. What does this mean? If something confidential gets posted on chat there isn't anything you can do to remove it other than remove chat from the course (hide it from students).

6. Do not delete the "roll call attendance" assignment from Assignments. If you do it will just keep coming back and haunting you...

7. Honestly (and we're being honest here, right?) don't use Roll Call Attendance as a grade in your gradebook. I'm not saying you shouldn't use the Attendance feature. It's not perfect, but it gets the job done and I use it myself. Yet, I do not believe it will provide any type of accurate grade information that you would want in your gradebook. So what can you do? First see #6 again, don't delete it. But what you can do is unpublish it, change it to be worth zero points, or make it so that it's not graded. If you want to give points for attendance then make a separate assignment for it that you can easily control and explain to students.

8. The "Reset course content" button can be awesome if you want to start a course over from scratch. Yet, it really will remove EVERYTHING from your course, so do not click that button unless you really mean it!

9. And surprise, surprise, the "Permanently delete this course" button really will delete your course - DO NOT CLICK ON THIS BUTTON!

10. Extra credit can be tricky, especially if you're using a weighted gradebook. I recommend checking out this blog - Extra credit using weighted assignment groups. - by stefaniesanders prior to setting anything up!

[tdelillo]

So much yes on #6. Don't rename the Roll Call Attendance assignment either. Next time you take attendance, the Roll Call Attendance assignment will be back in your gradebook, and you'll just have two columns with attendance scores instead of one.

And while we're talking about not renaming, if you have publisher integrations that sync with your Canvas gradebook, don't rename THOSE assignments either, or you'll probably get duplicates every time you sync.

[gouldt]

I so related to this post!

On the adding zeros, I might also add that anytime you see an icon in your gradebook, that means the item is manually graded. Until it is manually graded the student and instructor grade will be different. Instructors see the student's grade as if they received a zero for each manually graded item, student sees their grade as if the assignment hasn't been submitted. This can be a big problem if the grades have been posted to transcripts.

Roll call- we set the assignment to ungraded to remove from the gradebook.

Not using the front page as a home page, I am so glad someone agrees. We recently found one of our online courses that had been changed by the instructor to go to the front page. Then from there, they had all assignments linked from an introduction page for each unit. I'm sure the instructor thought this would make it easier for students, but in reality it made the course inaccessible from a mobile device, and about as non-ada compliant as you could get.

We have set all of our online and hybrid courses with the same links available- syllabus, grades, home, announcements, and two redirects that we created- instructor sheet and help and resources. I think the students appreciate knowing what to expect in an online course, and when all of the links are view-able it can be overwhelming.

Reset- I don't really like that this is available to instructors, and we have had a couple accidentally push the button thinking we wouldn't have it available if they could cause harm. But it is nice that we can always run a report to find recently reset courses and then restore it if need be. We have had to do that a time or two.

[kdickso]

I'd like to add to item number 1 about keeping things hidden (which is so true!) that if you think you are going to use something later, just go ahead and disable it now. It is like a new present for the students when you add a navigational link to a new content area, but dead links and content areas are just confusing.

I had students asking me about "broken links" in someone else's course last year but what it turned out to be was "Pages" was disabled for students and the students were clicking on unavailable items and getting redirected to the Course "Front Page." Several of them had gone to the computing center's help desk, but Canvas was so newly deployed that they were having a hard time getting a straight answer.  The subject came up because they were thanking me for putting a link to Canvas help on my front page of my course, so I've kept doing it ever since.

[jen]

My big red flag experience was related to copying assignments and editing them, leading to overwriting. I learned the VERY hard way that if you copy an assignment/quiz and then make changes to the original, it will make changes to the copy, and this gets harder to track if you are making multiple copies. To be honest, I'm still not sure I have this straight. I am now extremely skittish about this happening again, so I am exporting quizzes using QTi  and importing them back in, which I've been assured will break the parent/child relationship and prevent overwriting. (Is this correct?)

Here are some good threads to read on the subject:

Copying items in a course

Copy over just one bit of content from another course

Copy Anything in Canvas (Redux)

(If someone has more to share on this topic, please share!)

[gouldt]

We did have a problem with copying content and yes it was a big mess. What we discovered was that when content is copied into a course it becomes unique to that course with a specific item id for each item. If you copy the exact same content into the same course, it will have the same item id the second time, and over write the first time. Let's just say it's best not to copy items:) We had a problem with items that got stuck in the queue when importing. We went ahead and began the import again. As we were migrating from another LMS at the time, this problem occurred many times. At some point whatever was causing the stuck queue became unstuck, and all of those items imported over what was there. This happened approximately 2 months into the semester. So make a note, if an item EVER gets stuck in the queue don't import again, call Canvas!

[snugent]

I agree with  @kona ​ suggestion about the attendance tool. I tell our faculty to either unpublish it or edit the assignment and make it ungraded. Students can't see the attendance tool in the left navigation so if it is unpublished they won't see it in the assignment list. If it is set as ungraded, students will see it in the assignment list but it won't be part of the gradebook.

My other suggestion is for the LTI integration with TurnItIn. If the admin has added the codes for syncing the due date and Start date (which we have), always be sure in Canvas to set an Available From date and DO NOT set Available Until date when creating a new TurnItIn assignment. TurnItIn automatically creates a start date and I have found that if there is no Available From date in Canvas it can cause sync issues. If you set Available Until date, the TurnItIn assignment dashboard will be hidden from students once the date passes.

Also another issue that tends to crop up a bit on our campus is with the rich content editor and file uploads. I recommend not using the content browser to do file uploads. This is particularly true with syllabus tool. It seems many of our faculty will edit their syllabus document in Word and then give it a new name like syllabus-spring. Then they go to the syllabus tool and upload it. What they don't realize is that every syllabus file they ever uploaded is in the file section of the course. If the Files link is visible in the left navigation this can cause major confusion for students. I always tell faculty to download the current file in the Files section of their course. Save on the local drive with the same name (do NOT rename). Then make the changes and then upload it again to the same location in Files. The dialog box with the replace option will appear allowing you to rewrite the file. The dialog box does not appear when you use the rich content editor's content browser. A new file is created.

I also tell faculty not create questions directly in a quiz if possible. It's just too awkward of a process to remember to go to the question bank and rename the unfiled questions bank or move the questions to new bank. The Canvas Studio: Modern Quizzing Engine can't come soon enough as many of our issues seem to center around the quiz tool.

[nlatimer]

Something I have noticed a lot of my high school and middle school teachers doing is using the Calendar to create an Event for a homework assignment like this:

Read Chapter 5

The problem I see here is that these "events" will not show up on the Assignments Index Page. They also clutter up things that are real events, such as "Choir Practice."

My suggestion is that the teachers create these types of Assignments in a group called "Homework" and set them up as "Not Graded."

Has anyone else encountered this, and if so, I'd like to hear how you handled it, or if you don't see it as an issue. Thanks!

[John_Lowe]

Choose where you set your dates carefully!

Start and end dates can override each other.  We started off using term end dates in our initial Canvas pilot program, but had numerous situations come up where faculty wanted to extend their course for some or all students.  To make this process easier, we switched to setting only Section dates instead of setting Term dates or Course dates.  This allows faculty to adjust the dates for their groups of students.  For example, if they know they have one student who needs an extra couple of months to finish an incomplete the instructor can just create a new section with a different end date and move the student into that section from the main section.  If you look at our Terms list, all the terms have "whenever to whenever" listed.

[awilliams]

1. Don't try to use Canvas quizzes for in-class quizzes. Canvas quizzes get their point value from the number of questions you build into the quiz. So for an in-class quiz, just use a Canvas assignment where you can easily assign the point value.
2. Don't import all content unless you're importing into a totally blank course and you really know what you're importing. There are almost always gremlins in the closet and when you import all content all those gremlins get a free ride into your new course. It's much wiser to select specific content when importing and leave those gremlins behind. How do I select specific content as part of a course import?​
3. To build on what Kona said about 0's, don't use the treat ungraded as zero feature in the grade book as a shortcut. It doesn't work that way. The only shortcut is to use set default grade. How do I set a default grade for an Assignment?​
4. Don't forget to use the link validator and student view before releasing your course out into the wild. How do I validate links in a course?​ and What is Student View?​

[awilliams]

It just dawned on me this was posted in the Canvas Admins space and our answers have been very faculty focused. Is that what you were looking for  @jen ​ or were you looking for more admin focused don'ts?

[jen]

I really was hoping for more Admin focused don'ts actually. Thanks for asking.

[Bobby2]

 @jen ‌ thanks for this brilliant list you have begun. I will be referring to it as I get my head around using Canvas.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @jen ,

We are giving the Canvas Admins area a little bit of love (especially questions that are really, really old) and just want to check in with you.  This will also bring this question new attention. 

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie