Tips

In our pilot orientations, faculty pointed out some features that were important, surprising, or simple.  We gathered those features here (although they are covered in greater depth on other Pages in this course).

• Use Student View - Access it in courses you teach on the Home page or under course Settings via the right-side menu.  You can use the test student account specific to your course to preview the student experience of most course content (test students cannot use some tools, e. g. Collaborations and Conferences) without ever having to log out.
  Read more at Canvas Guides. Links to an external site.

• Control In-line Preview for linked documents - Insert a document link using the Rich Content Editor. Once the link is inserted, click the link then click "Link Options".  Check the box to auto-open an inline preview for all users and save (or check the box to disable inline preview to require students to click the link).

• Set due dates - Published Assignments, graded Discussions, and Quizzes with due dates set will all automatically display in the course Calendar, on the Syllabus, and in dashboards.  Events created in the course calendar also appear on the Syllabus.  Before entering all relevant dates in the Calendar, consider using assignments with due dates.  In this way, you avoid duplicating calendar events.

• Try Not-Graded Assignments - Canvas Assignments include the option to set display grade type as "Not Graded."  This removes its column from Grades, but it still appears in the Syllabus tool (and Calendar if due date is set).  Adding links, videos, documents, etc. to the description clarifies, for example, preparation tasks for a class meeting.  Putting all such Assignments in an "Ungraded" Assignment group will make their status clear to students.
  Related guide: What is the difference between a Canvas Assignment and a Canvas Activity? Links to an external site.

• Explore the Rich Content Editor (RCE) - It is much more than a text editor.  Utilizing its features diversifies your online course content.  Here are some ideas.

  1. After embedding an image, you can alter its position by clicking it, then clicking the same buttons used to indent, center, and left- or right-align text.  The image of Speedy Gonzales is styled to float to the right of the second list item.
  2. Give students a direct link from one page to another by writing link text and highlighting it (or by inserting an image and highlighting it), then clicking the page to link to in the Content Selector at right.  Ex 1: Speedy Gonzales links to the page about SpeedGraderTM.
  3. Make a button-styled link.  After making a hyperlink, switch to the HTML Editor view and insert "Button" into the link's class field. The link tag begins "<a" and has id, title, class, and href fields, with values in quotation marks.
     Check out Canvas' Style Guide section on buttons.