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Quick Canvas Wins: What's Your Go To Tip?

DiannaDK

I attended Indiana’s Canvas user group and several Instructure webinars recently, and one thing stood out: the collective wisdom in our community. There are so many talented, creative, and helpful users. The #CanvasFam consistently shares knowledge to support others — a perfect example of “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

One of my favorite admin tips is to remind instructors how useful their course number can be. For teachers, it makes finding the correct course to copy content much faster. For admins, having the course number helps us jump right into a teacher’s course to troubleshoot. There are other benefits, but those two are the biggest for me.

What’s your best or favorite Canvas “Pro Tip”? It can be a simple trick people often forget or a game-changing workflow you’ve discovered. If we all share our top tips, imagine the helpful repertoire we could build for the community?!

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jeremyh

Message Students Who is still my favorite tip! There's no faster way to send a reminder about missing work, and opportuinty to extend learning, or a congratulatory message to those who have succeeded.

melodyc_lam

A big helpful way for me as a Canvas admin to quickly answer internal tickets or to look up courses and users is to create Site Search shortcuts in Chrome — go to the Chrome Settings page → Search Engines, then scroll to Site Search and click Add.

For the name, give it a good name, like Canvas User Search, then a shortcut (like cuser). In URL, copy and paste in the following for these quick searches (replace items in brackets for your specific institution):

Canvas user search: https://[institution].instructure.com/accounts/[account ID]/users?search_term=%s

Canvas course search: https://[institution].instructure.com/accounts/[accountID]?search_term=%s

We're a very large district so these save me a lot of time on the Canvas side of the house.

The teacher pro tip that I usually give is to make sure your links work in your course. The Link Validator (Settings → Validate Links in Content) is a really useful check especially before the beginning of the year. In addition to that, the /undelete endpoint can be useful to restore deleted items (but not deleted submissions).

ajcope

Admin tip- create a template just for the navigation links. I have a template that just pushes out exactly what students need to see in Navigation. Teachers can still add their own homepage, but those links are set. Of course they can edit them if needed, but it saves students from clicking on a bunch of links!

Teacher Tip- Accidentally deleted something? Go to your course homepage and add /undelete to the end of the URL to restore it.

Chris

This is a great post!

My #1 tip for teachers is to put dates on everything. As much as some people may not like it, students are very dashboard-focused and items without dates will basically never appear on their dashboard to do, creating a lot of potential issues.

My #1 tip for an admin (especially for new Canvas customers) is to have a hard think about course naming formats. Come up with something that will make sense to students and faculty, would be easily searchable for admins, and easy to distinguish from one course or term to another.

-Chris

melodyc_lam

Agreed on naming conventions. The Canvas course search relies on exact naming order (I just had to answer a ticket about this!) so things like unique course codes or naming conventions can really help.

As an extension to this, for customers that utilize a Student Information System (SIS) to populate data, also think about how your SIS IDs need to be created/made to prevent future conflicts with new users/terms/courses/sections/accounts and also to make your life easier. Canvas searches do search on SIS IDs so that's an important consideration to think about. I just went through a SIS conversion and we had to switch our SIS IDs for users because the last time the SIS was set up, it was set up using a unique identifier only found in that SIS…

JASONWILLIAMSPT

I have been a huge forever advocate of the OG "Sandbox" concept.

Encouraging teachers to export their carefully built and curated lessons, quizzes, modules, etc. into the "lockbox" of an unpublished, rosterless course as the year ends puts their minds at ease that when summer ends, they can easily move previous year's content into their new courses and will be ready to roll when the students walk back into their rooms at the end of summer break.

tarnold

Pro-Tip: Teach your building administrators, instructional coaches, and teachers the power of "/undelete"! I can't tell you how many times this has saved an individual teacher, entire building, and even a district. Things happen. Mistakes are made. The power of /undelete is undefeated! I hope that you never need it - but we never say never!

Hildi_Pardo

Hello! Here's a blog I wrote a few years ago with some Tips for things to NOT do in Canvas — I think they all are still accurate (?)

DiannaDK

@jeremyh - I LOVE that one! It is great!Thank you for sharing!

DiannaDK

Mind blown @melodyc_lam ! I always learn some great information from you! Thank you for sharing!

Greg

Something I've recently relied upon is the History button on Global Navigation. Whether logged in as an instructor or as an admin, it helps me get to the places I was recently working. That's especially helpful when I'm bouncing between my computers at home and in my office.

DiannaDK

Great tips, @ajcope ! 👏

DiannaDK

Great things to consider, @Chris! Having dates on everything is a hill I will die on when working with our teachers.

DiannaDK

We utilize this as well @JASONWILLIAMSPT, especially if the teacher is going to be doing curriculum work over the summer and wants to edit/alter the content.

DiannaDK

@tarnold PREACH it! We never say never!

DiannaDK

@Hildi_Pardo that blog is full of some great tips! My favorite is not to hide the grades tab in course navigation!

DiannaDK

@Greg that's a great one! I always forget to use the history button!

jesmsmit74

From the educator side, the redirect tool and student view are two of my favorite things! From the admin side, troubleshooting Grade Sync errors has been a learning experience. I've learned to check the Sync History and look for key words that will help me dig in to the problem. If all else fails, after discussing with the staff member, Remastering the Grade Passback has solved many issues.

DiannaDK

Oooo, good ones! I concur on the Grade Sync issues. I was so scared the first time I had to "remaster" but it solves a lot of problems. The SIS Error Code Dictionary is a great resource for troubleshooting grade sync issues.

melodyc_lam

@jesmsmit74 Have you looked at the SIS Error Code Dictionary? I send this to my educators as well so they can troubleshoot on their own before they submit a ticket. You may also need to look at potentially resetting the SIS Integration Data for the course if Remastering Grade Passback doesn't work — for example, if the teacher deleted the assignment out of the SIS gradebook in some systems, Canvas won't re-make the assignment in the SIS gradebook and it will cause errors. Here's instructions for Infinite Campus but they exist also for supported SIS integrations.

jesmsmit74

Thanks for linking the SIS Error Code Dictionary!!

reynlds

I rely quite a bit on the Course Audit Log in the API. It shows key changes made to a course. It may be more programmatic than most want, but here's some python that will extract and display it per course.

I'm a big believer in Change Management. We've been with Canvas since Spring, 2019, and have logged EVERY change made to Canvas, LTI's, accounts, etc., in an Excel spreadsheet. Helps a ton when troubleshooting issues.

Lastly, grab CD2 and Caliper/Canvas Live Data out of Canvas. Invaluable when needing to report on usage or track down a pesky issue or inquiry.

melodyc_lam

Another pro tip: there are undocumented "limits" (outside of quotas) to assignments and quizzes when accessing them through the UI, at least in Chrome. This mostly affects K12s since we usually have year long courses and a lot more assignments/quizzes (or the potential for multiple imports).

For assignments and quizzes, in my experience dealing with course issues, 200 assignments will cause the page to start to slow down, and after around 300 assignments the page will refuse to load or hang. For assignments in particular, having too many assignment groups can also cause the page to slow down/not load.

The only real fix that I know of is to use the API to delete assignments as needed or do a full course reset if that's available and won't affect current submissions/grades.

jsowalsk

Take adventage of your beta environment to test things before moving to production.

james_whalley

Did you know students can still get to the Grades page even if you hide it in the navigation? They can get to it from the Dashboard, which surprises and embarasses some faculty who hide it and then think it's safe to leave the Gradebook a big mess.

melodyc_lam

@james_whalley TIL!! I'm going to maybe feature this in my monthly Canvas Teacher Tips slide in our district's newsletter.

DiannaDK

What? They can? I did not know that and would love to know more! From the recent feedback??

Kristin Lundstrum

Admins, instructional coaches, and teachers, all in one thread, all simply helping each other. This is a full professional development session disguised as a forum post! 🙌 I'm so grateful for every single one of you who took two minutes to share what you know!

JeffCampbell

@Chris hit on admin looking at course names. A few tips I give every teacher when doing a beginners session start right at prepping the Dashboard.

Click the 3-Dot menu in the corner for every course and give it a Nickname. Consider adding S1/S2/S3 or Fall/Spring/Summer, plus a 2-digit year. It helps you remember the courses, but it also helps quickly find it when looking at All Courses. Particularly if your names are generated through SIS Sync when multiple courses might share the same name.
Add a picture in the course settings. I use PowerPoint/Google Slides to design a picture that includes the course title and Fall/Spring, then export that slide as an image. A visual identifier is just another way to help students see your course.
To go along with #2…turn off color overlay in the Dashboard settings. It hinders the picture if you use one.

cpowell2

This is a great way to leverage a Chrome browser that many use, @melodyc_lam. I have used a similar quick-trigger search for Canvas courses and people with the Alfred utility on my macOS desktop. Made a nine minute video walking through the process, but if you use Alfred now on your macOS:

Course search trigger = https://[institution].instructure.com/accounts/[account]?search_term={query}

People search trigger = https://[institution].instructure.com/accounts/[account]/users?search_term={query}

A quick command-space to trigger the Alfred box and "ccs" for Canvas course search or "cps" for Canvas people search saves me many minutes a day with my admin tasklist.

Cheers,

Chris Powell

Canvas Admin, Western Washington University

KIMBERLYOGLESBY

Thank you for this tip! I created mine. In additon, I have utilized the tab groups in Google Chrome where I am able to create/ save a group of tabs for something I was working on. So for example, I have a tab group specifically for responding to internal support tickets with tabs open to sites I usually need to get through tickets quickly.

In additon, I also use Google Workspaces to group frequently opened documents for specific purposes, such as BOY Succes, EOY Success, and LMS Essentials. It helps me to keep track of documents my team and I are creating and need at specific times.

Maeve_McCooey

Alternatively, students can also add "/grades" at the end of the course url e.g. https://[Institution].instructure.com/courses/[course.id]/grades

Hildi_Pardo

Drag and Drop your course tiles so you have your most frequently needed courses at the top of your Dashboard. And re-arrange any time you need to!

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