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Due dates are a useful pedagogical tool. They help students keep pace to complete the course, populate the To-Do List and Calendar with reminders for both instructors and students, and allow Canvas to work more predictably and efficiently, among other benefits. However, there inevitably come times when a student needs a different time frame than the standard allotment to complete work. This guide will help walk through the considerations needed to extend the due date on an assignment. (Note: Extending the due date of an assignment, discussion, or quiz is different than adding additional attempts at the work. For more information on adding attempts, see the Envision piece Two-Stage Extensions: When a Canvas Quiz Has Limited Attempts and an Availability Date.)

Office hours, blocks of time designated for faculty and student interaction outside of any regularly scheduled class sessions, are routinely incorporated into university courses (Briody et al., 2019; Hsu et al., 2022). Such sessions are often semi-structured and optional for students, allowing faculty to provide customized support to individual learners when needs arise. This form of faculty-student interaction can support academic achievement, retention, and engagement (Griffin et al., 2014; Guzzardo et al., 2021). That office hours attendance is often at the discretion of individual students, however, can result in underutilization of this valuable supplement to required course sessions and contents (Briody et al., 2019; Griffin et al., 2014; Smith et al., 2017). The purpose of this blog is to delineate empirically guided strategies for optimizing the inclusion of office hours in university courses. In particular, we focus on office hours hosted online, as the online modality can be advantageously employed not only for courses delivered online but also for those delivered residentially.

If you want to get high-quality, professional-looking green screen footage, you’ll have to do more than paint a wall green or place a pop-up screen behind you during your shoot. Use the recommendations below to set up a studio that is optimized for green screen video production.

Good page design requires balance between white space, or negative space, and positive space. Positive space encompasses all aspects and types of content; on a course page, these objects might include an introductory paragraph, video thumbnail, infographic, callout box, opinion poll, or provocative quotation. Relative to these course components, white space might seem like a nice-to-have. Because it promotes clarity and reduces distortion, however, white space is just as important to instructional page design as content.

Situations may present themselves in which links or rubrics from another course can be useful in a current course. Should this occur, rubrics from other courses can be uploaded into another course. To successfully insert a previously built rubric, please follow the following steps.

Once you have defined the learning objectives for your course, you can begin to develop assessments to ensure students achieve those objectives. Once you have created assessments, you can begin to develop materials to ensure students succeed on those assessments. This backward design process—which moves from objectives to assessments and finally to materials—is known as learning-centered instruction, and it directs every course task toward the mastery of certain skills and competencies. This blog focuses on the third stage of this process, the development of high-quality instructional materials, beginning with the idea that robust and engaging online courses contain a mix of created and curated content. Below you will find guidelines for creating and curating instructional materials to help you achieve the optimal balance for your course.

What is “alt text”? Alt text is descriptive text linked to an image, graph, or other visual content that allows users to understand the visual without viewing it. Any image online should contain alt text, but guidelines differ depending on whether the image is simply decorative or related to other content on the page.

To edit a page in Canvas, simply click on the “Edit” button. Each page contains a variety of editing tools, similar to those found on most word processing programs. The Rich Content Editor applies the principles of a WYSIWIG editor (What You See is What You Get) and uses icons to illustrate the functions. You may also hover over an icon to confirm its function.

Over time, you may want to make changes to the syllabus of a course. The syllabus documents are saved in the “Files” area (1) of the course. To preserve the integrity of the document, the Word document is located in the “Instructor Only” folder (3) and the PDF is found in the “Documents” folder (2) so it is visible to students.

While Open Educational Resources (OERs) can take on many forms, including assignments, videos, and articles, open textbooks have provided students with more affordable options for accessing and purchasing required course materials.