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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.

When a Canvas quiz has a limited number of attempts and an availability date, there are two sets of actions instructors usually need to take to provide a student with an additional attempt or extension on the quiz. First, the instructor will need to add a new quiz attempt for the student. Second, if the availability date has passed or is about to pass, they will need to extend the availability of the quiz. This short guide will walk you through both stages of the process.

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.)

At the end of 2019, Canvas rolled out New Analytics, a new version of their former analytics tool, Course Analytics. By Canvas' own description, New Analytics retains the core functionality of Course Analytics while offering a simplified user experience. In this post we share our recommendations for leveraging New Analytics to support students.

With the help of tools like Canvas New Analytics, faculty can leverage learning management system (LMS) data to hone their instructional techniques and improve their online students' experience. In this piece, we provide an introduction to learning analytics in online higher education and detail some analytics best practices.

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.

Wondering how to stay on track in facilitating your online course? The Course Facilitation Plan can help! The document below has spaces for brainstorming what your approach will be to a range of actions, from welcoming students to the course to grading and consulting LMS analytics. For more help ensuring you're ready to facilitate your course, see the Course Facilitation Checklists.

Preparing to facilitate your upcoming online course? This checklist can help! With a short, specific list of actions to take just before and just after course launch, you won't have to worry that you're overlooking something important. For more help mapping out your facilitation goals, see the Course Facilitation Plan.

Faculty often express concern over how to maintain personal relationships with their students in an online course space; incorporating optional synchronous elements to an online course can help “put a face” to a name. Zoom, the video conferencing tool that allows you to create synchronous experiences for their students, has become ubiquitous in educational and businesses in the past two years.

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.