Canvas Essentials: Managing and Communicating in Large Courses
In this scenario-based video you’ll follow Professor Jack Huang and his student Finn McGreer as they navigate managing and communicating in large courses. You'll learn how your coordinators can view enrolments and communicate with teaching staff in large courses.
In this scenario-based video you’ll follow Professor Jack Huang and his student Finn McGreer as they navigate managing and communicating in large courses. You'll learn how your coordinators can view enrolments and communicate with teaching staff in large courses.
Video Transcript
Personas:
- Coordinator: Assoc. Prof. Jack Huang
- Student: Finn McGreer
Part A: Assoc. Prof. Jack Huang is coordinating a large, first year Nursing course. The course is being taught by multiple casual teaching staff in various locations. Jack wants to make sure there’s an adequate distribution of teachers and students. He also wants to encourage communication amongst the teaching team and set the course up in a way that allows teachers to easily communicate with students in specific locations.
Part B: Finn is a first year nursing student based in Perth. He’s been randomly assigned to a group for a group project, and wants to begin planning the presentation and collaborate with other members using Canvas’s native tools.
Script
Part A
In this video, we’ll show you how your coordinators can view enrolments and communicate with teaching staff in large courses.
Assoc. Prof. Jack Huang coordinates the Nursing Fundamentals course.
He wants to know how many students are currently enrolled in the course, and if there’s an adequate distribution of markers and students. He also wants to know how many tutorial classes are associated with the course.
Jack navigates to the People menu, where he sees all of the enrolled students, teachers, and tutors.
He sees that the students have been automatically placed in Sections based on their enrolled classes in the student information system. You can learn more about how student data is automatically populated and updated in Canvas in Scenario 4.
Sections help subdivide students within a course. For example, this course is being taught across a number of locations. A Section of students has been created for each location so that teaching staff can easily communicate with students in specific locations.
Teaching staff can also filter submissions in SpeedGrader, the Gradebook and Canvas’s various analytics tools by Section.
Note that Sections are useful for course management and communication. Canvas Groups, on the other hand, help foster student collaboration. You can learn more about Canvas Groups in Scenario 1.
Jack also wants to use Canvas to communicate with the teaching team. He wants to set expectations around how they should interact with students, while also ensuring there’s a consistent marking process across the course.
Jack uses the Canvas inbox to message all course tutors. He includes a brief video introduction in his message.
Jack also uploads some exemplar assignments to streamline the marking process. These assignments are unpublished and only visible to the teaching team.
Part B
We’ll now show you how students can work in groups and collaborate with ease using Canvas’s native tools, regardless of their location.
Finn’s ready to begin work on an upcoming group assignment. He accesses the project group space from his iPad and can see just how easy it is to use Canvas’s native tools to collaborate. There’s no need for students like Finn to turn to external tools that can’t be monitored by the institution.
Finn decides to post an announcement to the group about organising a time to virtually meet.
He also uploads some documents via the iOS files application and creates a shared folder for readings and presentation resources.
Finn’s also been added to a group space with a range of students from across Australia who are taking a First Year Nursing course.
He navigates to this group and introduces himself to the other members. While he’s there, he also answers the ice breaker questions posed by his course coordinator, Associate Professor Huang.