10 Canvas Features You Never Knew You Needed

So nice to see you. You're exceptionally good. Excellent. With introductions then, Rich, shall I massage your ego? And, Yeah. Definitely. That'd be great.

Yeah. That'd be that'd be great. Yeah. And then I'll explain how we'll sort of run the webinar. Have you got your slide with your pretty pictures of you? Yeah.

Oh, so just a bit of a a a welcome from me before we talk about me. John, you're here to to answer questions and and share guides. We've already asked people in the chat to say, you know, what features do you think we'll include or should we include from this session? Hello, Evans, by the way, from Denmark. I can see you in the chat. And, also, that if I introduce you, John, leader of Barrow and Meyer services team, and and if you enjoy today or any of the webinars, you can book more time with the people who work with John, including myself.

So, John, over to you. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's great to see so many people joining, and, you know, thanks for coming to the sesh to these sessions.

We're running them monthly, and it's just really to give a bit of opportunity for sort of bringing customers together. I'm a strong believer in collaboration and sharing ideas. So in a month's time, I'm gonna be leading this webinar, and my focus is actually gonna be about collaborating internally within an institution and then collaborating externally with other institutions as well. So, I've got the privilege of leading the services team in EMEA. I've been here for many, many years.

I know Danny, who's on the call, will know that I've been here a long time. We'll see if she could guess how many it is. But, Rich is part of my team, and we've got a fantastic team of consultants in in EMEA that work with, a wide variety of customers across multiple sectors. And they've got a massive, massive amount of experience of working with many, many customers. We've got the privilege of having Rich with us today.

Now Rich is one of our senior services consultants, And so, Rich manages a lot of the implementations, and he's very experienced in sort of the technical setup and the configuration of Canvas, also using that for teaching, but also sort of change strategy and communications as well in rolling out the projects. So we're really lucky to to have Rich today. He's got a lot of knowledge. Like a lot of our team, he was a Canvas customer prior to, actually working with us. So he's got experience of using using our tools.

And Rich as well, has got the cutest dog that you have ever seen. He's called Morag. And at some point, like Rich has put up on his bullet points, we'll interrupt our call or we'll have a cat walking around at the back of Rich, which happens in many of his calls. But during this session, I'm gonna keep quiet. I'll only chip in if Rich wants another opinion, but my main job is to handle the questions that, you can raise as Rich is giving his presentation.

There will be some time at the end as well where we'll be able to answer questions, if you've got ideas for other things that you would like us to present in the sessions because we plan to carry this on into twenty twenty five as well after we do our special in December to review sort of, the year that we've had. But, basically, any questions, please put those in the q and a for us. I'll be monitoring that, and I'll send you guides and links if I've got things that are useful. And, then at the end, we'll go for more more questions. But I'll hand over to Rich now, and I will mute my microphone and turn my camera off so you can focus on the expert.

Thanks, John. What a nice intro. That's that's made me feel very happy. And thank you all for joining. I didn't know, whether this would be a popular title for a session or not.

I'm gonna skip back one, on my slide so you can just double check that you're in the right session here. Ten Canvas features. You never knew you needed. So I've worked for Instructure now since twenty twenty, and I've been using the platform for a couple of years before that. There are so many times when I'm working with customers when I I'll look at their instance or we'll have a discussion.

And things that seem to us really obvious that customers would use have somehow managed an issue. So whether you're a teacher or an administrator, you've got some sort of strategic role. It's really important today that we show you the things that we think customers often miss or things that we think, actually, you might be using this, but there's a twist on how you might want to use it and things that we think you could reframe your thinking. Plus a couple of things towards the end today that we'll think about in the future with some of these products. Well, so we'll go through.

We've got around ten things, and I do encourage you in the chat as well to join in if there are things that you'd like to comment on, maybe use cases that we'll talk about today, or things that you think other people, should know that they often miss in Canvas. So without much further ado, let's jump into the first one. And the first one is gonna seem really obvious to those of you who are experienced users of Canvas, but I want to double check that everybody does this because the first thing that me or any of my colleagues in the services team do when we're looking into a customer instance and we've been asked by them, can you take a look at some of the back courses and make sure that they're being taught in effective ways? Is the modules controlled? Now I'm sure some of you will have used these before. So I'm starting off with an easy one so that everybody feels like, okay. I've got this.

I at least know what these are even if I'm not using them. And those can include things like requirements, prerequisites, the lock until feature. Have a look at that GIF on the right hand of the screen. Romet from Wallace and Romet. If you have ever been given a course development challenge by your employer or by yourself, in my case, when I was building Canvas courses, also the person who set the schedule at the same time, it can feel a little bit like Gromit putting out the track in front of the training while he's moving them along.

And so just to give you a kind of instance of what this looks like, things like text headers, indentations, and progress tracker, not only does it organize the student and give them scaffolding. When I was working as a teacher in Canvas, most of my students were largely online with a few blended components. So I wasn't in the room with them and supporting them all the time and being able to reinforce messages about my course. What it does is it gives you the ability to look at your, courses. And in this case, we've got one here in this course that wasn't built by me.

It was built by Jessica Jones, who many of you have worked with. And if you're looking for a good example of what a course looks like, I normally go for Jess's course. Now in this course, you can see underneath everything in here, there is labels. There's clarity over exactly what we need to do. Okay.

We've got, text headers. So if you come to the top of your module, you click add, you come here. Text headers can then separate out the things in your module and give a sense of structure to the learner. So for instance, I could say intro, resources, and then I can also add or remove indents as well, which pull them in from the side of the page. Page.

Now in the majority of courses that I look at, these aren't actually placed in there. So this is the sort of thing that will really structure things for you. But, also, if I sort of zoom in here and have a look at this, you can see underneath every item in this module, there are words that verbs that you need the students to do. View, view, contribute, submit, and so forth. And in terms of the students, if their progress isn't as quick as maybe, I would like it to be, maybe I've got a lot of course development on.

Like I said, I might feel a little bit like I'm trying to build and deliver at the same time. You can see in my second module, I've actually used this tool here, the lock until feature. So it can say this will unlock on the twenty first of October. And what this means from a student experience is when I come into view our student, and look in the student view on the top right hand side, my student has already worked through quite a lot of these and see exactly what is intended for each of these. It says complete all items.

Where I've done something and I've completed it. There's a green tick, and where I haven't, there's a little bubble there. And underneath, I know exactly what I need to do. So I've got lots of different options. But most importantly, when I scroll down to the second module, this might be stuff that my instructor has not completed the design of yet.

Or maybe there are other good reasons like, hey. I just want my students to be structured and on the right sort of path together. So quicker learners, maybe the ones who need a bit more time are aligned with each other. And just to go back to kind of this as an idea, if I come back to my slide deck, the reason why I think this is impactful is because when I was first teaching in Canvas, I had a student who was working full time with children who was balancing everything in their lives as an adult learner, and they said to me, enrich those green dots. They're a lifesaver, those ticks.

The ticks and the dots. And I said, what ticks and dots? Because I haven't looked at the module requirements in student view at that point. And I realized it was that column on the right hand side that allowed people to remember back. This is where I was last time, about two or three weeks ago. I've slept since then.

So module controls is number one. Hopefully, that's one that, we can get some feedback on in the chat. Hopefully, that's one everyone's used. Let's move forward to item number two in my top ten. And number two is sections.

Hopefully, this is something that everybody's using, but there is a huge proportion out there of teachers and instructors in the Canvas community who never use sections don't understand what the advantage of them are. So, hopefully, we'll have an educational moment for some people. So on the left hand side of the screen, you can see the model that the vast majority of people work with when they begin teaching in Canvas. So at the top, you'll see something that your colleagues who are admins will be really familiar with, a subaccount, which for most people is probably the name that their faculty or their department. And it's basically the part of your Canvas admin system where your courses live in in your faculty with the settings that you and your colleagues need compared to maybe other parts of your organization.

And in there lives all of your courses. And in most cases, we've got one course, and you put your content in there, And you've got, a thing called a section, which is where the students are enrolled in to. And for every, section that you have, most of the time, you have a separate course. And this is okay, except that sometimes the material in those courses is really similar, and, actually, some of the groups and what they need can share similarities instead. So what sections allow you to do if you work with your admins to enable this is it can allow you to have instead just one course where you've got three sections.

So just looking in the chat at people that we've got here, maybe, Jed, Jenny, and Adrian are all co teaching at the same institution on the same course. And, actually, they don't have a huge amount of time to create brilliant instructional design. So their admin could enroll them into one course and put them in section one, section two, and section three. Each of them has separate groups of students enrolled into that section, and those students will enjoy largely the same materials. If you've been looking at assigning work over the last couple of months, you might have noticed that the way we have assigned work in Canvas has changed.

So have a look at the right hand side of my screen. Where you're assigning maybe modules, you'll notice that there's now an assigned to box, and you'll be able to say, this is visible for everyone, or I can assign it to an individual or a section. Now we've always been able to do that for assignments and for quizzes and discussions because they're interacting thing. So we might have everybody given the same assignment, but then we might decide to give, a different assignment date to maybe one or two individuals. What sections allow you to do is when you create an assignment, for example, you can then change that, for a a whole group of users.

So in the the previous example I gave you where we've got three different teachers combining content together. But, actually, it might be that I'm just a single teacher, but I have three different sections. In order to manage sections, you would need to go into your course settings here. So you can see in here, I've got into my course settings at the bottom here, and I've headed into the second tab here, sections. And this is where I can separate the roster of my course to different sections.

And then whenever I've decided, okay. I'm now gonna go and work in in an assignment here. I can then go into an assignment. And if I've got a due date for people, I can say, instead of everyone, I would like this to be my just for my recent students or for my January twenty three students. And that way, you've got a different sectional or cohort of users who can have different dates at different times.

I'm not sure why that says twenty twenty two. I can set that for, maybe tomorrow, but then I can have a different section with a different set of dates. And what that means is that modules, assignments, quizzes, your course can look completely different depending on the differentiation needs of your students. That's something we're really leaning into in Canvas at the moment. It supports also better workload capacity for you and any teachers who you're collaborating with, and it means that you can shape your your module content section by section.

Now if this is completely new to you and you are like Batman here on the bottom left hand side saying, tell me where it is, then if you're not a canvas admin, I would encourage you to have a conversation with those who are in your organization. The reason why this might be restricted in your institution is because during implementation, some IT admins look at this and say, I don't really love the idea of teachers enrolling and unenrolling students from different parts of the course. And it feels a little bit like the wild west from a data integrity sample. It doesn't have to be, and that's something that we often have conversations on how to manage with our customers during implementation. But I know there's a lot of organizations out there that don't get to harness sections.

The other top tip that I've got for you is if you're in the position I mentioned before where Jed, Jenny, and Adrian are co producing a course and they've got different sections, I would just advise you to say make sure all of you are really clear on the implications of changes to your course because, Because, obviously, Adrian sees something, of course, he doesn't like and he removes it, then it could be that Jenny and Jen's students see or don't see something that they need to see. The other thing to consider with sections is whether you want students from different sections to see one or another. When you enroll students into a different section, you do have the option to say whether or not you'd like them to be able to be kind of parallel but separate or integrated so they have their discussions together. Okay. Well, that is sections.

Hopefully, that's something that for some people, it's been a revelation. It's something that my colleagues know I'm always banging on about when speaking to customers. Okay. And then number three, not a huge piece here, but one that caused me to nearly miss a flight to go on holiday. Because I used to be in charge of my own assignment dates for a course, and I realized what I had done, rather spiritually was, set a bunch of assignment dates or a a due date during my holiday.

And what I was really doing was giving students not enough time to complete their assignments compared to the amount of time that I would have to actually grade it. So what I did, I went into every single assignment in my Canvas instance, and then I just on the screen, I just showed you that assignment edit page. I went in and I said, okay. I'm gonna have to change every single assignment date for every single section of every single course. You don't have to do that.

And this is something that I really wish I'd known before I left that job and came to work for Instructure. So you can batch edit assignment dates across your course. Go into your assignments menu in a course. Head over to the top right hand side, and you see the three dots here, the vertical dots. If you see three dots in Canvas, investigate it.

There's usually something very important and worth seeing behind there. Click on those three dots, and you will see the button edit assignment dates. So when I saw, I went oh, that was very true. It should be. I wasted a lot of time because if you click on it and you go into here, you will see that you can see absolutely every date in your course.

And you can come in here, and if the students are separated like they are on this assignment by section, you can see the different dates for different sections. And you can come in here and you can manually change everything. Or you can click on this button here. You can select everything. You can head over to batch edit and edit the twenty two assignments selected, and you can shift the dates for that forwards or backwards.

So let's say you, book yourself two weeks in the Caribbean, and you go, you know what? I need some time off here. My students can get an extension. I'm giving myself an extension. Push everything forward by two weeks. So let's say your students should receive a notification, unless, of course, they've decided to switch those notifications off, and you can go and relax, safe in the knowledge that you've saved yourself a ton of.

I wonder if that was, one that anybody knew from the chat. I'm gonna pause here because we've been talking for ten minutes or so. I don't wanna take a sip of water and see. John, how are we doing in the chat? Is there anything that people have seen that they've heard for the first time? Any questions that we need to answer? Any summary from yourself? Yeah. No.

I just said a few comments and people are being positive about, you know, the tools that you're showing there. What would be good is if it I know we've got the chat. We'd have the dialogue there. But if there are specific questions, people can put those in the q and a button at the bottom. Then what we can do is we can address those and not have to filter through sort of all the other chats.

But, yeah, people are saying that they're using the tools and that they, they're taking some off the list, which I think that is a good sign because that means, obviously, we're we're building things that are useful for for people. We've got some questions about specifics with large courses and module progress. What I'll do is I'll reach out to those people in, individually. I've got some ideas, but it's just sort of things that we need a few more specifics on, and we can we can give some guidance on on those. But I think it's going well and things are positive.

We're seeing people are talking about the things they've done, whether they're using Sysintegrations or great pass back. So, you know, there's great things that people are developing between the tools in their own ecosystem as well. So all good. Danny's made a really interesting point about blueprints, wanting to automatically calculate start dates as plus ten days or whatever. Now I've never tested this with blueprints.

So with blueprints, there's always, just exercise a little caution and do testing because we're talking about two, separate features interacting with each other, and I hope they play nice. But if I'm bringing on screen the settings for the course that I was just in, so just go into your settings, scroll down, and, hopefully, this has been switched on by an account admin. If you are the account admin, you might want to check-in your feature settings for the overall account. I'm gonna think here called enable course pacing. Now it does say course pacing is in active development.

Learn more about this using the course pacing fee, user group, which I'm gonna open and pop into chat for you here because, like all things in active development, it it requires a bit of a bit of a health check next to it. But, effectively, it does exactly what you've said, Danny. So it takes those, assignments and gives you the ability to to plus ten days from the start of the course, which is perfect particularly if you've got people coming into Canvas catalog who have got all different start dates. You don't have to then kind of think about things only in terms of cohort by cohort dates. You can be nice and flexible.

Now whether that works exactly as intended with, blueprints, definitely worth testing. Haven't done that myself, but I would hope that they play nice together. So really great question. So, again, have a look in course pacing. And if you don't see that there and you are an administrator, then what I suggest you do is go into your admin area.

And, looking at the time, we definitely got time to to talk about all of this, but we're doing good for time. Thank you for the questions. And you can go into your settings and head to feature options, which is where if you can't see, course pacing in your course itself and apologies, for teachers who are looking at this. But if you go to here, have a look at your feature options, you'll see that course pacing is something that can be enabled and may not always be in your institution. Hopefully, that was super helpful for people.

Let's, continue because the next thing that we're going to look at, I believe, is one of my favorites that's totally underused, Canvas Commons. So stop. Elaborate. Listen. Sorry.

It's a global repository of best practices in Canvas. Now I say global. Actually, what we've got is due to, GDPR and data collection laws, you've separated commons out as of a couple of years ago just to make sure that the data that you're looking at is held within your, region. So if you are in Central Europe, you may be on the Amazon, Frankfurt server or the the the Dublin one if you're, maybe UK Ireland or one of our older customers from Europe there. Either way, everything that you've got is protected by GBBR.

So, the content repository really just comes from organizations across Europe, potentially, limited only to your institution or potentially only to your faculty depending on how your admin has set up Canvas Commons. But what it is is effectively the ability for you to, work with colleagues from across the world to create things like assignments, discussions, pages, quizzes, or in fact, just whole course content and templates so that you can then take these ready made resources, have a look at them. You've even got version control notes so they can be updated over time, or you've got, copyrights if there's something that you want to share with limitations, and you can download that into your course. So have a look here if I come back into my Canvas course here. Remember, the Canvas Commons item should be here in your global navigation.

If it isn't, that's normally a sign that your admins have decided to remove it. If you are an admin watching this, what I would recommend before you promote Canvas Commons to everybody is come in here yourself and take a look at the admin area where you can control your account settings. So in here, you can see I can see maybe two thousand different items in here, but the natural filters that are added to my account or the things that I can and can't see are dictated by the admin when they come into these account settings. So you can see here, for example, the admin has come in here and said, okay. We'll allow different things to be shown here.

We've got different, users who can manage the content. And you can also say, okay. Well, maybe I don't want, to allow my teachers to share to a public account because I'm worried about commercial interests and so forth. Or you could repeat stop users from seeing like this. So if this is something that, as an admin, makes you feel a bit spooked, don't worry.

You have lots of control. But if I come back into here and I search for things, I can see, for instance, the most favorited items that are in here, including things created by our instructional design team at Instructure. So, for example, if you wanted to think about using Canvas during a store closure, which obviously, a lot of importance over time. Or for instance, you'd like to come down here and see, okay. What different items have we got here? We can see that we've got some stuff from, some.

So, potentially, some of our Scandinavian colleagues have been using this quite a lot. And I really like this online course and, big development. So, don't know if Ian has created this, but you can see everything within here. For example, I can see, learning domains and design introduction, and I can see all the content within this course. And if I want to, I can add it to my favorites, download it, or I can review the details of this and see that this is from somebody in Durham and, even that they're in version consult mode.

So I can see when this is last updated. If I want to, I can create and share my content, and I can also see here that I've got groups or consortiums. So if I've got some colleagues and a faculty that I'd like to only share with, work as maybe, a center of excellence within my institution, or if I'm working in compatibility with another council organization. So for example, I know that our Swedish universities are all on the same Amazon web server so that you can always interact with each other because there's loads of work around consortiums there. This can be a really powerful tool for sharing that best best practice.

Okay. So Canvas Commons. Underload, not used enough, be curious, find some recesses resources, share some resources as well. Okay. Five, accessibility settings.

You may notice that I'm wearing a hearing aid today, so this is one that's particularly personal for me as somebody with significant hearing loss. And I'm really I must say on a personal level, really grateful and impressed that Instructure as my employer has been taking, accessibility quite seriously in the way that it's been developing its product. And some of the things that you can see on this slide are really important for me in terms of making sure that not only teachers know this, but teachers are able to demonstrate it to their students. So the reason that I put this on today's list is because these might be things that you've realized are available for you. I'd like to reinforce the point that this is something that students can often miss as well or that we assume that they're gonna find or that we think they're using, but they may not realize it's helpful too.

So one of the things that you can see, for example, is the high contrast UI. If I come over to here and bring in Canvas, you can see here this version of Canvas in this particular subaccount has got some blue, white, and white branding. If I have a visual impairment, that may not be easy for me, so I can open up my personal account settings at any point, toggle on use high contrast UI, give the page a refresh, and then everything in here is a hell of a lot more accessible. You've got underlined links. You've got a lot of the color stripped out.

And a lot of the things that if you wanted to go through one by one, you could also find these individually as settings by going into your personal settings, scrolling down here, and you'll see that you've got some feature options that apply to you as an individual user. Now some of these are accessibility features. Some of these are to do with the download of, items like CSV files. But there are things to have a look in there. Like, for instance, celebration animations may not be appropriate for everybody, particularly if they've got a site condition.

I head back to my slides here, and I'm gonna just turn that, high contrast back on or off rather. We've also got tools like the Microsoft immersive reader. So if you're on any item in a Canvas course, for example, at any point, if you head over to the top right hand side of it as you look at it when you're working on the desktop, you should be able to see. I'm gonna, bring that, a page open now and find an example for you. Now, hopefully, this has been enabled for you.

We've got a tool here. The Microsoft Immersive Reader sits in the top right hand corner. It's a brilliant tool by our colleagues at Microsoft that every Canvas instance has for free. Again, if it's not switched on in your instance or you can't find it when you're looking at a page, you can ask your admins to take a look and switch it on. You can see here that not only does this act as a screen reader Watch pre class work.

Which is really helpful. But, also, if you head over to text preferences, I believe it is, or perhaps it's under reading preferences, if I can pardon, you can translate into literally any language in the world and have that read out by the screen reader as well. So if maybe, like me, you've got, a a hearing impairment, it this could be something that's, not appropriate, but you can still, change this if you've got a language difficulty, what what needs there. Interestingly as well, we are not sitting still on this ourselves. So one of the things that we're building into this is soon is AI translations.

So if you don't use the Microsoft tool for any reason, then coming in one of our product releases soon. And on the product roadmap will be the ability for you to just click a button at the top of the page. And if you speak another language and you prefer to work in that or maybe you're learning a new language, you can read all of the content that's been created by your teacher and read it in the language that you choose. And, again, that's gonna be a really wide range of languages as well. You should all know by now that when you're working in the rich content edit editor in Canvas, you will always have the ability to see the accessibility checker as well.

If you've never seen that before or maybe you're used to using something like, one of our our other tools, so it's, I don't know, there's a a Blackboard tool that gets integrated into Canvas quite a lot. Just to show you where that lives is it's just here at the bottom. They've got an accessibility checker that also checks for accessibility. So, for example, if I did something really silly and I turn this and turn it into yellow font, you would immediately see a number one pop up there, and it would tell me, hey. The contrast here is, not effective.

And it might also be that you've got the wrong, the wrong size font as well for the the header that you've got there. So that accessibility check is really important too. And, also, one of the things that I think might have passed people by if you're a studio user is that captioning became automated over the last couple of years. That's great for when you get a new video that you've created, and many of you will have received an email saying, you've uploaded a studio video. Captions are ready for you to review.

And that's absolutely fine. I'm hoping that that's not a surprise to everybody. But when I pull over my studio library, hopefully, I've done that without hold on a second. Organize missing screens. You can now see that in my library, under the filter settings, I can come in here, view all, and under media, I can filter for things that don't have captions.

So this might be things that either have captions that have been generated and they've not been approved, or their older videos have never got the chance to have the auto captioning. So with this, for example, I did a screen recording during a webinar, talking about screencastomatic. I can come in here. I can click on captions, and I can see that there are captions, but they're not published. So click on that, review this.

Because the auto captioning in Canvas is generally about eighty five percent accurate in all of the languages that we use, then it's generally pretty okay, and I can click publish, and then my video will have captions to go on. So even if all of these are not made for you, I bet nobody has been in, obviously, all of their studio videos updated their captions. Okay. One more thing as well. If you are an admin and you're looking at Studio and the accessibility tools within there and thinking, actually, I really like auto captioning.

This is something that I would like everybody to do. You know that you have more than one media player in the rich content editor because, of course, there's also the Canvas legacy, media player that many of you may be using. But you have the option to disable those type of uploads, therefore forcing people to start using Canvas Studio, which goes above and beyond in terms of its accessibility and compliance. So you can go into your overall account settings. So just your normal root account settings.

And on the settings page, as you scroll down, you'd be familiar with some tick boxes, and one of them will be there to say disable uploads to Canvas media from the enhanced rich content editor, leaving people with only the option to use Studio, which is a better experience from an accessibility perspective. K. Okay. Next up. Hopefully, one that, is new for some people, and I think it's pretty exciting.

So, many times customers come through implementation and they say, we love Canvas. The UI works for us, but we'd like to do something slightly different. We wanna add something to the navigation, be it in your course or be in all courses, not just yours, but every course across your, sub account, your faculty, or your whole institution. Or maybe there are admins that want something different in their menu, or maybe you'd like something in the personal user menu to pop out and give you an extra link. Remember, you can also, always customize your help menu.

But for that extra bit of flexibility, this is not actually a a Canvas tool. This is an additional option, a third party, integration. It's from our app center, and it's called redirect plus. Well, actually, those of you who've been with Canvas for a while might recognize the initial redirect tool. But redirect plus came in, I think, last year and gives people just a few more options.

If I bring it on the screen and show you exactly what I mean in my account settings. So, teachers or people who are non admins, you should be able to find this in your course setting in the apps area. So if you go to your course settings and then have have a look over to the right hand side, you'll probably see that. Here, I'm showing it from an admin's root account perspective. So an admin will be able to go into their main settings.

I'm working in the root account. I could work in a sub account for this. And I head over to apps, and when I'm looking in the app center, which will soon be updated, by the way. So if you're watching a recording of this in a few months, you'll you'll notice this looks a little different because, there's there's some cool stuff coming in the app center. But for now, you if you have a look in here, you type in the word redirect, you'll see redirect tool and redirect plus.

Now redirect tool, if you're not a developer, is really easy to use. You can click on this. You can click add app. It basically gives you the label that you can give. So maybe I've got, something like, EMEA uni library, and that's what's gonna be put into all of my courses.

I put the URL for my library in there. I'll put it as force open new tab, which I probably want to do because I'm navigating people away from Canvas, but I'd like them to stay there. And I'll put it in my course navigation. Now if I click add app, that's gonna then sit in the navigation for every course in this account. So it's probably something if I'm gonna add that I wanna let my teachers know about first because it's a whole scale change.

And for that, I'd probably use a global announcement and let them know when it will happen. However, the thing about library links is that often when you go to them, it really helps for that library service to know some information about the user and what redirect clusters. Instead, if I come back to my app center, have a look at this, is redirect plus has the ability to take information about that user. So for instance, the course that they're working in or the user information that they've got or the subaccount that they belong to or the faculty within the organization so that the URL that they then go to is able to direct them to a specific resource. So if you're a developer on this call, full disclosure, I am not one, then hopefully, you can realize that there's a lot of ways that you could could use this and be creative with it.

So, for instance, you could do custom internal tools like a a library service. You could do individual resources based on data health and other systems, or you could have a program level resource. A lot of times customers come through implementation and say, how can we get everybody from one particular program even though there are different courses to be directed to a specific link? And rather than doing the hard work of hard coding that into every page, the redirect plus tool could do that for you. You. So something that I hope is really fun for people.

And one last thing to say about this is that there's no limit on how many times you can add this in, or where you can add it to. Obviously, less is more. We don't want to clutter people's navigation, but it is something you can reviews and be creative with. So have a conversation with your teams about how you could add this into a template or, in Danny's case, maybe a blueprint. Okay.

Once again, it is time for me to stop, have a sip of water, and check-in with Jonathan Perry and the chat and see how we're doing. Yeah. We've been getting quite quite a few questions coming in. Some of them are sort of quite specific use cases and effort product functionality, that maybe isn't directly sort of within the UI of Canvas. So what I'm doing is I'm reaching out to people individually on that, and we'll connect with your customer success managers.

There's a few solutions. Quite a few of them are around modules and module progress. So what we'll do is we've got the attendee list. There's just a bit of investigation I want to do about that and some of the ideas, and we'll reach out to people individually for specific use cases and, and and get more details on that. So the questions about things that are coming on the road map as well, so a few things about AI, that people are asking about.

Mhmm. Like I said, I'm not sure if if people here are attending Canvas Con next week. We do have, Zach Pendleton, flying into Barcelona, and there's gonna be a big presentation on, AI, sort of the expectations of institutions on what they want to do. All the details about the CanvasCon sessions afterwards and those stories. They'll all be shared and published for people that can't attend, so people will be able to get sort of access to, you know, those stories around that.

But, what we'll do as well is we'll we'll connect to the CSMs, and we'll make sure that, those of you that are asking questions about AI and about the road map, I'll get those over to your CSMs so they can give you accurate answers about the product, product road map. And what I'll do is I'll find the road map, link for you on the community, and I'll share that with everybody on the webinar so you know the best place to look for the updates and the things that are coming for product. And the other thing to say about that is, we've got some principles around Instructure and how they're developing AI. Obviously, there's been a bit of a gold rush for for tech companies or being asked by every customer. When do we when are we gonna have AI features? We've been quite cautious as a company about making sure that it's underpinned by some real responsible principles.

So you can see that I've added that link in the chat, and these are gonna be the guiding staff when our product teams work with AI, which I think is really important, particularly in regions like this where GDPR is super important. And also just to make sure that where we're putting, energy into our product, we're doing it for the right reasons to serve you as customers. So I'm happy with that so far with with what I've seen, and there'll be an AI tool that I'll mention later in today's session as well. There was also, a question in the chat about accessibility features for, Microsoft Reader. Can it read like PDFs and for instance? The answer to that is no.

Not at the moment. It wouldn't be able to dig into a PDF and read that. It's one of the reasons why we encourage people wherever possible to build natively in Canvas can be a difficult message to sell when we're working with organizations who've already built lots of things in, say, Google Drive and are trying to work in Canvas for the first time. What typically we mean, we find that, the more you build natively in Canvas, the more you can harness the technology that Canvas has got built in around accessibility. So it's part of the drive that we try and encourage.

We're trying to make, content development as easy as possible, which is why those of you who've been looking at the product blog and the product road map might have heard about the block editor, which is coming very soon, which is gonna change the game, making, things visible and look amazing and feel amazing in Canvas. So more on that soon. But, otherwise, we'll run out of time, so let's carry on because we're up to number seven. Speed grader has a comment library. Quick one on this because I can't believe that more people don't realize that this exists, but it is kinda tucked away in the UI.

So if you are grading in the SpeedGrader, as of, twenty twenty two, if you're working in a SpeedGrader here, you can see, my student has submitted a studio video. I've given them my grade, and I'm ready to start adding in here in our very recently updated simplified rich content editor, which you'll see in this V grader. Not only now do you have, for instance, just at the bottom of the screen, hopefully, you can, see it. Let me reshape my window slightly, because I think it's a little small for you. But you can see at the bottom of the screen here that now you've got video, recording with captioning at the bottom here.

So that, studio style, captioning now sits in the speed grader video comments as well. But, also, if you start typing in something that you are often using as a comment, then, oh, hopefully, I've switched on my suggestions. Maybe I'll switch them off. Okay. You can see here just a number sixteen next to a little speech bubble.

In here, a comment library, which means that you can pre, prepare all of the comments that you might usually add to a Canvas, speed grader feedback, and you can have this including suggestions that can be added when typing. So I can put that in there, or I can see you. And, hopefully, it will come up with the suggestion. You clearly there we go. You clearly listen to our discussion class.

I can put that comment, that will follow me from course to course, from year to year. I only need to put it in the course and it's done for it, which I think is really neat. The next thing that I want you to take a look at is the student what if grades. This is something I didn't know until relatively recently because I've not studied in Canvas very much. But if you go into a student grade book, and they're obviously, most of the time, you'll have probably spent your time looking in in, your normal grade book, which looks a little like this.

If I come in here and I look at a list of students here, we've got a student here called, called Connor. Now I'm an admin, so I'm gonna just masquerade as Connor just for a second so that we can see what his grade book looks like. You can look at, a general student grade book if you want to. There should be a drop down in the grade book to allow you to do that. But here, I wanted to show you this just specifically for this student for this course.

If I'm Connor and I've maybe done half of this course, but I've got a couple of items here where instructors are not posted to the grades yet. If I'm thinking, okay. Well, I need to get over seventy, but I think I probably only got about thirty on this. I can click on that, type in my grade, and then I can see, look. I still get seventy six percent.

So okay. What if I have a complete disaster and I only get twenty on this? Okay. That's the point. I need to get over twenty for this in order to hit my first grade for a UK higher education. So that's something that maybe you didn't know about.

But if you work with students and look at their grade book with them, you can then coach them on target setting and making sure that they feel like, okay. I know what I need to do. Because as we all know, students these days are increasingly focused on what they need to achieve, and they're very goal oriented very much more than maybe they were when I was at the university. So, hopefully, that's a brand new one for everybody. Moving quickly forward, new analytics.

So, it's we call it new analytics, but it's been here for what seems like forever, but so many teachers miss it. And what we want to insist on this one is that there's a lot of data that's building up into your course. It's only good if you use it to take action. One of the nice things about new analytic is that that because it's linked to the student's grade, grade book and it's linked to the inbox through the message students who functionality. It allows you to go in and see what students are doing, and it will make you look as if you are completely omniscient.

So if you go to the home page of any course you're on, take a look at new analytics on the right hand side, Click on that button there. Come over into new analytics here. It will give you a little guide if you need it. Now we've got some fake students in here, who we can see. If I decide to, say, compare someone like Steve Nye, whom many of you will know to the rest of the class, see how Steve gone.

He did really well on that. If I want to go more details into here, I can see his grade compared to the average of the class and what the status of that was. I can even message him based on his, attainment in this area as well. Or if I want to compare him to, say, Jess, of course, Jess is is doing as normally top of the class as we would expect for her, and we can see how she's getting on as well. Or we can, look at this tab here, weekly online activity.

Now back when we were using this, this as a fake student course and we were all logging in together, we were we were logging up some data here for average page views and participation. So did they take part in a discussion? Did they submit an assignment so far? And we can see here that there was a spike and then a drop. And you might want to analyze that and say, okay. Are there any synchronous events that are causing people to go towards Canvas, or is there an assignment deadline that's dragging people in? You can also scroll down here, and you can see which aspects of your course are killing it and getting loads of page views and which ones are really not getting a lot of views and you really want them to be, noticed or participated with a lot more. In fact, what you can do is you can go to message students who, this button here.

You can click on that, and then you can see, who viewed, didn't view, participated, or didn't participate in absolutely every aspect of your course. Now this data has a latency of a maximum of four hours. So if you do this in the evening, you probably know that, you know, most people today, if I wanted them to come in and get involved in the discussion here, if I click on these five students here, I know exactly who it is that hasn't participated, and I can send them an individual message in the inbox and say, please, could you take a look at this before Wednesday's class? It's really important that you do this. And they will think, my goodness. My teacher sees all, knows all, and really cares about my, my progress as well.

There's a lot of other things in here where you can dig down into individual students and their progress or the reports, and you can even manage online attendance if you have a a completely online school. So new analytics is one that we recommend you all go to. And if you are an admin, check out the analytics hub in your, admin area where we've been, collaborating with all of our admin data. Okay. I see Danny's getting excited about online attendance in the chat.

Make sure when you go into new analytics, you go into the settings button to enable that. It'll be in the top right hand corner of new analytics. It doesn't come up unless you enable it, so keep an eye on that. Without further ado, our final one, number ten, graded discussions. Now I know what you might be thinking, but, Rich, I know how to use a graded discussion.

That's really easy. I know that I just go into my discussion from my philosophy course. And when I'm asking my students to discuss whether free will is illusory, I come down here and I click the graded button, and that will open up all of the assignment stuff in here. Most people have done it. In fact, it was the first thing that I ever did in a Canvas course because I have online learners, and I wanted them to start talking to each other.

I made it graded. But one of the things that you can do as well, which I did back then, is you can add a rubric to this. So if I save this, and I come in here and I have a look at the external part of this. So before I click edit and and allow people to have a look at it, I click on the three dots here, scroll down, you can see there's add rubric here. Now many people might not have done this in the past because let's own it.

We needed to improve our rubrics. But if you've been taking a look at the product lists recently, have a development in there, you will know that we have been really improving our rubrics. So if you have worked at an account level here like we are, you can now switch on the enhanced rubrics, and they look and feel so much more easy to use. They also give the ability to import rubrics. So if you've got rubrics in another system, like turn it in, you can export out of there and export it into Canvas, and you can have them all sitting inside Canvas.

I can click on the persuasive essay rubric here, and I can see it in both traditional or horizontal or vertical modes. And I can test it out and see how the students and the teachers will actually use this as well. So rubrics are something that we can now add to our discussions, to our assignments with a lot more confidence. And I think John should be sharing links with everybody about, about when those are gonna come out. There's some information in the the community about when that will come out on the product roadmap.

Part one of the rubric update, as you can see, is out already, and I think part two is coming soon as well. Also, the other thing about discussions and the thing that I found when I was working on this BRAVE discussion that I ran in my first course is that I created a massive problem for myself. My students got really enthusiastic, and it took me forever to read all of those discussions. I promised you AI and and the snow. As of very soon, one of our product updates coming soon, we're gonna have AI powered discussion summaries.

So you'll be able to go I don't know if you can see it in here on my slide. You'll be able to come in to your graded discussion, and you'll be able to get discussion summaries and tell you exactly what all the students have been talking about. If you don't like the interpretation, you can click refresh, and it will reinterpret it for you. We really are living in the future. So we're nearly out of time.

There's a couple of, ones that we, we need to have as honorable mentions that didn't quite make the cut. Firstly, studio annotations. My goodness. If you're a studio user, please use annotations because they're brilliant. If you don't know, it's a way you can interrupt a video like this one of John playing guitar.

And if you've got some information about this that you'd like the students to stop and review, you can add something on the screen that's gonna take them to an external website. They can find out much more about something that John wasn't doing there, which is not doing his guitar. And then when they're ready, they can continue the video. If you got lengthy videos like this one that you're watching today, it's a really good way to chunk out that content and make sure that a cognitive load of all of your users does not get stretched. And the the final one that I was gonna mention just as an extra one is the admin console as well.

If you are an admin who's been working with the admin console, great. And for those of you who are not initiated, it's the place where tickets go when students or yourselves ask for help in Canvas. Now one thing that we do notice over time and that tier sevens are always talking to customers about is that often, the people managing the admin console can change jobs or maybe the the management of that doesn't get looked at for a while. But there's some really useful data set in there, things like, reports or things like, trends that you can see based on who's been raising tickets and what they've been asking about. So for a management tool, it's a really effective one.

But I didn't quite make the list of my top ten, which hopefully you've enjoyed today. So I'm gonna just hand back over to John. I'm gonna take a sip of water, and hopefully, we can we can wrap up today's section. Yeah. Thanks, Rick.

Thanks for that. I'm just waiting for my camera to focus in on me, to do that. I think we've answered all the questions that are in the, q and a, which is good. For the main things that you've spoken about, what I've done is I've put links into the chat. But what we'll do is we'll liaise with Georgina afterwards to make sure that we've got the resources that we've put together, presentation, all the links for these guides that we've been speaking about so that they can be accessible to you afterwards as well with all those key bits because I know there's things on here that people will have liked and and and want to look more deeply into.

And for some of the comments I've seen, you know, people have not been aware of some of the new releases and things along those lines. Like I said earlier, if it's questions that we can't answer, if it's a bit more detailed, specific use cases, things along those lines. What we'll do is I'll review, the attendees. We've got your your names for the people that have attended, and what we can do is we can talk to your customer success managers, flag the questions, give that to you. And then, also, you know, there's gonna be a lot of news and things, stuff that we'll be talking about in next week in Barcelona.

What we'll do is we'll bring that information back to you and make sure you've got those, those questions answered. Yeah. And and those who've been asking about the online attendance, it's the settings will in there, you can see on the screen. It it should be in the top right hand corner. It might be something that is, something you have to switch on at an account level.

So if you can't see the button, I can see Danny can see, is struggling to find that, then, we'll we'll have a look at the Canvas guides and make sure that gets sent out afterwards in the funnel. So I wanna say thank you to to everyone who's been asking questions in the chat, and, I really appreciate your participation today. This has been a labor of love, I'd say. I've really enjoyed putting this together, and it's been lovely as well to see names like Spagazita, who I've not spoken to for a little while, and and and hear, hear some old names and old faces to chat as well. All that's left to say from me is a really big thank you to everybody for joining today.

And hopefully, see some of you. I know Jordy's already in Barcelona, so hopefully, I'll I'll see you there next week. And then, of course, as always, the EMEA services team have a menu of services that you can get involved in if you want to come and buy more of our time. We're not too pricey. I don't think.

And go and speak to your CSM. You can have all of the services that you see listed on the screen here, and Jonathan will be the person for talking to your CSM about what's appropriate for what we need at the moment. And then, hopefully, I get to see more of your faces again in the future. But for now, that's it from me. And and and a big thank you to Jonathan as well and to all of you for attending today.

I will, we'll see you soon, and and take care, everyone. Yeah. Have a have a great day, everybody. Thanks for attending. What you should get as well is a survey that comes out to you afterwards about the webinars that that we have.

If you've got any ideas for us as well, you know, on webinars and things that you'd like to see, please, you know, you can put those in the chat before we finish. And if you want to listen to me ramble on and waffle a bit more, and, you're available in a month's time. If you attend the session again at the beginning of November, I'm gonna be talking about all the tools that teachers can use to collaborate and share and sort of the benefits around that as well in terms of sort of developing education and, you know, collective knowledge. So, that's from me. I think we need to say bye to everybody, Rich, and, you need to go find more.

I can take her for a walk because she didn't come disturb you. Not the pension. She will be very sad if I don't know to say hi. Okay. Take care, everyone.

We'll see you soon. Bye bye. Well, you too. Have a great day.