Canvas and Impact: Beginning of the Year Admin Best Practices
As people start well, welcome. Thank you all so much for joining us today. This is our beginning of the year admin best practices webinar. We actually have a series of these for our various products, but we're covering today Canvas best practices And, for those admin who are Canvas users, but also those who are Canvas and impact users, we're gonna be talking about how you can also apply some of those best practices when you have both products. So if you're a Canvas user or an impact user, you're in the right place. We will get started with some quick introductions here.
Hi. My name is Emily Koutsianis. I am a product specialist with the learning management team. I've been with Instructure seven years last month and former educator, and then I come from Orlando. I will introduce Melissa McClellan.
Do you wanna say hi, Melissa? I can unmute myself. Yes. Good morning. My name is Melissa. I am a product specialist for EdTech Effectiveness and have been with Instructure for the past three years, primarily working with Impact, formerly educator, kindergarten teacher, and school admin as well.
And we have, Jason and Benjie who will be joining us. They are our they're gonna help us facilitate the q and a and keep us on track, but we are so grateful to have these knowledgeable teammates here with us. So I'll turn it over to Jason real quick to say hello. Hi, everyone. Jason Richter.
Been with Instructure about ten years now and, formerly a Canvas customer, Canvas admin. And so just happy to share some experience and background. Again, I'm here more supporting, Emily and Melissa, but, happy to be with you this morning. And last but not least, Benji is joining us as well. It is his pandiversary, so his anniversary here at Instructure.
So thank you for just celebrating with us here this morning, Benjie. Right on. One year today, and I joined the greater Instructure family in twenty twenty one, as a k twelve education technology director when we brought Canvas LMS to our school. I like the product. I love the people, and, therefore, I'm thrilled to be here generally at Instructure and here specifically with you all today.
Well, we appreciate everyone joining us this morning. If if it's morning for you, maybe it's evening for our friends in EMEA. I'll turn it over to Melissa to kinda go over the objective. Yeah. Thank you, Emily.
The objective for today's call is really to set you up for success as Impact and Canvas admins. There's a lot of best practices for start up terms. We wanted to make sure everything is top of mind for you. You'll go to the next slide, Emily. Thank you.
It's also worth noting that everything we're going to review today is general Canvas and Impact admin information. If you have questions, it's great to reach out to your CSM. You can also visit the Instructure community that houses all of our wonderful how to guides and is a great place to collaborate with other, customers as well. And if you have any questions during today's session, please go ahead and throw them in the QA. We're gonna do our best to answer them.
We don't get to them, your CSM will be your best point of contact to get those questions answered. Wonderful. And let me there we go. So a lot of the information we're gonna be covering today is also documented in this amazing document called the customer life cycle and annual success strategies document. When we finish this, I will put, a link to our presentation in the Instructure live event that you've all registered for.
You can make a copy of this document, but it is amazing. You wanna make your own version of it. You wanna copy it and, bookmark it because this allows you basically a checklist, a guide that walks you through the entire academic year, in the areas of what you should be thinking about related to professional development. What about strategic planning and vision and goals? What about content creation should you be kind of looking at during the period various periods of the year? It also talks about SIS integration if you have a student information system connected to Canvas. And then everyone's favorite, admin tasks.
Right? So anything that you kinda should be doing at various periods of time throughout the academic year, this list has it, and we'll be hitting some of the highlights for that zero to three months before school start today. One of the biggest, questions that we have is related to content creation and distribution. And that's a whole area in the checklist, but we're gonna go over at a high level today various methods of being able to distribute your content. So by this point of the year, as an admin, you've probably already determined a few of your preferred methods for content distribution. If not, there's a guide we will be sharing out as well.
This is a link in our presentation that will help you identify what is the best fit for your unique needs. And at a very high level, the breakdown is we have blueprinting available, which is great for course specific information. We have templating available that's kinda meant to establish a consistent framework, across an account or a sub account and we also have the ability for your instructors to import courses from comments. So they're able to basically pull content into a course if they're using Commons, which is our learning object repository. Each of these ways has a purpose and a place, but it really depends on your unique needs for your institution.
We'll we'll cover each one in a little bit more depth in just one minute. So templates, as I mentioned before, templates came out just a few years ago, and I was thrilled. As a former Canvas admin, this just really checked a lot of boxes for me because I was always looking to build a consistent framework for my teachers so they didn't have to start from a completely blank canvas, so to speak. So, they build that consistent structure. Things that you may wanna do would be like building a template home page that your instructors can edit, but it gives them an example of what you want to cover on a home page or maybe example assignments.
Because templates are set at an account or a subaccount level, you don't wanna get too content specific. And, also, there's no way to, quote, unquote, lock content. It is fully editable by the teachers once they receive or they have access to the template. One thing that is critical, especially at this time of year, is that templates are pushed immediately after a new course is added to your account. The very first time it hits Canvas is when this template is copied into the course.
And they can't be applied to courses retroactively, so if they already exist in Canvas, you can't add a template to those. There's another way to do that, but, it's really critical that you have those before the start of the new year. So when your new courses start at being added to Canvas, you wanna have your templates in place if you're choosing that route. Those of you who have a student information system, if you have a student information system connected to Canvas, you wanna make sure it's prior to your what we call our SIS resume date. So if you're going to SIS integrations area and you look at where you resume what your resume date is, you wanna make sure that your template is applied long before you, that that date hits.
So, one other little, like you see these little, what are they called? Light bulbs? You see these little light bulbs here? You're gonna see little tips about just suggestions. You don't have to do this, but just a consideration would be using templates to set your navigation that is preferred. So if you have you want teachers to edit and have fewer navigation items, you can do that in a template, and then it removes the need to do that for the teacher. Same with course settings. If you go into your more options area and you expand that more options area, a lot of institutions have strong opinions about what they want in that more, more options area of their course settings.
And if you have standardized assignment groups that you want across your full institution, this is how a template could be applied. You could set those assignment groups up in a template. Just some thoughts really related to templates. Next is blueprints. Blueprints are awesome for distributing content to specific courses.
It is not at an account level. It is a course to course association. This is why it's best for curriculum materials. So, you can associate up to a hundred courses in the user interface. There's a little tray that pops up, and you can add the one hundred courses there.
Or if you would rather, do more in bulk or do more through a CSV, you can use a course's CSV. And all you'd have to do is attach whatever your blueprint course ID is to the column. Just list the number there. And the beauty and the reason that a a lot of people use blueprints is that content can be locked. So if you have really structured materials and content, this might be the a better approach than a template.
Nothing in a template can be locked, but there are certain aspects of a blueprint that can be locked or which means it's not editable by the instructor. One thing again, our tip here at the bottom is you wanna have the blueprint content. You can't sync it until those courses hit your Canvas instance. So you will be able to once they arrive in Canvas, then you can associate the blueprint to the associated courses. If you're going to do that, and I have a lot of institutions that choose to do this, you might wanna give yourself a little bit of a window to push that blueprint content.
And for that reason, when we talk about terms in just a few slides here, you're gonna wanna probably push back your teacher access dates so that, they don't get in immediately and start building content right away when you're just gonna push content in for them. So communication will be key here to let them know that you're pushing the content, but you may wanna also, like, as a safe a safe, method to push back teacher access just slightly so that you have time to blueprint before they get in and edit. Look at this now. We also have comments. I love comments.
It is super helpful for your teachers to be able to pull in and pick and choose the content that they want to pull into their course, whereas templates and blueprints were pushed into a Canvas course. Commons is kind of more of a pull. It provides teachers that flexibility to to choose the content that they want to put in their course. It could be an entire course. You see that there are full courses available on Commons, but it also could be smaller subsets.
So you could pick a single module and pull it into a course to see if that relates to the content you need to teach. Schools that leverage Canvas Commons should consider the type of control they're looking to have at an admin level. Like, if you're using Canvas Commons, you could look at there's a section of the class document that is, allowing and managing Canvas or Commons content. So you might wanna look at that piece of the class document. If you're using commons, you may also wanna make sure you're reminding your teachers to preview the content.
There is a preview function directly in commons where you can see what's available. But how often do teachers pull in stuff and love everything that's part of the course right? We like to pick and choose what we want to use with our students. All of our classes are unique so you want to make sure it meets their needs. So, one thing you can do is have them pull it into maybe a sandbox course or course that doesn't have students right away so that they can add their own edits to it before that material is made available to students. And, as far as content distribution, this is a critical piece, especially if you have used Canvas for more than a year, copying content or even more than a term, I guess.
We have a course import tool, and we have a tool called direct share. In the upper right corner, that is the direct share option where you go into an item in Canvas in the more options menu, and you choose copy to. And that allows a teacher to copy any single item or a module from one course that they teach to another. So that's called what we, overall, we call that direct share. But in your prompts, you're gonna see copy to, and it'll pull up a a course list and you choose which course you want it to copy to.
If you're providing templates, importing an entire course, whether you're doing it through the import menu or even from comments, just be aware that that course when you pull it over is going to reset the settings of the template. So the template isn't locked. When you copy an entire course over, it's going to take on the the entire settings of that course, the new one. So, we have a feature in Canvas where you can choose to copy select specific content, and that is really helpful for those of you who are applying templates. You wanna encourage your teachers to only pick and choose maybe the modules that they wanna bring over and not the full course, not the full course settings.
So and also as a quick reminder, there's a prompt what allows you to remove due dates. So that is gonna be critically important if you're using content from a past term. Because if you use those same due dates, it's gonna come over and all of your students are gonna have missing or late work, and that'll just be kind of a mess in your grade book. Book. So you can remove dates or you can push back dates to choose a new start.
So just a couple tips for those of you who are looking to push out content to your users. Alright. Before I move on to this, I think we have is it better to copy or import? It truly depends, on the unique situation. Like, I think individual items are easier to copy. So for, like, direct share, if I wanna send a whole module, I would probably do, a a copy too.
If I'm doing more, I'm selecting multiple modules, I will probably do an import and select specific content, and then I can kind of pick and choose which elements I want to move from one course to the other. So you can choose more, I think, in the import than you can in the copy too. But remember, all of these are available all year. I know we're talking about beginning of the year best practices. But if I was a teacher, I taught algebra one.
So if I had a unit that maybe I wasn't prepared for, for this year and I needed to pull some contact from last year, I can do that in October. I don't have to do that at the start of the year. As long as you still have view access to the old content, you can copy it over, from one year to the next as a teacher. Alright. Sorry.
Going back here. Admin tasks and best practices. These are all the just start of your housekeeping type things that you wanna make sure you at least are aware of even if you don't have to do them. You might at least know that there are some considerations to think about to start the year. My favorite one to talk about is terms.
That's a critical component of our Canvas courses. Terms in Canvas control user access to view and participate in courses. This is what your terms page looks like. You'll typically see your new school year terms appear after SIS rollover if you have a connected student information system. If you do not, maybe you're manually adding those.
You can do that through a term CSV. You can also do that manually in the UI if you don't have a whole lot. But, if you have more than a handful, you can definitely use a terms CSV That's available in our community to get the format for that. But those of you who do have assist, they'll start rolling over basically the day your assist resume hits. So in this case, the terms runs from dates, which is what I have in the block here, typically come from a connected student information system or whatever your official dates of the term are.
By default students have access from term start to term end. If you need to push forward or remove or push back any kind of access for this the group of students as a whole in that term, you can do so by clicking on the pencil icon and editing it. I have called out here specifically considering, choosing the date for teachers. So initially, when it your terms come over, the teacher access dates is from whenever to term end. Very often, if you were doing a, blueprint or, you know, you just want a little bit of time, maybe you have a certain date when teachers, access, like, they they return to school for the start of the year.
You may wanna push back their access until that date because we know schedule changes happen very often. We know that, you may just wanna be have a little bit of window to blueprint if you're choosing to do that. So you can push back and edit the teacher access date to be whatever works best for your institution. And also on the back end of the term, very often our teachers need a period of time afterwards to grade. Right? To be able to access that content.
And so this will be a critical element at the end of the year too to check those end the dates because if you don't edit that they will lose access to that course, edit access to that course when the term ends. So just be really aware of those term dates, for access for teachers and students. You also see that TAs and designers have the same thing. If you are if you have custom roles, they will be based on their access will be based on whatever their base role is. So oftentimes, when you create a custom role, it'll say, what's your base role? What are you basing this permission set on? And you choose one of the the standard roles, students, teachers, TAs, or designers, and edit their access from there.
Let's see what else I missed here. One thing there, Emily. Yeah. So just when I was at my institution, this is just please learn from my mistakes so you don't have to reinvent that wheel. When Emily says that that end of the term date is populated by the student information system, that means if it goes to that last day of class, it's gonna shut off.
And all people in my role that have been there as a Canvas admin, we need to keep our teachers from panicking. So I it became standard operating procedure for me that as soon as the SIS enrollments were coming over to Canvas, I'd immediately go to terms, kick it out by a week, maybe even a little bit longer just to make sure things didn't shut off early to save yourself those end of semester panicked calls and emails that you could get. So I very much advocate future proof it. Learn from my mistakes, please. And that is a really good call because I also have been burned by the default time being twelve AM.
So be very aware of that because, for example, if I had this this end date was December nineteenth twenty twenty four, if I didn't add, which add the date eleven fifty nine or the time eleven fifty nine, it would have been midnight. Let's if that was my last day of school, it would have cut off access at the very minute of that last day of school. So you wanna make sure that you adjust the dates either you push the date back until midnight the next day or, you adjust the time. So that's something to be aware of. I don't know how many times I've gotten panicked emails from admin.
Like, their courses have been disappeared from their dashboard, but it's because it said twelve AM, not eleven fifty nine or twelve AM the next day. So just be aware of that. You can. If you have a a million terms, which I know a lot of our institutions have terms per school building, have terms per, yeah, department, whatever it may be, you will want to, you can adjust those dates, those access dates via a CSV. So under that term CSV, there will be access dates you can adjust as well.
So if if doing it in the UI is too cumbersome because there's a lot of them, you actually have the CSV update or available to you as well. Let me see what else. Yeah. That twelve AM, I call the Cinderella rule. So just look for twelve AM.
When the clock strikes midnight, you just wanna be aware. And this is more probably geared to our k twelve users, maybe more than our higher ed users, but there's a area of Canvas called grading periods. They are optional So, like I said, I taught algebra one, grading periods. So, like I said, I taught algebra one. I would have a course for a full year, but I reported my grades quarterly.
So I would wanna have for my term, which was a full year term, I'd wanna have quarter one segmented out because then the the grades would be separated out in my Canvas Gradebook for quarter one, and then I could, filter that again for quarter two when we got there. And this is a nice feature if you do have terms that last longer than your typical grading period. Let me see what else. So while terms control access to seeing the course, accessing the course, grading periods control teachers' edit access to items that have a due date. This is really all about your due dates and where you when you add assignments or anything like a graded a graded quiz or a graded discussion.
They will filter automatically based on your due date into the areas of the grade book when you set up your grading periods. It's It's important to note the distinction between teacher edit access and students in relating to grading period. So there's a close date here. The very last column at the end of each grading period, is a close date, and that is the last day that teachers can edit or add feedback to an assignment or add a grade. If you're using grade pass back you want to push that back probably a day or two.
Oftentimes, again I taught k twelve, but oftentimes I had, like, a period of a few days after a term to finalize my grades and get them into the official grade book. So that's kinda where you may wanna match what your SIS or your your grading department has set. Items without a due date, it's worth noting. Those will automatically fall into the last grading period that you have listed. So just a tip, if you're interested in this, if you know the the the fun of getting all the emails when you get to the last grading period and the teacher's like, where did all of these assignments come from? Well, if you haven't been putting due dates on things for the past, three quarters, they're gonna fall under the fourth quarter when you go to your grade book.
So just be aware you can also add a no due date, segment after the last grade last official grading period, and that would allow anything that doesn't have a due date out or it has a due date outside of the end of the term to fall under there so that it's a little more clear that maybe they should have added due dates to those items. So, I'm gonna go real quick. I wanna also talk a little bit about I I forgot to mention that students have access to assignments based on the assignment availability dates. So that is set on an assignment by assignment, basis. So you see an available from and then until date.
That is this that's how you control student access to specific assignments. This close date is for teacher editing of specific assignments. Okay. Let me see. We talked about that.
I somebody mentioned this to me a couple years ago, and, you know, I've been using Canvas since twenty fourteen. And so, you know, how many years have I used this and and not considered the no due date thing? So that was really helpful, when I realized, like, the light bulb came on, and I was like, that's brilliant. Now it's not all sitting in quarter four. Additionally, within Canvas, under your account settings, you do wanna review those and make any necessary adjustments regarding user access. So just be aware of what they are.
Oftentimes, you set this when you first implement Canvas, and it might have been a while since you've taken a look. So the ones that I have blocked out here, there's a setting for don't let teachers rename their courses, so you can choose to enable that or not. You can choose about whether you want teachers to modify their course availability dates. That's an individual instance wide setting. And in the bottom section in that bottom box, it's restrict students from accessing courses before the start date.
How many times do we see teachers or students or even parents seeing courses in Canvas potentially early and calling the school saying, I feel like this teacher to be changed or whatever it may be. It kinda gives them an access into their into their schedule maybe before it's finalized. So you may wanna restrict that or lock that down. Same thing with that restrict students from viewing future courses in the enrollments list. So there's a section in Canvas that says future courses even if they haven't started yet.
Right? So if the if you want them to not be able to see that at the start of the year because there are a lot of schedule changes, you can hit restrict those as well. Really depends on your institution and how you schedule courses, what your preference will be there, but you do want to look at those that focus on access and availability just to spot check, really. And these are just I feel like the other areas that we talked about are really core. You you really need to look at those terms as grading periods, those settings. This is all nice to have.
So if you have time before your new year begins, you you wanna look at your permissions page and, make sure that you have course and account rules that have the proper permission sets. Very often, we have Canvas releases essentially every two weeks. And so there's updates to Canvas happening often, and there may be new permission sets available or maybe things are more granular than they were the year prior. So you just wanna kinda glance through your permission sets and make sure they fit, what the individual roles need to be. And you can build custom roles if you have a need that doesn't cover those standard roles.
The other thing is how often do we have personnel changes from year to year? All constantly. Right? So you can actually do admin adjustments. This is, I think, a little bit more critical to at least look at and be aware of who has admin access in your institution, whether it's a sub account or root account because there's a lot of power involved with having admin access. And if the personnel has changed, if they've left to a different role and they don't need that level of access anymore, you wanna adjust that or maybe make sure that whoever the new hire is has the admin role that they need. So just check that.
There is a there's an admin CSV that allows you to add those pretty easily, or you can go into the individual accounts areas and add them under the admins tab. Real quick, just a note and plug for those CSMs in the room. Don't forget to alert your CSMs if you had support personnel changes. So we have in Canvas, we have support field admin if you have one of our, support packages. And oftentimes, those are the ones who handle the tickets for Canvas, whether they get escalated back to the institution or not.
So, if you had anybody who's a support field admin that change, please let your CSM know so that they can update and get the proper, permissions to the right people. Let me see my other notes here. Oh, LTIs, just a good cleanup time, kind of a housekeeping thing. If you added a new or you got a new purchase or a new adoption, you wanna add LTIs, this is a good time to do that before your courses begin. Also the same if you're removing them.
If you've no longer subscribed to certain LTIs, you can remove those as well. And another good time of year to look at your feature options. Again, we update Canvas constantly. There's always new features being built or enhanced, and, you may wanna take a look at our feature options documentation in the community. That's what's linked here.
We'll share that out at the end of the webinar. In the feature options area, you go in your admin shield, and you go into the feature options. There's a whole lot of them there where you can either enable, disable, or lock in either direction. And there may be features that you wanna consider enabling for the new year, especially if they impact the UI. So you a lot and people do not like those changes midyear if you can avoid them.
So just a good reminder before the start of the year, if there's anything you're considering, you may wanna look at that now. And, again, a little tip here, you can always go into your beta instance and toggle on or enable those feature options in beta to test them out to make sure you're ready to enable them in production and you understand what they do. That beta instance is critical for just kinda testing things out. So don't forget about that. I know oftentimes if you're not in it every day, you may forget that that beta environment even exists.
So let's see. Okay. Couple highlights. I do wanna pull out my personal recommendations. So depending on what your institution needs, you may wanna enable these or not.
Discussions redesign as of today is going it's still a feature option as of today, July seventeenth. On the twentieth, it will be removed from the feature options area because it is going to be the default experience for our, all of our Canvas users. So that will be the new discussion look. There is a new feature option related to it. One of the awesome features related to this new redesign is getting reporting on replies.
So essentially your students or your teachers can go in and report a reply as inappropriate or offensive. That is a course by course choice, And we had a couple institutions who basically said, we'd like to make it an account level choice. And so because we're gonna be building out some new features related to the reporting, we turned it into a feature option. So if you are an admin and you want the default is on, so it's the same experience you're used to. But if you wanna turn that off for whatever reason, you can do so under your feature options.
And that just came out probably a month ago. So I wanna make sure that you're aware that it exists, and, if your institution would prefer it to be off, you can turn it off. Melissa, I noticed an impact logo here. Thank you, Emily, and I apologize. I had to turn my camera off because my Internet and Zoom are just not cooperating.
But, yes, anytime we see and we'll get you these, this deck after the recording after today's call. But anytime you see the Impact logo in the bottom corner, that just means that we have some out of the box content available within Impact to help, share some information. So in this example, it is the, discussions redesign campaign that is gonna raise awareness about those updates that are happening. So it's really quick to launch, and highly recommended. Wonderful.
I'm gonna call out. So there is one related to the discussions redesign again as Melissa said, but there's a new, feature option as well that I wanna call out for assignment enhancement student. And I say new, not new is not the right word for it. It's been around for a couple years now. So I know a lot of our institutions already have it enabled.
It is a really nice view for your students for submitting work. It just kind of goes it goes better with the workflow that a typical student would go through when they're submitting assignment. You know, read it and then hit submit assignment down at the bottom. They have icons for the different types of submissions that are available. It's just a nice look and feel for the student experience.
So it has been available for a couple years. If you're considering it, you can definitely unlock it and have your teachers choose whether they want the enhanced view of assignments or they want the classic view. But I do it it's a good thing to make available at the start of the year if it's something you take a look at and you're like, yes. Our our instructors and our students would really benefit from this. And then here we go.
Okay. We're gonna pivot a bit. I hope there's some people on this call who are also studio admin. Studio is our video platform that is available within Canvas. It's an additional product but embeds beautifully into Canvas, and it is one of our Instructure products.
So if you are a Canvas admin who also has Studio, I wanna make a call out because this just came out July third, and I think it'll be really important for you to take a look at and determine the best setting for your, your institution. So we back in March, Studio pushed out the ability to auto caption videos that you recorded or you uploaded, and that was really well received. People loved that. But back in March, they still had to go in and hit the publish button when they reviewed those captions, And it it still still took some action on the part of the individual user to actually publish those to their media. We're trying to make that a little bit more of a streamlined process for your end users and so there is now a feature options area.
If you go into Studio and you're an admin, you go into settings, there's an admin tab, and in the bottom, there's now a captioning set of features. So by default, auto captioning is on. It is unlocked. So if users wanna turn that off, they don't they don't have to turn it on. But if you want it forced on for everyone, you can lock it so that every user will auto caption their media automatically.
There is a separate, a separate setting for enable auto publish of those captions. So that would require no manual intervention. It would just auto caption it and publish it to your video automatically. Right now, because it's a new feature, it is off but unlocked. So the way it stands now, individual users can go into their personal.
You see this tab over here is the personal settings, and they can choose to auto publish. Or if you as an institution decide every you would wanna toggle that on. So that's the default that it would automatically do that. Let me see my notes. I think we're good on all of that.
I was excited when this came out. It just is a time saver for your users and and not to mention a huge win for accessibility across the board. So, if you are a studio user, definitely take a look at that. Alright. And last but not least, communication.
All of what we've talked about today is really great to know and you and review as an admin, but you wanna make sure your teachers are in the loop as well. They need to know when their courses are gonna be available for the new term. If you have training or PD opportunities, you wanna include that. Let's say you purchased a new LTI for your institution. Maybe explaining that and what the different feature options are like, hey.
We turned on assignment enhancements. This is what it looks like. So communication is key for all of this. If you are a pure Canvas user and you do not have impact, you could use global announcements for all of this information. If you are an impact user, wow.
You have a lot of information at your fingertips that will help you with this communication and make it so targeted to your individual users who need to see this. So I'm gonna pass it over to Melissa to talk through how she you can use Impact for those initiatives. Thank you, Emily. I love the why behind some of those changes too. I think that's really important to share within that message.
You usually get some additional buy in then. When thinking about your communication strategy for your start of term initiatives, I highly highly recommend using Impact to ensure the messages reach your users when and where, they are in Canvas. So if you have students looking for their courses and they're not yet available, having a gentle reminder there on the dashboard page, letting them know that they're not going to see their courses until x date, at x time and to reach out to their guidance counselor, professor, etcetera. If they have any questions, will really help cut down on some of those emails and phone calls you typically receive at start of term. Impact can also be utilized to take on some of the lift of start of term microlearning opportunities, reminders, and support and be utilized to, help drive adoption and, inform your decision making, which is fantastic.
On the next slide thank you. You might have to click through it two times. I put an animation on there. Thank you, Emily. We have lots of wonderful out of the box content that's available for all of our impact users to use.
It comes with your subscription. Highly recommend checking this out as well. The campaigns and walk throughs are available to launch quickly quickly to a targeted group of users providing in time and contact specific nudges and awareness when your instructors and students need to see it. I love utilizing this for start of term reminders. The publish your course reminder is a fan favorite.
I've seen so many folks be successful with that to see a reduction in support tickets and calls at the start of term. That paired with the reminder for students is it saves a lot of time and frustration during those first, few days of school. We also have other campaigns and walk throughs that will walk a user through new features. So the discussions redesign that rolled out, that will walk those users through that, the new processes. If you have new LTI tools, you can create your own walk through or campaign to raise awareness about those new tools.
But lots of content that you can create on your own or use our out of the box content. And this is just a small small sampling of content that's available to users. On the next slide, there's a little more detail about our studio and impact integration. We have a lot of resources available within Impact to help maintain and increase the adoption of Studio and help guide users through that utilization of Studio, and some of those features that Emily referenced as well. This includes out of the box messaging, campaigns and walk throughs, support guides, and even monitors so you can see what folks are doing when they are in Studio, what features are being utilized, underutilized.
It's really easy to start a campaign from this tool adoption report and target just those users who maybe haven't used Studio at all and raise some awareness, support them through that journey using Studio, to get them really using it consistently. The next slide. The Impact Support Center is a fantastic resource. You can use it out of the box, and it will still solve a lot of your headaches. But you can customize it as well.
For the start of term, I recommend adding an institution specific support content to your support center, like your academic calendar for the year, FAFSA information, handbooks. I've seen institution policies in there, AI policies. All of that can be housed in the impact support center. You're gonna receive nice insights on how many folks are opening them. They can leave feedback for you to let you know if your content was relevant, timely, that it makes sense, was it clear enough? So all of that is great to reflect on and then make edits then in the future.
I also recommend running the raise awareness of the support center campaign at the start of term to remind users about the support center because it sits on the page as a floating button in most cases, users stop seeing it after a while. So that reminder at the start of term, maybe a week or two, and just reminding them that it's there. It's pulling all of that content in from the community, and it's completely customizable. Just reminding them that they have that to lean on when they're trying to submit a test at two AM and don't want to call anybody or don't have the capacity to call somebody. This will really help them through that process.
Then last best practice that I wanted to mention today was setting up your reporting for the start of term. We have over a thousand activity monitors now throughout the campus environment, and that just means we're collecting data on those different points throughout the Canvas environment. At the start of term, it's a great best practice to set up reports that are going to be meaningful to you throughout the year. So if you have any institution initiatives that, you're trying to capture data on for this academic year, set those reports up now so it's quick and easy for you to get those insights and share them out with leadership or whoever is requesting them at a later date. So that's just setting you up for success.
It's still quick and easy to access through the tool adoption report, but this just makes things a tad bit easier. Alright. I think we're into our q and a. Wonderful. And I know our our teammates have been answering questions in the chat, but feel free to add any additional ones you have.
I'm gonna stop recording so you can feel free to ask. No holds barred. Right? We we're here to help and answer your questions, but I will hit stop recording. Nope. I hit stop share.
Hold on. Let's do that again. Where is stop recording? There it is. Okay.
Hi. My name is Emily Koutsianis. I am a product specialist with the learning management team. I've been with Instructure seven years last month and former educator, and then I come from Orlando. I will introduce Melissa McClellan.
Do you wanna say hi, Melissa? I can unmute myself. Yes. Good morning. My name is Melissa. I am a product specialist for EdTech Effectiveness and have been with Instructure for the past three years, primarily working with Impact, formerly educator, kindergarten teacher, and school admin as well.
And we have, Jason and Benjie who will be joining us. They are our they're gonna help us facilitate the q and a and keep us on track, but we are so grateful to have these knowledgeable teammates here with us. So I'll turn it over to Jason real quick to say hello. Hi, everyone. Jason Richter.
Been with Instructure about ten years now and, formerly a Canvas customer, Canvas admin. And so just happy to share some experience and background. Again, I'm here more supporting, Emily and Melissa, but, happy to be with you this morning. And last but not least, Benji is joining us as well. It is his pandiversary, so his anniversary here at Instructure.
So thank you for just celebrating with us here this morning, Benjie. Right on. One year today, and I joined the greater Instructure family in twenty twenty one, as a k twelve education technology director when we brought Canvas LMS to our school. I like the product. I love the people, and, therefore, I'm thrilled to be here generally at Instructure and here specifically with you all today.
Well, we appreciate everyone joining us this morning. If if it's morning for you, maybe it's evening for our friends in EMEA. I'll turn it over to Melissa to kinda go over the objective. Yeah. Thank you, Emily.
The objective for today's call is really to set you up for success as Impact and Canvas admins. There's a lot of best practices for start up terms. We wanted to make sure everything is top of mind for you. You'll go to the next slide, Emily. Thank you.
It's also worth noting that everything we're going to review today is general Canvas and Impact admin information. If you have questions, it's great to reach out to your CSM. You can also visit the Instructure community that houses all of our wonderful how to guides and is a great place to collaborate with other, customers as well. And if you have any questions during today's session, please go ahead and throw them in the QA. We're gonna do our best to answer them.
We don't get to them, your CSM will be your best point of contact to get those questions answered. Wonderful. And let me there we go. So a lot of the information we're gonna be covering today is also documented in this amazing document called the customer life cycle and annual success strategies document. When we finish this, I will put, a link to our presentation in the Instructure live event that you've all registered for.
You can make a copy of this document, but it is amazing. You wanna make your own version of it. You wanna copy it and, bookmark it because this allows you basically a checklist, a guide that walks you through the entire academic year, in the areas of what you should be thinking about related to professional development. What about strategic planning and vision and goals? What about content creation should you be kind of looking at during the period various periods of the year? It also talks about SIS integration if you have a student information system connected to Canvas. And then everyone's favorite, admin tasks.
Right? So anything that you kinda should be doing at various periods of time throughout the academic year, this list has it, and we'll be hitting some of the highlights for that zero to three months before school start today. One of the biggest, questions that we have is related to content creation and distribution. And that's a whole area in the checklist, but we're gonna go over at a high level today various methods of being able to distribute your content. So by this point of the year, as an admin, you've probably already determined a few of your preferred methods for content distribution. If not, there's a guide we will be sharing out as well.
This is a link in our presentation that will help you identify what is the best fit for your unique needs. And at a very high level, the breakdown is we have blueprinting available, which is great for course specific information. We have templating available that's kinda meant to establish a consistent framework, across an account or a sub account and we also have the ability for your instructors to import courses from comments. So they're able to basically pull content into a course if they're using Commons, which is our learning object repository. Each of these ways has a purpose and a place, but it really depends on your unique needs for your institution.
We'll we'll cover each one in a little bit more depth in just one minute. So templates, as I mentioned before, templates came out just a few years ago, and I was thrilled. As a former Canvas admin, this just really checked a lot of boxes for me because I was always looking to build a consistent framework for my teachers so they didn't have to start from a completely blank canvas, so to speak. So, they build that consistent structure. Things that you may wanna do would be like building a template home page that your instructors can edit, but it gives them an example of what you want to cover on a home page or maybe example assignments.
Because templates are set at an account or a subaccount level, you don't wanna get too content specific. And, also, there's no way to, quote, unquote, lock content. It is fully editable by the teachers once they receive or they have access to the template. One thing that is critical, especially at this time of year, is that templates are pushed immediately after a new course is added to your account. The very first time it hits Canvas is when this template is copied into the course.
And they can't be applied to courses retroactively, so if they already exist in Canvas, you can't add a template to those. There's another way to do that, but, it's really critical that you have those before the start of the new year. So when your new courses start at being added to Canvas, you wanna have your templates in place if you're choosing that route. Those of you who have a student information system, if you have a student information system connected to Canvas, you wanna make sure it's prior to your what we call our SIS resume date. So if you're going to SIS integrations area and you look at where you resume what your resume date is, you wanna make sure that your template is applied long before you, that that date hits.
So, one other little, like you see these little, what are they called? Light bulbs? You see these little light bulbs here? You're gonna see little tips about just suggestions. You don't have to do this, but just a consideration would be using templates to set your navigation that is preferred. So if you have you want teachers to edit and have fewer navigation items, you can do that in a template, and then it removes the need to do that for the teacher. Same with course settings. If you go into your more options area and you expand that more options area, a lot of institutions have strong opinions about what they want in that more, more options area of their course settings.
And if you have standardized assignment groups that you want across your full institution, this is how a template could be applied. You could set those assignment groups up in a template. Just some thoughts really related to templates. Next is blueprints. Blueprints are awesome for distributing content to specific courses.
It is not at an account level. It is a course to course association. This is why it's best for curriculum materials. So, you can associate up to a hundred courses in the user interface. There's a little tray that pops up, and you can add the one hundred courses there.
Or if you would rather, do more in bulk or do more through a CSV, you can use a course's CSV. And all you'd have to do is attach whatever your blueprint course ID is to the column. Just list the number there. And the beauty and the reason that a a lot of people use blueprints is that content can be locked. So if you have really structured materials and content, this might be the a better approach than a template.
Nothing in a template can be locked, but there are certain aspects of a blueprint that can be locked or which means it's not editable by the instructor. One thing again, our tip here at the bottom is you wanna have the blueprint content. You can't sync it until those courses hit your Canvas instance. So you will be able to once they arrive in Canvas, then you can associate the blueprint to the associated courses. If you're going to do that, and I have a lot of institutions that choose to do this, you might wanna give yourself a little bit of a window to push that blueprint content.
And for that reason, when we talk about terms in just a few slides here, you're gonna wanna probably push back your teacher access dates so that, they don't get in immediately and start building content right away when you're just gonna push content in for them. So communication will be key here to let them know that you're pushing the content, but you may wanna also, like, as a safe a safe, method to push back teacher access just slightly so that you have time to blueprint before they get in and edit. Look at this now. We also have comments. I love comments.
It is super helpful for your teachers to be able to pull in and pick and choose the content that they want to pull into their course, whereas templates and blueprints were pushed into a Canvas course. Commons is kind of more of a pull. It provides teachers that flexibility to to choose the content that they want to put in their course. It could be an entire course. You see that there are full courses available on Commons, but it also could be smaller subsets.
So you could pick a single module and pull it into a course to see if that relates to the content you need to teach. Schools that leverage Canvas Commons should consider the type of control they're looking to have at an admin level. Like, if you're using Canvas Commons, you could look at there's a section of the class document that is, allowing and managing Canvas or Commons content. So you might wanna look at that piece of the class document. If you're using commons, you may also wanna make sure you're reminding your teachers to preview the content.
There is a preview function directly in commons where you can see what's available. But how often do teachers pull in stuff and love everything that's part of the course right? We like to pick and choose what we want to use with our students. All of our classes are unique so you want to make sure it meets their needs. So, one thing you can do is have them pull it into maybe a sandbox course or course that doesn't have students right away so that they can add their own edits to it before that material is made available to students. And, as far as content distribution, this is a critical piece, especially if you have used Canvas for more than a year, copying content or even more than a term, I guess.
We have a course import tool, and we have a tool called direct share. In the upper right corner, that is the direct share option where you go into an item in Canvas in the more options menu, and you choose copy to. And that allows a teacher to copy any single item or a module from one course that they teach to another. So that's called what we, overall, we call that direct share. But in your prompts, you're gonna see copy to, and it'll pull up a a course list and you choose which course you want it to copy to.
If you're providing templates, importing an entire course, whether you're doing it through the import menu or even from comments, just be aware that that course when you pull it over is going to reset the settings of the template. So the template isn't locked. When you copy an entire course over, it's going to take on the the entire settings of that course, the new one. So, we have a feature in Canvas where you can choose to copy select specific content, and that is really helpful for those of you who are applying templates. You wanna encourage your teachers to only pick and choose maybe the modules that they wanna bring over and not the full course, not the full course settings.
So and also as a quick reminder, there's a prompt what allows you to remove due dates. So that is gonna be critically important if you're using content from a past term. Because if you use those same due dates, it's gonna come over and all of your students are gonna have missing or late work, and that'll just be kind of a mess in your grade book. Book. So you can remove dates or you can push back dates to choose a new start.
So just a couple tips for those of you who are looking to push out content to your users. Alright. Before I move on to this, I think we have is it better to copy or import? It truly depends, on the unique situation. Like, I think individual items are easier to copy. So for, like, direct share, if I wanna send a whole module, I would probably do, a a copy too.
If I'm doing more, I'm selecting multiple modules, I will probably do an import and select specific content, and then I can kind of pick and choose which elements I want to move from one course to the other. So you can choose more, I think, in the import than you can in the copy too. But remember, all of these are available all year. I know we're talking about beginning of the year best practices. But if I was a teacher, I taught algebra one.
So if I had a unit that maybe I wasn't prepared for, for this year and I needed to pull some contact from last year, I can do that in October. I don't have to do that at the start of the year. As long as you still have view access to the old content, you can copy it over, from one year to the next as a teacher. Alright. Sorry.
Going back here. Admin tasks and best practices. These are all the just start of your housekeeping type things that you wanna make sure you at least are aware of even if you don't have to do them. You might at least know that there are some considerations to think about to start the year. My favorite one to talk about is terms.
That's a critical component of our Canvas courses. Terms in Canvas control user access to view and participate in courses. This is what your terms page looks like. You'll typically see your new school year terms appear after SIS rollover if you have a connected student information system. If you do not, maybe you're manually adding those.
You can do that through a term CSV. You can also do that manually in the UI if you don't have a whole lot. But, if you have more than a handful, you can definitely use a terms CSV That's available in our community to get the format for that. But those of you who do have assist, they'll start rolling over basically the day your assist resume hits. So in this case, the terms runs from dates, which is what I have in the block here, typically come from a connected student information system or whatever your official dates of the term are.
By default students have access from term start to term end. If you need to push forward or remove or push back any kind of access for this the group of students as a whole in that term, you can do so by clicking on the pencil icon and editing it. I have called out here specifically considering, choosing the date for teachers. So initially, when it your terms come over, the teacher access dates is from whenever to term end. Very often, if you were doing a, blueprint or, you know, you just want a little bit of time, maybe you have a certain date when teachers, access, like, they they return to school for the start of the year.
You may wanna push back their access until that date because we know schedule changes happen very often. We know that, you may just wanna be have a little bit of window to blueprint if you're choosing to do that. So you can push back and edit the teacher access date to be whatever works best for your institution. And also on the back end of the term, very often our teachers need a period of time afterwards to grade. Right? To be able to access that content.
And so this will be a critical element at the end of the year too to check those end the dates because if you don't edit that they will lose access to that course, edit access to that course when the term ends. So just be really aware of those term dates, for access for teachers and students. You also see that TAs and designers have the same thing. If you are if you have custom roles, they will be based on their access will be based on whatever their base role is. So oftentimes, when you create a custom role, it'll say, what's your base role? What are you basing this permission set on? And you choose one of the the standard roles, students, teachers, TAs, or designers, and edit their access from there.
Let's see what else I missed here. One thing there, Emily. Yeah. So just when I was at my institution, this is just please learn from my mistakes so you don't have to reinvent that wheel. When Emily says that that end of the term date is populated by the student information system, that means if it goes to that last day of class, it's gonna shut off.
And all people in my role that have been there as a Canvas admin, we need to keep our teachers from panicking. So I it became standard operating procedure for me that as soon as the SIS enrollments were coming over to Canvas, I'd immediately go to terms, kick it out by a week, maybe even a little bit longer just to make sure things didn't shut off early to save yourself those end of semester panicked calls and emails that you could get. So I very much advocate future proof it. Learn from my mistakes, please. And that is a really good call because I also have been burned by the default time being twelve AM.
So be very aware of that because, for example, if I had this this end date was December nineteenth twenty twenty four, if I didn't add, which add the date eleven fifty nine or the time eleven fifty nine, it would have been midnight. Let's if that was my last day of school, it would have cut off access at the very minute of that last day of school. So you wanna make sure that you adjust the dates either you push the date back until midnight the next day or, you adjust the time. So that's something to be aware of. I don't know how many times I've gotten panicked emails from admin.
Like, their courses have been disappeared from their dashboard, but it's because it said twelve AM, not eleven fifty nine or twelve AM the next day. So just be aware of that. You can. If you have a a million terms, which I know a lot of our institutions have terms per school building, have terms per, yeah, department, whatever it may be, you will want to, you can adjust those dates, those access dates via a CSV. So under that term CSV, there will be access dates you can adjust as well.
So if if doing it in the UI is too cumbersome because there's a lot of them, you actually have the CSV update or available to you as well. Let me see what else. Yeah. That twelve AM, I call the Cinderella rule. So just look for twelve AM.
When the clock strikes midnight, you just wanna be aware. And this is more probably geared to our k twelve users, maybe more than our higher ed users, but there's a area of Canvas called grading periods. They are optional So, like I said, I taught algebra one, grading periods. So, like I said, I taught algebra one. I would have a course for a full year, but I reported my grades quarterly.
So I would wanna have for my term, which was a full year term, I'd wanna have quarter one segmented out because then the the grades would be separated out in my Canvas Gradebook for quarter one, and then I could, filter that again for quarter two when we got there. And this is a nice feature if you do have terms that last longer than your typical grading period. Let me see what else. So while terms control access to seeing the course, accessing the course, grading periods control teachers' edit access to items that have a due date. This is really all about your due dates and where you when you add assignments or anything like a graded a graded quiz or a graded discussion.
They will filter automatically based on your due date into the areas of the grade book when you set up your grading periods. It's It's important to note the distinction between teacher edit access and students in relating to grading period. So there's a close date here. The very last column at the end of each grading period, is a close date, and that is the last day that teachers can edit or add feedback to an assignment or add a grade. If you're using grade pass back you want to push that back probably a day or two.
Oftentimes, again I taught k twelve, but oftentimes I had, like, a period of a few days after a term to finalize my grades and get them into the official grade book. So that's kinda where you may wanna match what your SIS or your your grading department has set. Items without a due date, it's worth noting. Those will automatically fall into the last grading period that you have listed. So just a tip, if you're interested in this, if you know the the the fun of getting all the emails when you get to the last grading period and the teacher's like, where did all of these assignments come from? Well, if you haven't been putting due dates on things for the past, three quarters, they're gonna fall under the fourth quarter when you go to your grade book.
So just be aware you can also add a no due date, segment after the last grade last official grading period, and that would allow anything that doesn't have a due date out or it has a due date outside of the end of the term to fall under there so that it's a little more clear that maybe they should have added due dates to those items. So, I'm gonna go real quick. I wanna also talk a little bit about I I forgot to mention that students have access to assignments based on the assignment availability dates. So that is set on an assignment by assignment, basis. So you see an available from and then until date.
That is this that's how you control student access to specific assignments. This close date is for teacher editing of specific assignments. Okay. Let me see. We talked about that.
I somebody mentioned this to me a couple years ago, and, you know, I've been using Canvas since twenty fourteen. And so, you know, how many years have I used this and and not considered the no due date thing? So that was really helpful, when I realized, like, the light bulb came on, and I was like, that's brilliant. Now it's not all sitting in quarter four. Additionally, within Canvas, under your account settings, you do wanna review those and make any necessary adjustments regarding user access. So just be aware of what they are.
Oftentimes, you set this when you first implement Canvas, and it might have been a while since you've taken a look. So the ones that I have blocked out here, there's a setting for don't let teachers rename their courses, so you can choose to enable that or not. You can choose about whether you want teachers to modify their course availability dates. That's an individual instance wide setting. And in the bottom section in that bottom box, it's restrict students from accessing courses before the start date.
How many times do we see teachers or students or even parents seeing courses in Canvas potentially early and calling the school saying, I feel like this teacher to be changed or whatever it may be. It kinda gives them an access into their into their schedule maybe before it's finalized. So you may wanna restrict that or lock that down. Same thing with that restrict students from viewing future courses in the enrollments list. So there's a section in Canvas that says future courses even if they haven't started yet.
Right? So if the if you want them to not be able to see that at the start of the year because there are a lot of schedule changes, you can hit restrict those as well. Really depends on your institution and how you schedule courses, what your preference will be there, but you do want to look at those that focus on access and availability just to spot check, really. And these are just I feel like the other areas that we talked about are really core. You you really need to look at those terms as grading periods, those settings. This is all nice to have.
So if you have time before your new year begins, you you wanna look at your permissions page and, make sure that you have course and account rules that have the proper permission sets. Very often, we have Canvas releases essentially every two weeks. And so there's updates to Canvas happening often, and there may be new permission sets available or maybe things are more granular than they were the year prior. So you just wanna kinda glance through your permission sets and make sure they fit, what the individual roles need to be. And you can build custom roles if you have a need that doesn't cover those standard roles.
The other thing is how often do we have personnel changes from year to year? All constantly. Right? So you can actually do admin adjustments. This is, I think, a little bit more critical to at least look at and be aware of who has admin access in your institution, whether it's a sub account or root account because there's a lot of power involved with having admin access. And if the personnel has changed, if they've left to a different role and they don't need that level of access anymore, you wanna adjust that or maybe make sure that whoever the new hire is has the admin role that they need. So just check that.
There is a there's an admin CSV that allows you to add those pretty easily, or you can go into the individual accounts areas and add them under the admins tab. Real quick, just a note and plug for those CSMs in the room. Don't forget to alert your CSMs if you had support personnel changes. So we have in Canvas, we have support field admin if you have one of our, support packages. And oftentimes, those are the ones who handle the tickets for Canvas, whether they get escalated back to the institution or not.
So, if you had anybody who's a support field admin that change, please let your CSM know so that they can update and get the proper, permissions to the right people. Let me see my other notes here. Oh, LTIs, just a good cleanup time, kind of a housekeeping thing. If you added a new or you got a new purchase or a new adoption, you wanna add LTIs, this is a good time to do that before your courses begin. Also the same if you're removing them.
If you've no longer subscribed to certain LTIs, you can remove those as well. And another good time of year to look at your feature options. Again, we update Canvas constantly. There's always new features being built or enhanced, and, you may wanna take a look at our feature options documentation in the community. That's what's linked here.
We'll share that out at the end of the webinar. In the feature options area, you go in your admin shield, and you go into the feature options. There's a whole lot of them there where you can either enable, disable, or lock in either direction. And there may be features that you wanna consider enabling for the new year, especially if they impact the UI. So you a lot and people do not like those changes midyear if you can avoid them.
So just a good reminder before the start of the year, if there's anything you're considering, you may wanna look at that now. And, again, a little tip here, you can always go into your beta instance and toggle on or enable those feature options in beta to test them out to make sure you're ready to enable them in production and you understand what they do. That beta instance is critical for just kinda testing things out. So don't forget about that. I know oftentimes if you're not in it every day, you may forget that that beta environment even exists.
So let's see. Okay. Couple highlights. I do wanna pull out my personal recommendations. So depending on what your institution needs, you may wanna enable these or not.
Discussions redesign as of today is going it's still a feature option as of today, July seventeenth. On the twentieth, it will be removed from the feature options area because it is going to be the default experience for our, all of our Canvas users. So that will be the new discussion look. There is a new feature option related to it. One of the awesome features related to this new redesign is getting reporting on replies.
So essentially your students or your teachers can go in and report a reply as inappropriate or offensive. That is a course by course choice, And we had a couple institutions who basically said, we'd like to make it an account level choice. And so because we're gonna be building out some new features related to the reporting, we turned it into a feature option. So if you are an admin and you want the default is on, so it's the same experience you're used to. But if you wanna turn that off for whatever reason, you can do so under your feature options.
And that just came out probably a month ago. So I wanna make sure that you're aware that it exists, and, if your institution would prefer it to be off, you can turn it off. Melissa, I noticed an impact logo here. Thank you, Emily, and I apologize. I had to turn my camera off because my Internet and Zoom are just not cooperating.
But, yes, anytime we see and we'll get you these, this deck after the recording after today's call. But anytime you see the Impact logo in the bottom corner, that just means that we have some out of the box content available within Impact to help, share some information. So in this example, it is the, discussions redesign campaign that is gonna raise awareness about those updates that are happening. So it's really quick to launch, and highly recommended. Wonderful.
I'm gonna call out. So there is one related to the discussions redesign again as Melissa said, but there's a new, feature option as well that I wanna call out for assignment enhancement student. And I say new, not new is not the right word for it. It's been around for a couple years now. So I know a lot of our institutions already have it enabled.
It is a really nice view for your students for submitting work. It just kind of goes it goes better with the workflow that a typical student would go through when they're submitting assignment. You know, read it and then hit submit assignment down at the bottom. They have icons for the different types of submissions that are available. It's just a nice look and feel for the student experience.
So it has been available for a couple years. If you're considering it, you can definitely unlock it and have your teachers choose whether they want the enhanced view of assignments or they want the classic view. But I do it it's a good thing to make available at the start of the year if it's something you take a look at and you're like, yes. Our our instructors and our students would really benefit from this. And then here we go.
Okay. We're gonna pivot a bit. I hope there's some people on this call who are also studio admin. Studio is our video platform that is available within Canvas. It's an additional product but embeds beautifully into Canvas, and it is one of our Instructure products.
So if you are a Canvas admin who also has Studio, I wanna make a call out because this just came out July third, and I think it'll be really important for you to take a look at and determine the best setting for your, your institution. So we back in March, Studio pushed out the ability to auto caption videos that you recorded or you uploaded, and that was really well received. People loved that. But back in March, they still had to go in and hit the publish button when they reviewed those captions, And it it still still took some action on the part of the individual user to actually publish those to their media. We're trying to make that a little bit more of a streamlined process for your end users and so there is now a feature options area.
If you go into Studio and you're an admin, you go into settings, there's an admin tab, and in the bottom, there's now a captioning set of features. So by default, auto captioning is on. It is unlocked. So if users wanna turn that off, they don't they don't have to turn it on. But if you want it forced on for everyone, you can lock it so that every user will auto caption their media automatically.
There is a separate, a separate setting for enable auto publish of those captions. So that would require no manual intervention. It would just auto caption it and publish it to your video automatically. Right now, because it's a new feature, it is off but unlocked. So the way it stands now, individual users can go into their personal.
You see this tab over here is the personal settings, and they can choose to auto publish. Or if you as an institution decide every you would wanna toggle that on. So that's the default that it would automatically do that. Let me see my notes. I think we're good on all of that.
I was excited when this came out. It just is a time saver for your users and and not to mention a huge win for accessibility across the board. So, if you are a studio user, definitely take a look at that. Alright. And last but not least, communication.
All of what we've talked about today is really great to know and you and review as an admin, but you wanna make sure your teachers are in the loop as well. They need to know when their courses are gonna be available for the new term. If you have training or PD opportunities, you wanna include that. Let's say you purchased a new LTI for your institution. Maybe explaining that and what the different feature options are like, hey.
We turned on assignment enhancements. This is what it looks like. So communication is key for all of this. If you are a pure Canvas user and you do not have impact, you could use global announcements for all of this information. If you are an impact user, wow.
You have a lot of information at your fingertips that will help you with this communication and make it so targeted to your individual users who need to see this. So I'm gonna pass it over to Melissa to talk through how she you can use Impact for those initiatives. Thank you, Emily. I love the why behind some of those changes too. I think that's really important to share within that message.
You usually get some additional buy in then. When thinking about your communication strategy for your start of term initiatives, I highly highly recommend using Impact to ensure the messages reach your users when and where, they are in Canvas. So if you have students looking for their courses and they're not yet available, having a gentle reminder there on the dashboard page, letting them know that they're not going to see their courses until x date, at x time and to reach out to their guidance counselor, professor, etcetera. If they have any questions, will really help cut down on some of those emails and phone calls you typically receive at start of term. Impact can also be utilized to take on some of the lift of start of term microlearning opportunities, reminders, and support and be utilized to, help drive adoption and, inform your decision making, which is fantastic.
On the next slide thank you. You might have to click through it two times. I put an animation on there. Thank you, Emily. We have lots of wonderful out of the box content that's available for all of our impact users to use.
It comes with your subscription. Highly recommend checking this out as well. The campaigns and walk throughs are available to launch quickly quickly to a targeted group of users providing in time and contact specific nudges and awareness when your instructors and students need to see it. I love utilizing this for start of term reminders. The publish your course reminder is a fan favorite.
I've seen so many folks be successful with that to see a reduction in support tickets and calls at the start of term. That paired with the reminder for students is it saves a lot of time and frustration during those first, few days of school. We also have other campaigns and walk throughs that will walk a user through new features. So the discussions redesign that rolled out, that will walk those users through that, the new processes. If you have new LTI tools, you can create your own walk through or campaign to raise awareness about those new tools.
But lots of content that you can create on your own or use our out of the box content. And this is just a small small sampling of content that's available to users. On the next slide, there's a little more detail about our studio and impact integration. We have a lot of resources available within Impact to help maintain and increase the adoption of Studio and help guide users through that utilization of Studio, and some of those features that Emily referenced as well. This includes out of the box messaging, campaigns and walk throughs, support guides, and even monitors so you can see what folks are doing when they are in Studio, what features are being utilized, underutilized.
It's really easy to start a campaign from this tool adoption report and target just those users who maybe haven't used Studio at all and raise some awareness, support them through that journey using Studio, to get them really using it consistently. The next slide. The Impact Support Center is a fantastic resource. You can use it out of the box, and it will still solve a lot of your headaches. But you can customize it as well.
For the start of term, I recommend adding an institution specific support content to your support center, like your academic calendar for the year, FAFSA information, handbooks. I've seen institution policies in there, AI policies. All of that can be housed in the impact support center. You're gonna receive nice insights on how many folks are opening them. They can leave feedback for you to let you know if your content was relevant, timely, that it makes sense, was it clear enough? So all of that is great to reflect on and then make edits then in the future.
I also recommend running the raise awareness of the support center campaign at the start of term to remind users about the support center because it sits on the page as a floating button in most cases, users stop seeing it after a while. So that reminder at the start of term, maybe a week or two, and just reminding them that it's there. It's pulling all of that content in from the community, and it's completely customizable. Just reminding them that they have that to lean on when they're trying to submit a test at two AM and don't want to call anybody or don't have the capacity to call somebody. This will really help them through that process.
Then last best practice that I wanted to mention today was setting up your reporting for the start of term. We have over a thousand activity monitors now throughout the campus environment, and that just means we're collecting data on those different points throughout the Canvas environment. At the start of term, it's a great best practice to set up reports that are going to be meaningful to you throughout the year. So if you have any institution initiatives that, you're trying to capture data on for this academic year, set those reports up now so it's quick and easy for you to get those insights and share them out with leadership or whoever is requesting them at a later date. So that's just setting you up for success.
It's still quick and easy to access through the tool adoption report, but this just makes things a tad bit easier. Alright. I think we're into our q and a. Wonderful. And I know our our teammates have been answering questions in the chat, but feel free to add any additional ones you have.
I'm gonna stop recording so you can feel free to ask. No holds barred. Right? We we're here to help and answer your questions, but I will hit stop recording. Nope. I hit stop share.
Hold on. Let's do that again. Where is stop recording? There it is. Okay.