In alignment with our school LMS requirements and with some of the best practices we observed during our remote teaching, the Instructional Support team has made a number of changes to the default course template in Canvas. Starting with the Spring 22 course update (occurring on October 5th), the following changes will be present by default in all courses:
- Course navigation simplified- For years, the default course navigation has been cluttered with unused and unnecessary navigation links. The new template disables student access to the following tabs:
- Office 365
- Google Drive
- Rubrics
- Pages
- Files
- Rubrics
- Outcomes
- Chat
- Collaborations
- Attendance
- Big Blue Button (Conferences)
Instructors will still have access to each tool above and can re-enable student access to them if desired (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-manage-Course-Navigation-links/ta-p/1020).
- Kaltura links enabled- As recording and posting lecture content has become the university expectation, we want our premier video management tool to be easily accessible to all faculty. Kaltura allows unlimited hosting and streaming of video content, along with full text search across all files in a video gallery. The best current collection of guides for using Kaltura resides at the CTL site: https://ctl.wustl.edu/resources/kaltura/. You can disable Kaltura via the course navigation process outlined above.
- Announcements pinned to homepage- The three most recent announcements in each course will now be visible on any homepage in Canvas. This change increase the likelihood that your course-wide communication will be viewed by students. If you wish to undo this change, you may follow these steps: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-show-recent-announcements-in-the-Course-Home-Page/ta-p/983.
- Grading scheme enabled- Canvas uses a grading scheme to translate grade percentages into letter grades. Submitting final grades via the eGrades integration requires a course grading scheme. This will also allow students to more easily anticipate their final grades during the course. This does NOT mean that you must display grades to students as letter grades in Canvas; it only allows you to do so. If you wish to either edit the default grading scheme or disable the grading scheme altogether, please follow the guide here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-use-grading-schemes-in-a-course/ta-p/870
We believe these changes will be valuable to you and your students as you continue to provide them with a superior digital learning experience. Please contact Meghann (pytka@wustl.edu) or Jason (jasoncrandall@wustl.edu) with any questions about the templates or McKelvey’s LMS requirements.