Office of Information Technology
Canvas
Instructors Start Here (Main Campus & Education Centers)
- Canvas is the university's primary Learning Management System.
- Canvas requires a TRACKS login account and FIT email address. (New students and faculty must wait until they receive their FIT email address to gain access to Canvas.)
- Courses and enrollments are synced with PAWS; there is a 2-6 hour delay between PAWS and Canvas.
- Set Your Notification Preferences to tell Canvas when and how you want to receive notifications from the system.
- Use a Sandbox to build courses or try features. Sandboxes may have access to new features not available in other areas of Canvas.
- Enroll in Growing With Canvas, an online self-paced course for instructors. Last updated 2019-12-18
- Get Help 24/7 on the phone or via Live Chat. Click the Help link in Canvas for contact info.
- Learn more from the Canvas Community, a place where every Canvas school can discuss methods and ideas.
Additional Tutorials and Training
- Overview of the User Dashboard - Video for Students | Video for Instructors
- Take Canvas's Self-Paced Instructor Orientation to learn about common course-building tasks.
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Enroll in Panopto 101 online training to use Panopto with Canvas.
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Canvas's TurnItIn Integration connects Turnitin to Canvas Course Assignments.
Canvas Commons - Learning Object Repository
- Canvas Commons is a crowd-sourced educational content/learning object repository.
- Access Commons by logging into Canvas.
- Use Commons to create a personal learning object repository.
- Build a course from scratch using materials shared by other Canvas users.
- Share materials to gain reputation as a subject matter expert and content creator.
- Learn more!
Canvas Toolkit
- Crosslist/Merge Your Courses - makes combining multiple sections in Canvas easy and intuitive.
- Non-synced Course/Group Manager - lets you create a course shell in Canvas on-demand.
- Make Yourself a Sandbox - lets you create Sandbox courses on-demand.
- Canvas Gradebook Workflow - a guide to how different tools in Canvas feed into the Canvas gradebook
General Information
- Get Help 24/7: email support@instructure.com, call 844-325-8810, chat online, or click Help inside Canvas.
- Canvas's Configurations explain how Canvas interacts with other FIT systems. (last updated 6/2/2014)
Building Courses
Work-Arounds & Solutions to Common Headaches
- For HELP from within Canvas, simply click the Help link. The Canvas Guides are excellent.
- Rather than a Folder structure, Canvas uses Modules. Modules are a good way to sequence the content in your course.
- Copying and pasting from PDFs removes formatting; it works better to copy from Word files to preserve formatting and links.
- Syllabus shortcut: Go to the Syllabus menu on the left, then click Edit Syllabus Description. There, copy and paste your syllabus from Word.
- The default grading scale cannot be set for all courses. If you don't use a grading scale, all scores will be numeric. If you want to convert scores into letters, you have to set up a grading scheme.
- Is Roll Call Attendance affecting your grades in Canvas when you wish it wouldn't? Try this easy fix.(last updated 10/14/2014)
