Quick Tips Blog

The Regional Campus Instructional Design (RCID) team shares regular Quick Tips to assist faculty in leveraging Canvas and other educational technology to support their teaching goals.

By now, you’ve learned all about how to leverage Canvas Modules, Pages, and the Rich Content Editor (RCE) to improve how course materials are presented and how students view and interact with the content.

In this final installment, we are taking a look at the letter E in our IMPROVE acronym, which stands for Editor Tips and Tricks.  We know that working with any online text editor can present some challenges, so we’d like to share the team’s favorite tips and tricks for working with the Rich Content Editor (RCE) more efficiently. 

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Welcome back to the IMPROVE series of Quick Tips.  Today we’re looking at the letter V in our IMPROVE acronym, which stands for UniVersal Design Tips.  Okay, yes, we took some liberties with that one, but bear with us -- acronyms are tricky to come up with!

We’ve focused the last few weeks on creating page content via text and various kinds of media.  We’ve touched on accessibility throughout, but we wanted to take a week to highlight universal design strategies that can help make your Canvas content accessible not only for those with differing abilities, but for ALL learners.

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Welcome back to Part 5 of our IMPROVE series. We’re on to the letter O in our IMPROVE acronym, which stands for Other Content Types.

Last time, we discussed how to use the Rich Content Editor (RCE) to present textual content within Pages in your Canvas courses. In Part 5, we will expand on embedding other types of content and media.

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Welcome back to Part 4 of our IMPROVE series.  We’re on to the letter R in our IMPROVE acronym, which stands for Rich Content Editor (RCE).

So far, we’ve created a modular course structure and begun creating individual Pages to house our content. Now it’s finally time to start adding the text, files, links, images, videos, and more that make up your online course content.  

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Welcome back to Part 3 of our IMPROVE series.  We’re on to the letter P in our IMPROVE acronym, which stands for Pages!

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about Modules so far, and for good reason -- they create the overall structure of the course content.  Now that we have established that structure, we can move into creating the content for those modules.  In this post, we will discuss the purpose of Pages, how to create them, and how to add them to your modules.

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Welcome back to Part 2 of our IMPROVE series.  If you recall our acronym from our last post, you’ll remember that the M in IMPROVE stands for Modules Overview.  In this post, we will discuss the purpose of modules, how students navigate them, and how to create a module structure in your own courses.

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In this 7-part series, we will cover how to leverage Canvas Modules, Pages, and the Rich Content Editor (RCE) to improve how course materials are presented and how students view and interact with the content.  While we delve into these tools, we’ll also discuss how utilizing them in certain ways can improve course organization, simplify navigation, and increase accessibility and usability of your content.

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This is the final installment of the Regional Campus Instructional Design team’s 5-week series on communication, and MAGIC is our acronym that will help you engage and connect with your students.  This week is C: Comment Library.

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The Regional Campus Instructional Design team is continuing our 5-week series on communication and MAGIC is our acronym that will help you engage and connect with your students.  This week is I: Inbox.

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The Regional Campus Instructional Design team is continuing our 5-week series on communication and MAGIC is our acronym that will help you engage and connect with your students.  This week is G: Grade Comments.

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The Regional Campus Instructional Design team is continuing our 5-week series on communication and MAGIC is our acronym that will help you engage and connect with your students.  This week is A: Announcements.

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There is a new emphasis on engagement and belonging when it comes to all education. A little MAGIC can help tremendously. The RCID team is doing a 5-week series on communication and MAGIC is our acronym that will help you engage and connect with your students.  

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Canvas recently released a new feature for New Quizzes which uses the “Allow multiple attempts” options. "Build on Last Attempt" is a game-changing new feature within New Quizzes.

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All faculty and students have access to the Turnitin tool through Canvas.  This tool can be used to identify potential plagiarism, AI-assisted writing, and inconsistencies from what would be found in a typical paper. Turnitin can also be used to help your students check their drafts for issues before final submission.

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Fall semester is in full swing and we hope this week's Tip will save you some clicks.  Instructors can now publish and unpublish all modules, or individual items within modules, in bulk. For instructors using weekly released modules, or copying content to a new course, bulk publishing and unpublishing will save valuable time. 

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Now that the semester is fully underway, we wanted to reach out to see how things are going and remind you that you have a team of four instructional designers ready to support you.

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This week we are highlighting some recent changes and new features in the Canvas Gradebook.

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Virtual Drop-in Hours for students are a popular way to increase attendance.  Students can reach out to you without driving to campus or struggling to find your office. A good place to add a link is on the home page under instructor contact information.

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The start of a new semester means updating and sharing your syllabi with your students.  Canvas gives instructors a dedicated place to post their course syllabus and related information -- aptly named the “Syllabus” page -- which you and your students can access from the course navigation menu on the left.

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Here is a tip from the RCID team to help you avoid getting unexpectedly logged out of Canvas. Instead of logging into Canvas via the icon in FlashLine, get into the habit of logging into Canvas directly at canvas.kent.edu in a completely NEW browser session.

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