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There is a lot of confusion around copyright. What can you use? What can’t you use? How much can you use? A few years ago, I participated in an excellent Educause course on copyright hosted by Thomas Tobin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and what I learned has been a tremendous help to me. I hope this helps you, too! (Disclaimer: I am not an intellectual property attorney. If I were an intellectual property attorney, well, you’d probably already know that.) To determine whether you can use something without violating copyright, you need to answer four questions. Keep in mind that all four answers are on aRead More →

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As I get ready for next term, I’ve copied my fall Canvas course into next term’s course. My Trello “course reset” checklist tells me that I need to delete all of my course announcements. As of this writing, the only option Canvas gives me to do that is to manually click each box and then click the trashcan icon at the top of the page. This seems unnecessarily cumbersome, but we have a couple workarounds. Tampermonkey If you have installed Tampermonkey, I recommend this userscript available via the Greasy Fork. IMPORTANT: If you use this script, edit line 7 to read: // @match https://*/courses/*/announcements ThatRead More →

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For all of you Canvas learning management system users, I have compiled all of my favorite Canvas enhancements onto one page. The page is listed as a link in the top horizontal menu for easy access. If there is anything on the Canvas enhancements page that could be clearer, please let me know via sue@suefrantz.com.Read More →

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A colleague recently received a question bank from a publisher as a CSV (spreadsheet) file. He wondered how to get those questions into Canvas. It takes a few steps, but there is a way. For those of you hate all the clicking Canvas requires for you to create quiz questions, you will love this. This blog post from Kristina Wilson at the Northwestern University School of Professional Studies Distance Learning office will give you all of the instructions you need on how to use the Kansas State University’s CSV to QTI converter. Here is the short version. First, download the Kansas State template. Here areRead More →

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There are many things I like about the Canvas learning management system. The inability to sort courses into folders is not one of them. In this blog post, we’ll use a built-in Canvas feature and a James Jones Tampermonkey script to do the next best thing. We’ll use course nicknames as a stand-in for folder names, and we’ll use the All Courses Sort Tampermonkey script to sort by nickname. Assigning nicknames to courses Nicknames are for your use only. Students, other instructors, observers, and anyone else in the course will not see them. Nicknames can only be assigned from the course card on the CanvasRead More →

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I’m back with another excellent James Jones Canvas Tampermonkey script (Jones’s full description). If you don’t yet have Tampermonkey installed in your web browser, visit the Tampermonkey website and click the first download button, not the beta version. What does the Autofill Maximum Rubric Ratings script do? Once installed, the script adds a Max button at the top of the rubric in the Pts cell. Clicking the Max button selects the maximum points cell for all of the criteria in your rubric. There are a couple ways you can use it. 1) Click Max to start with your rubric at maximum points, and then asRead More →

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As frequent readers of this blog know, I’m a fan of everyone who has the skill to create scripts that make Canvas better. This post will feature another James Jones script (thank you, James!). Like other scripts, this one uses the Tampermonkey add-on for your browser. If you don’t yet have Tampermonkey installed, visit the Tampermonkey website and click the first download button, not the beta version. What the “add color course border” script does Since all Canvas courses look the same, it can be hard to tell at first glance which course you are in. The “add color course border” script provides a handyRead More →

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Here are some handy features in the latest Canvas update. Some of these features needs to be turned on by your Canvas administrator. If you don’t see this feature in your instance of Canvas, ask your Canvas administrator to flip the switch. Apply score to ungraded While we’ve been able to mark all ungraded work with a default grade by clicking the 3-dot kebab icon for each Canvas gradebook entry, we now have the power to do that across the entire gradebook in one fell swoop. Click the 3-dot kebab icon next to Total in the Canvas gradebook. Use your new-found power only for good.Read More →

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I’ve written before about using Tampermonkey scripts for adding functionality to Canvas. If you’re not familiar with Tampermonkey scripts for Canvas, please read that post first. I have another one for my fellow intrepid Canvas users. This one comes from Ben Fisher of Crean Lutheran High School, known as fisher1 in the Canvas Community forums. Read his post here. What the “Set Canvas Default Due Times” script does Everywhere you can add a time for when an assignment, quiz, or discussion is due, you will have time buttons to choose from. Yes, you can decide what those times are. All of my course stuff isRead More →

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One of the advantages of using the Canvas learning management system is that it is built on a platform that makes it easy to make it do things that its inherent programming doesn’t allow it to do. By “easy,” I mean easy for those who know how to write the scripts and easier for us who only need to install the scripts others have written. Using a web browser add-in called Tampermonkey (yes, it is called Tampermonkey; download for Chrome; download for Firefox), we can run scripts in your browser that will change how Canvas behaves. For example, there is a Tampermonkey script that allowsRead More →