We are happy to share that over 80% of courses are being taught in Canvas this Fall 2023 term!
Spring 2024 courses are also now in Canvas! Log into Canvas to find your courses on your Dashboard or by clicking on Courses > All Courses in the global menu.
This is the final term Sakai is available for teaching. We strongly encourage moving to Canvas if you have not yet made the switch, but if you wish to use Sakai during this last semester, Spring 2024 rosters are also now available. You must still manually create your course sites in Sakai.
New to Canvas? Find resources on Moving from Sakai to Canvas and consider joining a 2-hour “Canvas Course Design Snapshot.” Presented in partnership with the Center for Faculty Excellence and our ITS-EdTech team, this interactive session is a great opportunity to revisit the overall design of your courses as you become familiar with Canvas. We hope you’ll join us!
- In-person Option 1: Friday, October 20 (Fall Break), 9-11am in 111 Carroll Hall
- In-person Option 2: Wednesday, December 13 (Reading Day), 1-3pm in 111 Carroll Hall
- Online Option 1: Thursday, January 4 (week before SP24 classes begin), 10am-Noon on Zoom
Get Added to Your Roster in ConnectCarolina
Whether you will teach in Canvas or Sakai, your departmental course scheduler must list you as one of the following in ConnectCarolina to access your course in the learning management system (LMS). This must be done on each your rosters.
- Primary Instructor
- Secondary Instructor
- Proxy
- Dean’s Designate
- Teaching Assistant
- Notes:
- TAs cannot create course sites in Sakai.
- If you are a new instructor, you must first complete FERPA training before the registrar can list you as the instructor in ConnectCarolina.
Once you are added as the instructor on your course roster, you should see your Class Roster in ConnectCarolina in the Faculty Portal. See these Faculty help guides if you have questions about ConnectCarolina. If you were recently added as the instructor of record in ConnectCarolina, you will need to wait a bit for the LMS to pick up this update:
- Canvas: Typically updates every few minutes but can take up to an hour.
- Sakai: Updates take several hours (run 3 times a day) but can take up to 24 hours.
Canvas
Access Your Course Site in Canvas
Course sites are automatically created in Canvas so this is one less step for instructors! Log into Canvas and access your course sites on your Dashboard or on the Courses > All Courses page.
Cross-listed Rosters
Rosters that are cross-listed in ConnectCarolina will automatically be cross-listed in Canvas. They will appear as separate rosters in Canvas as they do in ConnectCarolina.
If you are teaching a course with multiple rosters that are not officially cross-listed in ConnectCarolina, you can combine those rosters onto one Canvas site. First determine which site you want to use as the main course site for the term and then go to your other section site(s) to cross-list it with the main section site . Note that the other section site(s) will disappear once the cross-listing has been made.
For example, you may be teaching DEPT101.001, 002, and 003. You decide to use the 001 section site as your course site and want to cross-list sections 002 and 003 with section 001. You would go to the 002 and 003 section sites to cross-list them with DEPT101.001.
Note: If you cross-list the wrong sections in Canvas, please submit a help request through help.unc.edu . We will need to remove the cross-listing for you.
Reusing Content from Canvas and Sakai Courses
If you have already taught your course in Canvas, you can easily copy course materials between Canvas sites .
If you would like to reuse course content from Sakai, we have worked with a migration vendor to automatically transfer all course materials from Registrar courses from 2022 and Spring-Summer 2023 (Fall 2023 and Spring 2024 will also be migrated in the future). You can locate these “SAKAI_Archive” sites when you log into Canvas and view your Dashboard or the Courses > All Courses page.
You are welcome to reuse any of this migrated content and copy it into your upcoming courses (see Getting Content into Canvas). We strongly advise thoroughly reviewing this migrated content before copying it into your official SP24 course sites . While Canvas and Sakai offer similar features, their underlying data structures are vastly different, which means there likely won’t be a clean and complete data transfer between the systems. Please review common issues we have found and then decide what content to clean up and reuse.
Give Students Access
From the Home or Settings page of your course, click the Publish button in the top right to publish your site and give students access.
Note regarding course dates and student access:
In Canvas, student access has been granted based on two things: 1) Publishing the site and 2) Waiting for the Course/Term start date to pass. Prior to the Spring 2024 semester, instructors had to update the course start date in addition to publishing their site in order to give students access. To avoid potential confusion, we are setting the Term start date as soon as courses become available. Whenever you’re ready to give students access, all you need to do is publish your site!
If you want to publish your site ahead of time but not give students access until later, you can still do so by updating your course start date . On that same note, you can also set student access to end on a specific date by updating the course end date. By default, the Term end date is still set to the end of the month that term ends, so for Spring 2024, students have access through May 31. Keep in mind a course cannot be unpublished once it includes student grades.
Sakai
Create Your Course Site in Sakai
Create your course site by clicking on the Sites waffle icon > Create New Site OR Home > Worksite Setup > New. Then:
- Select course site
- Set Academic term to Spring 2024 and Continue
- Check roster of course you want to create and Continue — Check *only 1 roster* if you want separate course sites
- Edit Home Description (or later) and Continue
- Check tools you want to use and Continue — can add/remove later
- Leave as Draft and Continue — remember to publish site when ready
- Create Site
Note: If you want to reuse any old course material, you may do so before continuing in Step #5 through the “Re-use Material from Other Sites You Own” option. You can also wait until after you have created your site and use the Import from Site feature. See details on duplicating course content.
Managing Rosters
Here are things to be aware of if you’re teaching a cross-listed course or if you created your course sites but can’t find them all:
- Rosters that are cross-listed in ConnectCarolina will automatically be cross-listed in Sakai. They will appear under only one roster in Sakai, taking the name of the sponsoring department. We recommend comparing your class rosters in ConnectCarolina with your site membership in Sakai through Site Info > Manage Participants. If a student just added/dropped the course, give it a few hours to update in Sakai.
- The course creation process creates only one Sakai site at a time. If you checked multiple rosters in Step #3 above but actually wanted separate Sakai sites for each roster, you can remove the extra roster from the course site that was created through Site Info > Edit Class Rosters. Once removed from the existing site, the roster will become available for you to repeat this process and create a separate site.
- If you left off a roster, you can add the extra roster to your existing Sakai site.
Give Students Access
Click Publish Now in the top yellow bar of your site to give students access . You can also go to Site Info > Manage Access to (un)publish your site.