Welcome back for Spring 2024! Below are 5 important things to note as you get started.
Course Dates and Publishing Sites
The Spring 2024 Canvas Term Dates are January 10, 2024, through May 11, 2024 (Commencement Day), however student access dates by default for Spring 2024 are October 19, 2023 (when course sites became available), through midnight on June 1, 2024. This means that if you published your site prior to today, January 10, your students’ access started on the day you published your site and will continue through May 31, 2024. If this timeline does not work for you, you can change your course dates. We also recommend leaving ‘Restrict students from viewing course after course end date’ checked if you would like to remove student access after your course ends and you no longer want students to view your course content. Keep in mind that if students need to take an assessment in Canvas, you must set the End date to a date after all submissions are due.
Guest Account Process
As you may have noticed on canvas.unc.edu, those with Teacher, TA, Designer, Dean Designate, or Tech Support roles within a course site can now create guest accounts for users without an Onyen. Navigate to the bottom of the linked services page to find step-by-step instructions for the process. Note that those with an Onyen should always be added to a course site by their already created Onyen-linked account. Creating a guest account for a user who already possesses an Onyen-linked account can cause confusion with data retrieval and login.
A Warning about Quiz Import
Any time you perform an Import in your Canvas course site, you may have overlooked a warning that states, “Importing the same course content more than once will overwrite any existing content in the course.” In some cases, this process may work exactly as intended particularly if you are replacing content on Pages currently in the course site for content within the imported Pages. However, attempting to import the same Quiz(zes) after students have already taken the Quiz can and will cause major issues to the scoring schema resulting in a manual check and manual re-adjustment for every score recorded. If you find that there was a typo on a question, the correct answer was incorrectly marked, or the point value for a question is wrong, we recommend that you go through the Regrade process rather than importing another version of the quiz over the current quiz.
Anonymous Grading
Canvas Quizzes includes a feature that will allow you to grade the assessment without associating the name of the student with the quiz attempt. Please be aware that when enabled, this feature is permanent. You will not be able to see the names of the students until after you’ve posted the grades to the grade book. If you would like the opportunity to be able to toggle this feature on and off during the grading process, we recommend that you utilize the ‘Hide Student Names in the Speedgrader’ setting under Options within the Speedgrader.
Alternative URL for Canvas
In the event that Canvas is unavailable via canvas.unc.edu, Onyen-associated users may utilize this alternative URL to access Canvas with an Onyen. Those with guest accounts may utilize this slightly different alternative URL to access Canvas with a guest account. Feel free to bookmark these and share these links with your students.
We hope that this information helps your semester in some way. Remember that you can utilize 24/7 chat and phone help from Instructure. Information for help can be located within the Help icon on the left side of the screen in Canvas.