The Canvas Term Start date is two weeks in advance of the U-M official term start date. The official term start date for the Winter 2016 term in Canvas is December 22, 2015. Students can access your course up to six weeks before the term start date but first you must publish it.

This timing enables you to give students earlier access to course materials, if appropriate.  This timing impacts all courses without explicit dates. Courses with dates set by instructors or department staff still adhere to those dates.

Course sites are automatically created in Canvas six months before the official term start date, via a data feed from MPathways. To begin working on a course before that date or for a course you are not sure when you will teach next, request a “placeholder” course site by contacting the ITS Service Center. If you are using the ITS Convert2Canvas service, in the request form, choose Other Future Term for the Canvas course and term.

You can copy course content such as assignments, modules, pages, and discussions from previous Canvas courses into existing courses. For step-by-step instructions, see the Canvas instructions page.

By default, a Canvas site is created for each component of a multi-component course, such as a lecture and several discussion or lab sections. As part of the course set up process, the instructor of record can request that the ITS Service Center combine all or some of the components into a single Canvas course.

When GSIs are automatically added to the course via MPathways, they are given a role of TA and can only grade students in their own section. If you need to manually add someone as a TA, go to People in the Course Navigation List on the left and click + People. Pick the appropriate section from the drop-down list. Check Can grade students only in their section. If they are already in the course roster, click on their name to look at their profile. To limit them to grading only students in their section, in the Privileges section, click “limit this user to only see fellow section users.”

You can request that cross-listed courses be combined but they are not by default. You may also combine course sections yourself by using the "Course Manager" tab on the left of the course. The "Add a Section" tool allows faculty to combine sections of the courses they are teaching.

Groups are a means of organizing students for collaboration purposes and aren’t part of the Grades feature. Sections are the way to organize students for assignment and grading purposes.

You cannot copy an assignment but you can duplicate it by importing it from the existing course. For more details, view the Canvas Guides.

The best option for sharing student work, with permission, is to set up a shared U-M Dropbox Team Folder and link to it from your course.  Request a shared U-M Dropbox Team Folder via this ITS form. 

Click on the pencil icon to the right of the answer text box. Click on the X² icon.

See the Canvas Guides question, ‘How do I Upload Changes to the Gradebook’ for details. Additionally, review a sample scenario for uploading changes to the gradebook. 

Using the calendar feed to enable Google Calendar results in several changes to the calendar details. First, all course events are in the same color and can’t individually be hidden. Second, the feed only updates the Google Calendar every 24 hours.

The Canvas Calendar has a Scheduler feature that enables you to set up time slots for a variety of activities. View details about the Scheduler in the Canvas Guides.

Teaching evaluations are available in Canvas. To review your course evaluations, click the Settings link at the top right in the yellow bar. Teaching Evaluations is in the left-hand list, at the bottom. 

Students can now access Teaching Evaluations through the left-side navigation bar in Canvas. Clicking Teaching Evaluations will take students to CTools where they can complete the evaluation.