Essential

These technologies will be the simplest to implement, and they replicate foundational activities for delivering a course in an online environment.

Send updates to students. 

With Canvas Inbox and Announcements, you can easily share new information with your entire class at once—including your plan to move learning activities online. 

• Inbox allows you to send email messages to all students in your class. It is synced to your Gmail account, so any replies to your email will appear in its inbox. 
• Announcements appear within your Canvas course in a feed, with the latest message appearing at its top.

Post your course materials in Canvas.

Every course at Miami has an automatically created Canvas course site that is linked to enrollments through Banner. Within the one for your class, you can:

• upload most types of files, like your lecture slides/notes, study guides, or PDFs of readings; 
• add links to videos, library resources, and external websites; and
• create simple pages.

Upload videos directly to Canvas using Kaltura. We do not recommend that you upload audio files directly to Canvas because they can be difficult for students to view, and they do not meet accessibility requirements. Instead, add a link to your audioafter you have uploaded it to a site like YouTube or SoundCloud.

NOTE: Make sure your Canvas course site is published; otherwise, students will not be able to access it.

Meet online.

One of the easiest ways to move your course online quickly is to meet with students during your regular class time through Webex, the university's web conferencing platform. It is integrated with Canvas and works on either a computer or mobile device. 

Webex allows you to share your screen to show documents, slides, or web pages. If some students are unable to join your online meeting, you can record your Webex session, and it will be available to all students within your Canvas course.

Set up discussion forums.

Canvas Discussions are an excellent option for hosting your class discussion online; they allow you to post questions or prompts for students to respond to, and students can to reply to one another's responses. In addition to adding text, you and your students can upload documents or images to discussion forums or use a built-in media recorder to post responses in video or audio format.

Recommended

These activities will require a bit more time and effort to implement, but they will create a much better learning experience for students. Also, once you have mastered them, you may find that they’ll make some of your regular class activities easier to complete.

Set up online assignment submission.

Canvas's Assignments feature allows you to create a place in your course site where students can upload deliverables for assignments, including documents, spreadsheets, images, audio or video files, etc. It also provides a textbox where they can post a link to their work if it is hosted online, like on Google Drive or a website, and add comments for you.

Consider that with a Canvas Assignment, only you can see students' work. If you would like students to be able to see one another's work, consider instead creating a Discussion forum in Canvas where they can submit their work. 

Set up your gradebook in Canvas. 

It is easier for students to track their progress in your course if they can see their grades online, so it is a good practice to replicate your gradebook in Canvas. Scores for some learning activities you set up in Canvas (like Assignments and Quizzes) will automatically appear in Grades, but you can also create assignments for which you’ll manually enter scores.

Meet with students one-on-one or in small groups. 

You can set up Webex meetings with just one student or small groups of students if you would like to have separate conversations with them. This option is especially helpful if you have a lower-enrollment class, you have assigned group projects, or you typically conference with your students to discuss drafts or projects. 

Note that if you need to schedule a series of meetings, the process often goes more smoothly if you create a sign-up sheet in Google Sheets or set up an appointment scheduling page with YouCanBookMe.com.

Best Practices

These online course delivery options require more set-up time, but they are well worth the effort. Also, they’ll be in place if you need to use them in a future term or another class.

Record your lecture.

Consider recording yourself delivering a lecture for your students, then adding it to Canvas for them to view. You can use free software such as Screencast-o-Matic, Kaltura's Personal Capture feature, or even a WebEx meeting with just yourself to create video or narrate presentations, then upload it to our video hosting platform, Kaltura, which is integrated into Canvas.

Create automatically graded quizzes. 

If you want to make sure students understand a course topic or are keeping up with readings, Canvas Quizzes is a great option. With it, you can create a quiz with a variety of automatically graded question types, including multiple choice, multiple answers, fill in the blank, and more. In addition, you can add custom feedback to each of the answer options for a question and overall feedback for the entire quiz. Once your quiz set-up is done, your work is complete; Canvas will do the work of grading students' responses, displaying your feedback to them, and saving their scores in Grades.

Please note that students are unable to access some sites, such as Google Suite apps, if they are located in China.