Need help accessing your summer course? If you can’t see your course on Canvas for the summer, follow these directions to activate your course in Canvas (or more technically, move it from Peoplesoft to Canvas). Struggling at the end of the semester? Check out this article on faculty survival strategies, including a method to triage commitments. Also, visit our page to survey students a the end of the semester.

Finally, here are some fun suggestions for Canvas "hack" - ways to use tools for a non-typical purpose. Some things to keep in mind the next time you teach!

Hack #1: Use Canvas Quizzes to make an interactive video. How to do it: add short segments of video to a quiz question. Have them answer the question before moving on to the next section of the video. You could do this to break up a lecture, retain engagement in a YouTube video, etc. (for YouTube you might just reference certain parts of the video in each question). Here are Canvas articles on embedding external video or recording directly in Canvas.

Hack #2: Use Discussions to create a DIY student journal. How to do it: Create a Group Discussion with only one student in each group. Students can then use this Discussion as a journal that they can add to over time.

Hack #3: Use Discussions to create a DIY VoiceThread-style discussion. How to do it: Create a Discussion but give students the option of responding with text, audio or video recording. Here's the Canvas Student Guide for recording media.

A few other less-common ways to use Canvas Discussions:

Use as a multi-media gallery for students to share images, videos, etc.
Use as a space to share student work (written work, presentations, multi-media projects, etc.)
Create student-facilitated discussions using the group discussion feature
Ask students to share resources with the class
Ask students to share an example of an approach, analysis or a certain kind of work (for example, a literary passage or line of code that meets some criteria). You could also give them the option to share non-examples.

For more, see our Canvas Discussions page.