Beginning of Semester Reminders – Spring 2024
Greetings Faculty and Staff,
We hope everyone had a memorable winter break filled with rest and relaxation! Below we have gathered some reminders that will hopefully help get your semester off to a seamless start. For questions, email lsrequest@vcu.edu.
Join VCU’s Möbius Pilot Today!
We are in our 2nd semester of the Möbius pilot, by DigitalEd, and we encourage you to try it today. The pilot began at the beginning of the Fall 2023 semester and is scheduled to last through the Spring 2024 semester.
Möbius, a cloud-based learning platform designed to create and deploy STEM course materials for all modalities, is only available via the Canvas integration and open for use to all faculty, staff, and students. For additional information, including demos, continuous learning/training, onboarding and support, visit the go.vcu.edu/mobius page. We hope you will join us!
If you are already participating in the pilot and find that you need assistance, be sure to email support@digitaled.com.
Academic Technologies Website
Visit the Academic Technologies page for an overview of AT Teams, what we support and how we can help.
Canvas Login
Login to Canvas using the Canvas Login Portal page at http://go.vcu.edu/canvas.
Copy a Canvas Course
Course copying is the fastest way to transfer content from one course to another in bulk. This can be performed by anyone listed in the Canvas course with a role of ‘Teacher’. Please be aware that you can only copy content to an existing course, not a new course. For more information, visit the Copy a Course page or watch the Importing Course Content in Canvas video.
Please note that Canvas Third Party tools all have unique functionality and course copy behavior may vary.
Note: If you are copying a course with embedded VoiceThreads, those entries should copy over seamlessly. If you have any trouble, email support@voicethread.com.
Course or Section Cross-Listing
For Cross-Listing instructions, best practices, and FERPA Compliance, visit the Cross-Listing Course Sections page or watch the Cross-Listing in Canvas video.
Do Not manually enroll students in courses; this may result in your student(s) being unenrolled each time the automated system enrollment file runs resulting in potential loss of student activity in your course.
Important Tip: Cross-listing should be done while courses are unpublished. It is highly recommended that you Do Not cross-list after you have published your course and students have accessed it. Course work is retained within the course, not within the sections, so if a published course is cross-listed after publishing, all cross-listed enrollments will lose any associated assignment submissions and grades.
Ellucian ILP
Beginning the semester, Spring 2024, VCU is introducing the Ellucian Intelligent Learning Platform (ILP) to seamlessly integrate its SIS (Banner) with Canvas, making real-time updates for course data and student information possible.
Key benefits include real-time updates, a more accurate representation of inactive students, and streamlined secondary instructor listings.
However, with this integration, instructors won’t be able to change course names in Canvas, and the format for course names and unique course IDs will shift to “CRN.TERM.”
This change is expected to enhance efficiency and data consistency for VCU. See the Revolutionizing Course Management: Ellucian ILP Meets Canvas blog for more information.
Canvas Collaborations
Collaboration Services (VCU’s Google Management team), Stone Frangowlakis, has put together some documentation for How to Create & Use Collaborations in Canvas. We hope this will make it easier to collaborate with your students.
Publishing/Unpublishing Courses
A course will not be visible to students until it has been published by the instructor.
Publishing a course means it is available to students and can now be accessed from their Canvas dashboard. Here, you can find more information on how to Publish and Unpublish a Canvas Course.
3rd Party Tool Removals
In 2020, the Learning Systems team transferred several Third Party Tools from Blackboard to Canvas at VCU to ensure continuity during a transitional phase. Tool integrations have now been re-evaluated based on specific criteria, including institutional agreements, IT Governance reviews, and support contacts.
As a result, the following account level tools will be removed from Canvas on May 20, 2024:
- BigBlueButton, Evolve Link, Macmillan Learning, MyBusinessCourse, Packback, TurningPoint Registration, Vista Higher Learning, and WileyPLUS.
Instructors can integrate specific tools into their courses by obtaining tool credentials. Course-level tools remain configurable at the discretion of faculty or staff. The Learning Systems team discourages the use of the EduApp Center for tool integration.
For more information and inquiries about this change, visit https://go.vcu.edu/canvas-tools or contact LSrequest@vcu.edu.
Benefits of Centrally Supported Tools
It is our responsibility as faculty, staff and a university community to implement a safer learning environment by ensuring our students’ data privacy, personally identifiable information that is collected from an individual, is secure. This student data is not only names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, photos and videos but also the participation and activity in email accounts, online bulletin boards, and educational programs and applications.
One way to better ensure this protection is utilizing centrally supported tools. Visit the Benefits of Centrally Supported Tools blog for more information.
Faculty Developer Role Decommissioned
The Faculty developer role, at the institutional level, is has been decommissioned. Current users of the Faculty Developer role will retain their permissions in any active course(s). Whereas, any new users will no longer have the Faculty Developer role available. For more information on currently available roles, their primary usage, permissions and limitations, see the Course Role Permissions tab.
Course Conclude Functionality Removed
Users (more specifically Designers and Instructors) are no longer be able to manually conclude a course. Usage of this function has some irreversible consequences, i.e. removal of the gradebook, that users may not be aware of when implementing.
Spring 2023 Training Opportunities
Upcoming Training Opportunities
For upcoming training hosted by Learning Systems, you can register at www.training.vcu.edu. (Keyword: Canvas or Kaltura)
Individual or Group Training
Learning Systems now extends faculty the opportunity to request individual or group/departmental training using the “Request a Virtual Training Session” button located on the Learning Systems website. This training is intended for faculty who want to learn how to use the instructional tools supported by Learning Systems (i.e. Canvas and Kaltura).
Asynchronous Training
Surviving in Canvas Mini-Courses – Academic Technologies and VCU Online has collaborated on a series of asynchronous (self-paced) courses designed for beginner to intermediate experienced users.
Training Recordings
We hope that you were able to participate in this interested training opportunities previously offered; however, if you were unable to attend, you can catch up via the recorded training sessions largely led by Learning Systems’ Learning Support Specialist, Jon Reed and some in partnership with a VCU Online instructional designer.
Visit the Learning Systems Academy for a library of short videos on topics ranging from beginner Canvas to using Kaltura.
Academic Integrity Concerns
In the case that a faculty member requests a Course Access Report or other Canvas administrator-level report for the purposes of addressing a suspected academic misconduct issue, the office of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity (SCAI) has provided the following guidance:
The VCU Honor System & Standards of Academic Conduct states that Faculty “must report suspected violations to SCAI as provided in the policy.” (III.2) To initiate this report for use in an academic integrity violation, we would need to receive the request from VCU Student Conduct & Academic Integrity. You can report this suspicion of an honor violation to SCAI using the Honor System and Standards of Academic Conduct Reporting Form.
Requests for administrator-level reports will come directly from the SCAI office.
For all other guidelines and procedures, please see: http://go.vcu.edu/lsprocedures.
We Appreciate Your Feedback
As always, we welcome and appreciate your feedback; it is valuable to our team’s continued success. Please take a moment to fill out this short 4 question survey whenever you are assisted by anyone in any capacity on the Learning Systems team – Learning Systems Support Survey. Additionally, if you would just like to give us general feedback on any of the systems we support, training we provide, suggestions, our website, etc. please email lsfeedback@vcu.edu.
For any information regarding our team, what we do, what we support and/or how to get support, visit the Learning Systems website or email lsrequest@vcu.edu.
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Categories Beginning of Semester, Canvas, Faculty, Online Teaching and Development, Staff, Teaching with Technology, Workshops and Training