This is a short onboarding guide to help you get up to speed with Canvas as a teacher. More extensive guides on different topics are available as a list view on the Modules page but are also searchable from the start page.

To the left in your course you see a couple of menu items - some with and eye with a strike-through. Those have either been inactivated for students or are empty for content at the moment. You can test what any page will look like as a student by clicking Home then Student view (to the right).

Home

The course home page. As a default setting this points to Modules. You can change it to show a welcome page, for example by fetching a template from Commons. When using a welcome page it wise to include thins like course literature, excerpts from the syllabus, contact information to course staff and links to resources/information that is useful for students in your course.

Note!

Before your course start you should publish it. This is done from the home page and to the right.

Announcements

Announcements in the menu is currently grey but that is only because you have not yet made any announcements. An announcement is a "news item" for the course at the three latest ones will appear at the top of the home page automatically. All announcements can be accessed from the Announcements page.

People

A list of everyone registered on the course, including teachers. This is also the view from which you can create/edit student groups. You can also invite JU colleagues to your course using their JU mail or JU username.

Students are automatically enrolled when they register for the course in Ladok, so you don't have to worry about giving them access to your course.

Modules

Modules is the default way for you to organize course material for your students. You can have as many (or few) modules as you want and they can all contain a lot of different content: pages, assignments, links, files, discussion forums and external tools. The idea with Modules is to not display content sorted by type but rather by course part/element/section. So instead of having all assignments in one place you have all content related to the first part of the course in one place.

An example of a module setup can look like this:

Example of a complete module.

Grades

By clicking Grades you get an overview of all assignments, students and their grades in the form of a table. You can sort and filter by clicking View at the top. If you hover over the column header for each assignment and click the three dots that appear you get more options.

Assignments: Points/scores/letters

Canvas is forcing the use of points for each assignment - there is no way to completely disable this. But you can display grades in a couple of ways. Let's say you have created an assignment worth 25 points and a student scores 15. The different options for "Display grade as" will generate these results:

Grading options
Display grade as	Example: Teacher view	Example: Student view
Percentage	60%	60%
Complete / Incomplete	or	or
Points	15	15
Letter grade Grading scheme: U-G	G	15 (G)
GPA scale Grading scheme: U-G	G	15 (G)

If you would like to get as far away from points as possible in Canvas you can assign 0 points to the assignment (but the value cannot be blank). However, the student will still see the actual points awarded. Like this:

Grading options without points
Display grade as	Example: Teacher view	Example: Student view
Letter grade Grading scheme: U-G	G	0 (G)
GPA scale Grading scheme: U-G	G	0 (G)

"I want to grade with points or percentage"

No trouble at all, Canvas handles this perfectly fine!

"I want to grade with complete/incomplete"

Works fine, but consider assigning at least 1 point to your assignment. If you for some reason would like to export your grades (e.g. work in Excel) only the students point scores will be exported - not the actual complete/incomplete status. Since Complete is translated to max points and Incomplete to 0 points there is no way for the exported file to distinguish between the grades if the max points are set to 0.

"I want to grade with letter grades + use points"

Assign your points, choose Letter Grade or GPA scale and pick a grading scheme or setup your own. Mind the percentages since a students score will be used to generate a letter grade, and if you assign a letter grade directly to a student the points awarded will be the amount that corresponds to the max point for that grade (with decimals displayed, if needed). Exporting with the Letter grade option will only export the score, not the actual letter. GPA scale however exports into the letter grade that matches the students score in the grading scheme.

"I want to grade with letter grades and not use points at all"

You can't. You can assign 0 points to your assignment, which probably is the closest you can get to not use points. But this will impact the automatically calculated total score for your course as well as the possibility to export grades (e.g. work with Excel). Grading and giving feedback will still work fine in Canvas, just choose to display grades as Letter grades or GPA scale (no difference is this context), pick your grading scheme or setup your own. The percentages in the scheme won't matter since the max points is 0 anyway. Exporting a Gradebook with assignments worth 0 points will render useless information, since what is actually is exported are the scores that generated said grade, not the actual letter grades. So in this case there will only be 0 for each student.

Read more about exporting in the article about The Gradebook.

Settings

From the Settings menu you can edit course details (like image, language etc.) but perhaps most important is the Navigation tab. From here you can reorder, enable and disable menu items from your course using drag and drop. As a default setting Home, Announcements, People, Modules and Grades are activated. Some additional settings can be found in the Apps and Feature Options tabs.