Managing and Organizing Your Course

After creating and publishing your course, and may wish to organize to your course by Pages or Modules. Read more about these topics below:

1. Announcements, 2. Discussions, 3. Assignments, 4. Grading, 5. Quizzes, 6. Pages and Modules, 7. Groups

1. Make announcements

By default, announcements are sent to students' email associated with their Canvas account. Students can add multiple email addresses to their Canvas account if they wish to receive notifications in multiple locations.

Tip! Clicking Save actually sends announcements. If you're still drafting it, delay posting Announcements to go out at a future time to continue working on it. 

2. Start Discussions

Canvas Discussions allows students to post ideas and work for all to see and comment on. Topics can be graded if you'd like to grade student participation. Third-party discussion tools like Harmonize and Ed Discussion can be enabled if desired.

3. Create Assignments

The five types of Assignments are Assignments (readings, reply to a prompt, or upload), Discussion, Quizzes, External tool, or Not Graded.

Tip: Set due dates for Assignments.Without due dates, the Canvas Calendar, Notifications and To-Do lists will not be as useful for students.

4. Get to know your grading options

Use  SpeedGrader (Use Chrome browser) to grade assignments and quizzes and give feedback online, even audio or video feedback. You can manually enter and edit grades in the Gradebook. Third party tool Gradescope is also an option if you have handwritten homework or exams. You may even calculate final grades in Canvas.

5. Create Quizzes

Quizzes and surveys can have a multitude of question types and test options. Surveys can be anonymous or not.

6. Organize with Pages and Modules

Pages and Modules both let you create and combine content with links to Files, Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions, and external links. Here's a Module about Modules, and a Page about combining Files and Pages and an article about the ideal use of each for organizing content.

7. Foster collaboration with Groups

Create Groups (in the People tool) that students can self-join. Unlike a section, a group has special capabilities such as the ability to maintain a subsection of your course site or submit an assignment as a group.