Drawing up the balance

29 Oct 2020

Without the effort from coordinators building their courses, support from the Canvas helpdesk, many webinars, workshops and transition services, we would not stand where we are now. But, when connecting all the systems to Canvas, we faced some challenges.

Connecting Canvas

At the start of the academic year, the Student Portal did not show all relevant Canvas content. It took us until a few days before the start of course period 2 to have it fixed. Currently, the Student Portal – Canvas connection works as designed, including announcements and assignment deadlines showing up in Student Portal.

At the same time, several bug fixes were applied to the SIS connector, loading enrollment and scheduling information. The automated SIS connector is currently scheduled twice a day (6:00 AM and 6:00 PM). In the upcoming weeks, the refresh rate will slowly be increased to once per hour.

 

Additional tools

One of the reasons we chose Canvas was the ease to integrate additional tools with the core system. To name a few:

  • Mediasite enables smooth integration of lecture recordings (and other videos) in your courses. Note: notwithstanding the fact that the Mediasite infrastructure has recently been upgraded to ‘high availability setup’ to meet the large amount of views, we currently face performance issues. This of course receives our attention.
  • Next to Zoom integrated in Canvas (and in the future perhaps instead of) we start exploring Microsoft Teams integration.
  • Thinking about facilitating interaction around videos or documents? Or wanting your students to provide feedback in each other’s work or performance? The FeedbackFruits modules are integrated in Canvas for these purposes.
  • From January 2021 we will use KeyLinks Learning Resources as Maastricht University’s new reference list tool.
  • And did you try Urkund already to detect plagiarism in your students assignments?

Curious? Go to your Course, select Settings, and click on the App tab, to explore more third party tools that are easy to integrate in Canvas (in most cases for an additional fee).

 

Saying goodbye to EleUM and Blackboard

We already informed you about keeping access to previous courses through a Blackboard Archive License. However, the terms Blackboard and EleUM will be phased out and replaced by Canvas. Accordingly, the support organisation will transfer from Faculty EleUM Support to Faculty Canvas Support.

 

Urgent questions? Don’t panic!

You find a growing list of FAQs, guidelines and of course, information on where to turn to for support on the Canvas Support Portal.

We also want to stress that the helpdesk is there for you and will stay available until the end of the academic year! Do not hesitate to ask for help, we are there to support you!

Author: Canvas Support Team

 

 


This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

 

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Last updated: 29/10/20