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Canvas student support and syllabus statement

Here’s how you can help support your students with Canvas.

Syllabus statement

Consider adding this statement to your syllabus:

This course uses Canvas as the main learning platform. If you haven’t used Canvas before, I recommend you take the PSU Learning Center’s remote readiness course this week. If you’ve used Canvas and you just need occasional technical support, contact the OIT Helpdesk. If they can’t help you, please let me know.

Canvas resources for students

The Learning Center has self-paced learning resources for students new to Canvas. We recommend sending students there first — and encouraging them to take the Center’s remote readiness course during the term’s first week.

The OIT Helpdesk offers “just in time” technical support. This is good for students having trouble logging into Canvas, finding or accessing Canvas materials, and other technical issues.

The Help item (on the global navigation bar within Canvas) reveals links to OIT’s Canvas resources and to technology support through the myPSU portal.


Growing with Canvas

Growing with Canvas

Resource type: Self-paced Canvas course
Intended for: New faculty, emerging practitioners

Growing with Canvas is a self-paced training course to introduce the main Canvas tools. You can self-enroll through the Canvas learning system. The course is organized into modules with videos, text explanations, examples, and practice exercises. Consider working through the modules in order, because some topics build from others.

What's in the Growing with Canvas course?

In this module, you’ll learn more about the basics of navigating your Canvas course as well as how to communicate with students via the Inbox and Calendar tools.

This module covers:

  • Getting Around in Canvas
  • Communication Tools

This module focuses on overall course design, sharing strategies for customizing your course appearance as well as organizing content to support student learning.

This module covers:

  • Customizing Your Course
  • Course Design

In this module, you’ll learn more about the different Canvas activities you can use to support student engagement in your course.

This module covers:

  • Pages
  • Discussions
  • Assignments
  • Quizzes

This module shares strategies for effectively using Canvas SpeedGrader™ to assess your students’ work and share their grades with them so they can keep track of their progress in the course.

This module covers:

  • Course Settings and Weights
  • SpeedGrader and Gradebook

This module reviews how the Canvas Groups tool can be used to support learning and develop a sense of community in your course. It also outlines the steps for copying your course materials from term to term, as well as how to share content with your colleagues.

This module covers:

  • Groups and Collaboration
  • Copying and Sharing Courses

Tools You'll Use

The Growing with Canvas self-paced course is built within PSU’s learning management system, Canvas by Instructure. You can learn more about how to use Canvas with our Canvas Tutorials.

About the Course Creators

This course was adapted from the Instructure’s Growing With Canvas: Faculty Development course and customized for the PSU community by OAI staff.


Add a User to a PSU Canvas Course

This article was last updated Jun 9, 2025 @ 2:59 pm.

While most people are added to a Canvas course through an automated process, you may occasionally need to add one or more people manually. In most cases, this is something you can do yourself, but some situations may require support from OIT or OAI.

Note: If you wish to share course materials with a colleague or other instructor, we recommend sharing a copy of the course instead of the “live” Canvas shell with student enrollment. This helps keep confidential student information private while allowing you to share what you need. Review the PSU Registrar’s webpage, FERPA & Student Records Privacy FAQs for more information about FERPA and confidential student information.

Adding a user with an Odin ID

You can add anyone with an active Odin ID to your Canvas course, as long as it is during the active course dates or prior to the course start date.

  1. In Course Navigation, select People (1) link.

  1. In the upper right corner of the class list, select the +People (2) button.

  1. Enter the PSU email address (3) of the person you want to add. (Note: To add multiple users, enter their email addresses on a single line separated by commas.)
  2. Using the dropdown menus, assign the user(s) Role (4) and Section (5). (Note: When adding multiple users at once, only one role and section can be assigned. If you’re not sure which role to choose, read User Roles in Canvas.)
  3. Select Next (6).

  1. If located, the users to be added to the course are displayed. Confirm these are the correct users, then select the Add Users (7) button.

If you are unable to add a user with their email, you can also try adding them with their Login ID. This is the same as their Odin ID (or the part of the email before the @). If you continue to have trouble, contact the Office of Academic Innovation for faculty support.

Adding a user without an Odin ID

A user must have an Odin account to be added to a Canvas course. If you are working with a community partner or other colleague outside the PSU community and would like them to have access to your course, they must first obtain an Affiliate Account and Odin username.

After receiving an Affiliate Account and Odin username, you should be able to follow the steps above to add a user with an Odin ID. If you have any trouble adding the new user, contact the Office of Academic Innovation for faculty support. Please include the user’s pdx.edu email address in your request. This email address is required for our support professionals to add users to a course, as PSU IDs are not used in Canvas.

Student repeatedly removed from course

Question:
My student keeps getting kicked out of my Canvas course! Every time I add them back in, the student gets removed again. Can you fix this?

 

Answer:
Your student is likely being removed from Canvas because of enrollment status changes in PSU’s official enrollment system, Banner. Banner sends enrollment information to Canvas regularly to keep Canvas enrollment up-to-date. If you manually add a student to your Canvas course, but that student isn’t enrolled through Banner (or their enrollment changes after you add them), Banner will tell Canvas to remove the student because of the change in their enrollment information.

 

When this occurs, contact OAI. Our support professionals can work around the Banner unenrollment.


Copy or send items to a Canvas Course

Back to Canvas Tutorials

Copy or send a course item to another Canvas course

Every Canvas index page (list of items in Modules, Assignments, Discussions, Pages, etc.) gives you the option to “push” a copy of an item to a different Canvas course in your account, or send it to another Canvas user at PSU. These options are found in the 3-dot menu to the right of the items listed. The example below is from the Modules index, but the Copy To… and Send To… options are the same in each area.

  1. In the course you want to copy materials from, select Modules from the left navigation menu.
    Modules menu item.
  2. On the right side of the list, select the three vertical dots aligned with the item you want to copy.
    Module item menu with Copy To highlighted.
  3. Select the Copy To… menu item.
  4. Select the course you want to copy this item to. You can also select a specific module to copy it into.
    Select a Course menu and Copy button.
  5. Select Copy.

Note: if you copy the same material twice without changing the filename, the first copy will be overwritten.


Student-Faculty Partnerships in Curricula

Contributors:Kari Goin, Sophia Ryker

There is a growing movement to not only include but also involve students in curricula decisions. Students in higher education have challenged the notion that they are customers receiving a transactional education and instead call for higher levels of participation and agency in their learning (Matthews et al., 2017). Students collaborating with institutions, programs, and faculty to design curricula is a framework known as students as partners, or student-faculty partnerships. At Portland State University, student body President Nya Mbock has called for more student involvement with faculty in the curriculum (Swordfisk, 2021).

Positive outcomes of student-faculty partnership include increased student engagement, motivation, and ownership for learning, a positive shift of power dynamics between faculty and student (toward more equitable power), engagement and empowerment for students who are historically excluded, and increased student confidence and self-determination (Cook-Sather et al., 2014).

With any approach to curricula, the intention of including students can end up harming students. It’s important to set intentions, to be transparent, and to reflect on how power affects the partnership. Without these intentional pieces, partnership work may end up tokenizing students and essentializing the student experience (Cook-Sather et al., 2014; de Bie et al., 2021). As a result, and despite good intentions, partnerships can reinforce the inequitable learning environments that they seek to disrupt. For example, partnership work may focus on an increased sense of belonging for students, which may be problematic when the institution students are invited to feel connected with has a history of erasure and colonization for some student populations (de Bie et al., 2021).

Example Partnership Approaches

Here are three examples of partnership approaches you can include in your own practice:

Student-faculty course design

This happens before a course is taught and when you are designing the course. A student or group of students collaborate with the faculty member on the design of a course. This might include a redesigned syllabus or elements such as course outcomes, a course assignment, or an entire course.

Students create and choose

This includes students in a course you are teaching. This might include having students choose the weekly discussion topics or create and vote on quiz questions, embedding students’ social bookmarking annotations to shape course content, or having students collaborate to create course content (Cook-Sather et al., 2014).

Partnerships in assessment

Invite students to identify grading criteria for an assignment or final essay or invite students to co-assess their own final presentations. Another example is to bring a rubric with past student papers (used with permission) and have current students grade the papers based on that rubric. Have a discussion about the rubric and invite students to offer suggestions on adapting it for their course term.

Getting Started

Step 1

Begin by reflecting on how you currently involve students in your curriculum.

Step 2

Create a list of when students get to make decisions within your curriculum. (If this is currently “never,” consider starting with a negotiated syllabus.)

Step 3

Acknowledge that this iterative process never really ends.

Examples in Practice

Provide a diversity of materials in formats that remain consistent from week to week. Students choose which materials to engage with to learn the concepts outlined for that week. The focus of the negotiated syllabus is to highlight student agency within their learning by creating opportunities for students to choose the way they want to learn a concept.

For example, provide lecture slides, supplementary texts, and external videos covering the information being taught each week. From this collection, students can choose which items are most useful to them and will have reliable access to their preferred materials for each new topic.

Reflect on the level at which students make decisions and identify opportunities to increase student involvement: Hold a discussion with students in class to determine course learning outcomes and discuss how predetermined assignments will help the class reach their goals.

Be prepared to make small changes to assignments based on the class discussion. This is expected, as every class will have different students. The discussion may also yield ideas for new or different assignments to help the class meet their co-created learning outcomes.

Alternatively, hold a discussion with students in class to create course assignments based on predetermined course outcomes and how these assignments will help the class reach their goals.

Integrate the student voice into your course by providing ample room for identity expression and application of the material to students’ own lived experiences — in ways such as including languages spoken beyond English and encouraging cultural and community practices. This engages more parts of the brain and allows for greater communication between them, along with deeper integration of the learned material into long-term memory (Johnson et al., 2006).

This eReader is a great example of storytelling that showcases stories written by diverse students in University Studies courses at PSU:

Develop a syllabus, in partnership with students, that reflects your collective values. Co-creating a syllabus is a chance for students to democratically participate in their own learning. It signals that a course is designed to share power and encourage not only student involvement but also engagement and agency.

The syllabus might include co-created community guidelines, flexible deadlines based on the class’s needs for that quarter, or opportunities for students to self-grade. You might also consider including a list of linked resources (where to find cost-considerate course materials, necessary technology, internet access), a land acknowledgement, and an acknowledgment of bias.

Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., & Felton, P. (2014). Engaging Students As Partners in Learning and Teaching : A Guide for Faculty. John Wiley & Sons. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/lib/psu/detail.action?docID=1650837

De Bie, K., Marquis, E., Cook-Sather, A., & Luqueño, L. P. (2021). Promoting Equity and Justice through Pedagogical Partnership. Stylus. https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.pdx.edu/lib/PSU/detail.action?docID=6647714

Johnson, S., & Taylor, K. (2006). The Neuroscience of Adult Learning: New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Wiley. https://search.library.pdx.edu/permalink/f/p82vj0/CP71182273540001451

Matthews, K. E., Groenendijk, L. J., & Chunduri, P. (2017). We Want to be More Involved: Student Perceptions of Students as Partners Across the Degree Program Curriculum. International Journal for Students As Partners, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v1i2.3063

Swordfisk, K. (2021, September 27). In pursuit of student success: ASPSU president prioritizes student involvement, improving the post-COVID learning environment. PSU News. https://www.pdx.edu/news/pursuit-student-success


Log in to Canvas

Log in to Canvas at Portland State by navigating to canvas.pdx.edu. You will be redirected to a page where you will be prompted to enter your PSU Odin name and password. Once authenticated, you will be logged in to your Canvas account.

Portland State single sign on screen for Canvas log in.

When logging in, you will be prompted to complete Duo Two-Factor Authentication. For additional information, please refer to OIT’s resource on Duo Two-Factor Authentication.

This article was last updated Jul 7, 2025 @ 4:34 pm.


Stylized illustration of people walking past geometric houses with a yellow car. Minimalist design with bold colors and patterns.

Equity and inclusion practices

Stylized illustration of people walking past geometric houses with a yellow car. Minimalist design with bold colors and patterns.

Contributors:Raiza Dottin, Kari Goin, Megan McFarland, Harold McNaron, Janelle DeCarrico Voegele

This guide introduces a few pedagogies you can adopt into your inclusive teaching practice. They can help facilitate connections and conversations leading to inclusive and equitable learning — but this is not an exhaustive list.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Culturally sustaining pedagogy builds on the work of culturally relevant teaching and culturally responsive pedagogy. It affirms and sustains students’ connections to their culture, language, and community. It focuses on students as active contributors of unique lived experiences essential to learning. It also resists monolingualism and deficit student framing by promoting cultural equality (Paris, 2012).

In practice

“I Notice, I Wonder” is a useful culturally sustaining practice in many teaching contexts. It’s an introductory brainstorming activity in which students from all backgrounds and abilities can participate.

Further reading about Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

Universal Design for Learning

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) attempts to minimize barriers and create equal opportunities for all students to express what they know. UDL creates multiple paths to learning and understanding that benefit all students, regardless of disability. This framework focuses on adding flexibility, choice, and relevance to three key areas of instruction: expression of knowledge, representation of information, and engagement.

In practice

Further reading about Universal Design for Learning

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

Originating in neuroscience, trauma-informed pedagogy acknowledges and attempts to mitigate the trauma’s impact on learning. Trauma can come from sources including but not limited to adverse childhood experiences (or ACEs) such as physical or emotional abuse, institutional and systemic oppression, and COVID-19. While trauma affects each individual differently, it’s likely to impact cognitive functions such as memory, emotional regulation, stamina, and focus. Strategies within this framework include a focus on community, relationships, routine, and flexibility.

In practice

Further reading about Trauma-Informed Pedagogy

Community-Engaged Learning Pedagogy

What is the role of a university in a community? How might curricula contribute to students’ civic identity? How does a course honor the life experience students bring to the classroom? Community-engaged learning (CEL) pedagogies attempt to address these and other foundational questions concerning the intentional interplay between movements for justice, academic knowledge, and the spaces we share.

In practice

Further reading about Community-Engaged Pedagogy

Contemplative Pedagogy

Contemplative pedagogy encourages deep learning through focused attention, reflection, and mindfulness practice. It engages students in an introspective, first-person way of knowing the world around them through an embodied educational experience, which allows students to see themselves in their courses. “Inviting the contemplative simply includes the natural human capacity for knowing through silence, looking inward, pondering deeply, beholding, witnessing the contents of our consciousness…. These approaches cultivate an inner technology of knowing….” (Hart, 2004, pp. 29–30).

Many common classroom practices — such as close reading, writing, and reflection — can draw from contemplative practices to help students focus deeply, retain new information, and integrate learning into meaningful situations.

In practice

Further reading

Student voice

Student voice “aims to signal not only the literal sound of students’ words as they inform educational planning, research, and reform, but also the collective contribution of diverse students’ presence, participation and power in those processes” (Bovill et al., 2011, pp. 2–3). Notably, student voice work is shared decision-making between students and faculty that involves value, agency, and action for students and aims to be transformative for both students and faculty.

In practice

Further reading about student voice

Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Anti-racist pedagogy is a “paradigm located within critical theory utilized to explain and counteract the persistence and impact of racism using praxis as its focus to promote social justice for the creation of a democratic society in every respect” (Blakeney, 2005, p. 119). Further, anti-racist pedagogy reveals the structural inequalities within U.S. society while fostering students’ critical analysis skills as well as their critical self-reflection (Kishimoto, 2018). Per Kishimoto, incorporating anti-racist pedagogy at the classroom level begins with examining one’s own pedagogy and curriculum to implement change. This could involve understanding how inequitable education structures impact students differently, reevaluating assumptions we may make about students’ backgrounds, inviting a colleague to review syllabi or other course materials to identify where bias might impact curriculum and organization, meaningfully incorporating the work and voices of minoritized scholars, and incorporating high impact learning practices that create the foundations for collective exploration of historical, social, and cultural biases in the field of study.

In practice

Further reading

Blakeney, A. M. (2005). Antiracist pedagogy: Definition, theory, and professional development. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2(1), 119–132.

Bovill, C. (2020). Co-creation in learning and teaching: the case for a whole-class approach in higher education. High Educ 79, 1023–1037. 

Bovill, C., Cook‐Sather, A. & Felten, P. (2011). Students as co‐creators of teaching approaches, course design, and curricula: implications for academic developers. International Journal for Academic Development, 16(2), 133–145.

Bovill, C., Cook‐Sather, A. & Felten, P. (2014). Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty. John Wiley & Sons.

Carello, J., & Butler, L.D. (2014). Potentially perilous pedagogies: Teaching trauma is not the same as trauma-informed teaching. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 15(2), 153–168. 

Hart, T. (2004). Opening the contemplative mind in the classroom. Journal of Transformative Education, 2(28), 28–46.

Kishimoto, K. (2018) Anti-racist pedagogy: from faculty’s self-reflection to organizing within and beyond the classroom. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(4), 540–554.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97.


How to manage your Canvas site

Need to log in to Canvas? Follow this link to the Canvas log in portal.

This website and resources are intended for Portland State instructors. For PSU students looking for help with Canvas and general tech support, please contact the OIT Helpdesk.
Additional Canvas resources for PSU students can be found in OIT’s Canvas Resources for Students.

Canvas has many features and tools for teaching a course. But you also need these “under the hood” functions for managing your course site.

Personal settings

Before getting started in Canvas, be sure to update your personal settings. It’s an important step to make sure you stay connected with your classes. You’ll need to do this only once, unless your preferences change.

The following list outlines the main settings you should consider reviewing and are linked to detailed guides:

Course import tool

Copy a course when you want to use or repurpose previously created content — including course settings, syllabus, assignments, modules, files, pages, discussions, quizzes, and question banks. You can also copy or adjust events and due dates. Not all content can be copied as part of a course. (Learn about “Import Limitations.”) Canvas lets you copy all content from one course site to another or select specific content.

Course shells for each new term will be available in the preceding term. For example, winter course shells will be available midway through the preceding fall term. If you need a place to work on your course sooner or just want a sandbox where you can test new ideas, create a new Canvas course shell from your Canvas Dashboard

Student view

It’s always a good idea to check your course from the student’s perspective. This helps you identify what elements a student can access and how the course navigation menu displays for them.

To enter Student View, select “Settings” in the course navigation menu. Next, select “Student View” from among the settings area’s options.

The Canvas Course homepage with the Student View menu button pointed out.

Student View has a highlighted frame or border.

You can navigate the course as a student, with some slight exceptions:

  • Groups: As an instructor in Student View, all group information will be available to you, while students will only have access to their own group. 
  • Inbox: The Test Student doesn’t have a Canvas Inbox, so you won’t be able to test communications.
  • Other tools: Some other tools (e.g., Panopto, VoiceThread, etc.) may not function as expected.

To exit Student View, select the “Leave Student View” button.

The “Leave Student View” button pointed out within the Student View border.

You can check all external links throughout your course with the course link validator. It finds invalid or unresponsive external links in both published and unpublished content. However, some links it flags as unresponsive (to Canvas servers) will still work for students.

Additional course settings

These settings are available only to the course instructor:

Adapted from “Managing Your Canvas Site” in Start Here 102: Best Practices in Online instruction, licensed CC BY 4.0 by Grace Seo, University of Missouri.

This article was last updated Aug 5, 2025 @ 10:19 am.


Communicating in Canvas

Contributors:Misty Hamideh

Need to log in to Canvas? Follow this link to the Canvas log in portal.

This website and resources are intended for Portland State instructors. For PSU students looking for help with Canvas and general tech support, please contact the OIT Helpdesk.
Additional Canvas resources for PSU students can be found in OIT’s Canvas Resources for Students.

Canvas has several ways to communicate with your students. Here are two of them:

  • Announcements are course-wide.
  • Inbox messages may be private between an instructor and a student or group of students, or a message between students.

Announcements

You can use Announcements to give students news, updates, and reminders. Students receive email copies of your announcements in their campus email. This is based on their notification preferences; by default, they receive the message immediately — but they can opt for less frequent notifications.

From the Canvas Tutorial Video Series for instructors

Note: A default Canvas course is set to show the latest announcement at the top of the page. You can set how many announcements to display, but we recommend just one to make sure students notice the most important and current information.

The primary use of an announcement is for news and reminders:

    • Notify students of class cancellation, if a class location has moved, if you will be out of town or delayed in providing feedback on an assignment, etc.
    • Remind students of upcoming due dates.
    • Notify students of campus events or news items of interest or relevance.

You can also use announcements to engage students at the beginning of each unit (week). Doing this consistently helps participants stay connected and recognize that you are a human with a personality (and not just a computer). It helps define your “presence” in an online course.

When writing an announcement, use the “inverted pyramid” model from journalistic writing. Open with the most important facts or information and then progress through less important details. Most people will read only the first sentence or two unless they perceive a need to keep going.

Guiding announcements generally include two or more of the following:

    • Introduction to the main idea for the week — short, one sentence, to motivate and encourage engagement in the topic of the week.
    • Any scheduling information such as days the teacher will not be available, a changed due date, holiday, etc.
    • Summary response to previous week’s discussion (or assignment submission). Provide positive feedback; whenever possible, mention student names and take quotes directly from their postings. This should be only a paragraph highlighting just one or two exceptional comments. (This recognizes and motivates, as well as demonstrating that you actually read the discussions.)

    • By default, students receive an immediate email copy of a course announcement. However, faculty do not automatically receive copies of announcements they have created. If you want email copies of your own announcements (e.g., as reassurance that the announcement went out), edit your notification preferences.
    • You can schedule Announcements in advance or post them immediately. Delaying release — even by a little — gives you time to proofread (and revise if needed) before students receive it.
    • If multiple sections are loaded to your Canvas site, you can post an announcement to just selected sections if necessary.
    • Announcements are also available in Canvas Groups. You can post an announcement to just one group, and group members can post announcements to each other.
    • When you copy an entire Canvas site from one semester to the next, the announcements are included. You will need to go through them and delete any that are no longer needed or edit the release date for those you wish to reuse. Be sure to also edit out any information that was only relevant to the previous class!
    • You can use the Rich Content Editor and Content Selector when you create an announcement. Use these to format the text of your posts or to link to the items you reference; for example, if you are reminding students that an assignment is due, you can link to that assignment.

The Inbox

The Inbox allows Canvas users to send messages to one another within Canvas.

Both faculty and students can configure their notification settings to receive Canvas Inbox messages at the email address of their choice. You can also choose how often to receive these notifications.

Use the Inbox to:

  • Send information or updates to an individual student, a section, or a group.
  • Record a media comment (audio or video) to send to an individual student, section, or group.
  • Send file attachments to an individual student, a section, or a group.
  • Use the “Message Students Who…” feature in the Gradebook to contact students who have not submitted an assessment, who scored less than a given grade, or who scored more than a given grade.

Adapted from “Communicating in Canvas” in Start Here 102: Best Practices in Online instruction, licensed CC BY 4.0 by Grace Seo, University of Missouri.


Assignments in Canvas

Need to log in to Canvas? Follow this link to the Canvas log in portal.

This website and resources are intended for Portland State instructors. For PSU students looking for help with Canvas and general tech support, please contact the OIT Helpdesk.
Additional Canvas resources for PSU students can be found in OIT’s Canvas Resources for Students.

Assignments in Canvas is both a specific kind of assessment and any Canvas activity associated with a grade. This video provides a basic overview:

How to Use Assignments in Teaching

Students can submit several assignment types in Canvas:

  • A “no submission” assignment helps you track activities not completed directly in Canvas, such as attendance at a Zoom session.
  • “Online” assignments provide a space for students to turn something in online. You can select one or more types of online submissions to accept:
    • Text entry provides a text box with formatting tools where students can write a submission directly in Canvas.
    • Website URL provides a space for students to share a URL as their submission.
    • Media Recordings allow students to create and submit recordings directly within Canvas or to upload recordings created in another application.
    • Student Annotation allows you to provide a file that students can annotate directly in Canvas.
    • File upload allows students to submit file types including Word documents, PowerPoint slides, spreadsheets, PDFs, images, and videos. (You can restrict file types if necessary.)
  • “On Paper” assignments allow you to track hard copies handed in.
  • “External tool” assignments allow you to create assessments with tools not native to Canvas, such as Turnitin or PebblePad.
  • Graded discussions and quizzes are also considered “assignments.” These are listed under both Assignments and on their own respective Canvas index pages.

Assignments and Grades

The Canvas Gradebook is closely tied to the Assignments index. Anything you want a Gradebook column for must have an Assignment associated with it.

By default, assignments are listed in the order you create them. This also determines the order they appear in the Gradebook, but you can drag and drop them into the order you prefer.

You can also create Assignment Groups on the Assignments page. This gives you:

  • Subtotals in the Gradebook for each assignment group. For example, if you want a subtotal for all discussion assignments and another for all quizzes, you could create groups for each.
  • A place to assign weight for weighted grades. You could assign a weight to each group (e.g., 20% for discussions, 50% for quizzes).
  • A place to assign other rules for assignment groups, such as dropping the lowest score.
Canvas screen detail showing assignments arranged in Assignment Groups

Adapted from “Assignments in Canvas” in Start Here 102: Best Practices in Online instruction, licensed CC BY 4.0 by Grace Seo, University of Missouri.


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