Key Things to Know about Your New Canvas Course

Canvas and D2L have many similarities and overlapping functions — but also some important differences. Here are some key differences you’re likely to come across as you review course(s) copied from D2L to Canvas and prepare to teach. If you have any questions about your course or these differences, please contact the OAI Faculty Support desk.

All graded activities (including discussions, assignments, and quizzes) are automatically added to the Canvas gradebook. Unlike in D2L, you cannot have a Canvas grade item without an associated Canvas assignment.

• “No submission” assignments are used to create gradebook items without associated Canvas submissions.
• The Canvas Assignments tool lists all graded activities in the course. For example, if you had weekly graded quizzes in D2L, those quizzes are included in the Canvas Assignments tool. The Canvas Assignments tool is similar to the D2L Manage Grades list of grade items.
• Deleting items from the Canvas Assignment tool will remove the item from your course.

Your Canvas home page is customizable. The template includes recent Announcements, but you can change that.

Discussions appear in order of most recent activity in the Canvas Discussions tool. For migrated courses, this is usually reverse chronological order.

You can “pin” discussions to put them in numeric or chronological order. Look in the lower section of the Discussion tool where your topics are in reverse order. Just to the left of each discussion topic, you’ll notice six dots in the form of a small rectangle. Click or tap, then hold this rectangle of dots to drag-and-drop a topic into the “pinned” discussion area. Repeat as needed to arrange topics in the order you choose.

Student Groups are much more expansive in Canvas than in D2L. Using groups will take some help and practice. A good starting place is to watch this short video guide for students.

Canvas Modules are containers for content and the main recommended way to organize your course. Modules can contain pages, uploaded files, and links to course tools or external websites.

• Organize pages within modules. Students will access discrete Canvas pages through the course modules.
• To display all Canvas pages in your course, click Pages in the course navigation, then View all Pages at the top of the page.

Canvas currently has two quiz tools: Classic Quizzes and New Quizzes. New Quizzes is expected to replace Classic Quizzes eventually. However, use Classic quizzes if you use Proctorio or if you use Question groups to sub-organize question banks.