Current Announcements

Starting Spring 2024 – For Instructors – Checklist

       See One-Page Semester Planning Calendar for all Spring 2024 dates on one page.

Spring 2024 Courses

New to Canvas? See Setting Up Your Course on Canvas

Spring 2024 classes begin January 8, 2024. Student access opened on December 31, 2023.

However, students will not be able to view your course on Canvas until you "Publish" your course. After you publish a course, you can send a message to students by creating a new Announcement. The announcement will be emailed to students. (Announcements sent before the course opens or before it's published will not be emailed, but will be visible to students in the "Announcements" section of the course.)

1) Validate Course Links and Turnitin Assignments

Before you "Publish" your course, it would be a good idea to check all the links in the course to make sure they all work. You can do this automatically by going to "Settings" then click "Validate Links in Content" and click the red "Start Link Validation" button to see if there are any broken links. See official Canvas documentation for How do I validate links in a course?

Also, if you are using Turnitin for any assignment, be sure to click on that assignment at least once, to make the connection between Canvas and Turnitin. (Normally, this would happen automatically when you're creating the assignment, but if you haven't edited the assignment since you copied it from a previous semester, this connection hasn't been made. Simply opening the assignment and going to Turnitin is sufficient.)

2) Edit Dates – Semester Calendar – One-Page Term Planning Calendar

While you're creating your syllabus and setting up due dates in Canvas, you may find this one-page "Term Planning Calendar" helpful. It shows all of the dates for the whole semester on one page: http://www.biola.edu/semester-planning-calendars 

3) Copying Courses from Previous Semesters

You can copy from one course to another on Canvas if you are the instructor for both classes. For example, you may want to do this to copy from an old semester to a new semester. To do this kind of copy, start at the new course on Canvas and click Settings on the left navigation menu, then click the "Import Content into this Course" button, and choose Copy a Canvas Course. You can then choose the course and the content. See detailed Canvas instructions here: How do I import content from another Canvas course?

Some notes about copying:

• The "Select Migration Content" option lets you choose whether to copy the whole course (usually, you do), or just parts of it (specific Modules, or specific Quizzes, for example).

• When you do a course copy, the roster is never copied, just the course content.

• Canvas asks if you want to "adjust events and due dates" – We usually recommend you say "no" and adjust manually. If you say yes, it will let you enter the beginning and end dates for both semesters and will attempt to put due dates in roughly the same places. Or you can choose to remove the dates altogether. In any case you will probably want to review and adjust the dates for each assignment.

• To copy from another teacher's course, get their permission then email Matthew Weathers.

• To adjust all due dates at once: Go to Assignments, then click the vertical ellipses menu (three dots to the right of the red "+Assignment" button on the top-right) and click "Edit Assignment Dates."

Viewing Courses from Previous Semesters

You can view all your classes (current, past, and future) by clicking "Courses" (left menu) then "All Courses." See Viewing Closed Courses.

4) Need to Add a TA?

If you need to give a TA access to your course on Canvas, email Matthew Weathers (it will be helpful if you include the CRN number of the course and the TA's ID number or email address).

We can also give administrative assistants or other instructors access to courses if necessary.

Teaching more than one section?

If you teach more than one section of the same class, you may find it convenient to combine all your sections into one single site on Canvas. This means you won't have to duplicate all your work. You can still view students separately by section, and you can assign different due dates by section, and you can email the students separately by section, if needed. If you would like to combine sections, email Matthew Weathers (it will be helpful if you include the CRN numbers of the courses). See our page about Working with Combined Sections.

Registrar's List of Courses

The Registrar's Office no longer publishes a list of courses online for general use. However, you can request access as described here: Access to Course Pallet.

5) Zoom

If you need to use Zoom, it's a good idea to make sure you're using the latest version of Zoom. Usually Macs automatically update. For Windows, see Zoom Update Instructions.

For Summer 2022 classes and beyond, I.T. will not create Zoom meeting links for you in the "Zoom" section of your class. On-campus classes do not need them, and neither do fully online classes which don't have scheduled times, and are usually done asynchronously without Zoom. However, the "Zoom" link will still appear in the course menu, and you can add Zoom meetings if needed, as described in this page about how to Create Zoom Meeting in Canvas.

Go to https://biola.zoom.us/ and log in with your Net ID to access your recordings and more detailed settings.

6) Publish The Course

Once you're ready for students to see the course, go to the home page of the course and click the "Publish" button. Be sure to publish your class by the time the semester begins.

After you publish a class, you will be able to send announcements to your students by clicking "Announcements" and adding a new one. (If you do this before a class is published, your announcement will still be on Canvas and students can see it there, but it won't get automatically emailed to them.)

New Faculty and Adjuncts

Welcome to Biola! For new teachers, there are several steps that need to happen in this specific order before you can log in to your class on Canvas. First, Human Resources needs to approve all the paperwork, officially hire you, and create an ID number for you. Next, I.T. needs to make a NetID account and password and biola.edu email address for you. Next, your department needs to notify the Registrar's Office that you are assigned to teach a class. Once the Registrar's Office officially assigns you to a class, an automated process will give you access on Canvas within six hours. Sorry for the long process, but due to FERPA regulations, only Biola employees can have access to student data, so you have to be officially hired and assigned to a class before you have access on Canvas.

For adjuncts, H.R. does not consider you an employee during the summer or during Christmas break. Once your new contract starts at the beginning of the term, you will have access to your Biola NetID account.

Finishing Fall 2023 – For Instructors

Fall 2023 courses closed on Canvas on December 16, 2023. After that date students can no longer submit assignments. On January 6, 2024 courses also became read-only for teachers & TA's. You can override these dates by changing the "End" date in the course settings.

Have a student with "Incomplete"? You will need to change the "End" date for the course on Canvas if you have a student who has been granted an "Incomplete" by the Associate Provost's Office. On the course "Settings" page, change "Participation" to "Course" and enter an "End" date to give the student enough time to submit the assignments plus enough time for you to finish grading them. See Course Dates for more details.  

Fall 2023 grades were due Friday, December 22, 2023 at noon at My Account / Final Grades. See Uploading Grades for more details. (That's five business days after the semester ends. Starting next semester, grades will be due after three business days.)

Documentation, Workshops, and Online Class

See Training Schedule for complete details and a links to sign up.

Assistance

The Office of Digital Learning (x5490) is available to assist you as you design your course. Feel free to contact our Instructional Designers if you have questions about how to set up a course: James Tedford, Tim Milosch, Lori Nicholson, Ryan Lucchesi, Carrie Cleveland, and Ruth Kinyua. If you have technical questions, or questions about registrations or courses, contact Matthew Weathers.