This video shows you where to find help for Canvas: in the official documentation, on Biola's Resources pages, and through Google searches.
Watch the video here: (length = 1:57)
Biola's Help Pages: Canvas at Biola
The Official Canvas Guide for Instructors
Canvas provides lots of help resources. In this video, I'll show you what's available within Canvas and how to use a Google search to find more documentation.
Every page has a help button in the left menu. Students can use the "Ask Your Instructor" link to ask a question about a class. The message will go to the teachers and TAs in the class using the Canvas Conversations system.
You can also search the official Canvas documentation by clicking "Canvas Guides." This opens up a new tab where you can find guides designed for students or for teachers. You can also search for a specific topic. Pretty much every part of Canvas is explained in these guides, with detailed instructions and screen shots showing what it looks like. There are so many pages that sometimes the challenge is to figure out which specific search terms to use.
If you come across an error in Canvas, you can report a problem. This creates a ticket in the support system and includes some details that will help support staff figure out your problem, including which class, page, and browser you were using.
Finally, there's a series of help pages that we've written specifically for Biola. Click "Canvas at Biola" to see where students can find help logging in, and where teachers can find details about setting up a course.
Another strategy for getting help is to do some online searches. Since Canvas is used by hundreds of universities, there's lots of online help available. Start by putting the word Canvas first in your search, before the topic.
The results in the canvaslms.com domain are the official documentation pages. But as you can see, there are a lot of other results from other universities.
If you want to search only in the official documentation, you could add this qualifier to your search.
Also, if you're a teacher and you're finding that students keep having the same question, you could post a link to the instructions directly in the description of an assignment, like this. Find a documentation page, copy the link, then paste it into the description for students to find.
So if you're stuck, look around. It's likely that someone else has experienced something similar, and you should be able to find the answer somewhere using one of these resources.
Thanks for watching.