DE and CANVAS FAQs

The TLC maintains the DE and Correspondence Education Handbook. It is full of very helpful information about being an online educator at Cabrillo College. Check it out! If you have questions, schedule a consultation with the Director who is also the DE Coordinator. 

Currently, the TLC is not accepting proposals for Global Canvas announcements unless extenuating circumstances such as campus outages, closures, or Canvas issues. If you would like to communicate with students, please consider the following options:

• Guided Pathways, On the Horizon can help to promote events. Here is the link for a request. 

• You may also want to consider a Marketing/communications request. 

• Another recommendation is to request departments for faculty to include in their course announcements. 

Faculty are not able to merge their own courses. The Office of Instruction in collaboration with Deans, determines which courses can and cannot be merged. In general, they are courses that meet together, in the same place and time with the same students. Many courses that can be merged are now automatically merged by the Canvas/Colleague ILP or by the TLC. The TLC does not determine or evaluate merging. If you have questions about the status of your courses, please reach out to your department chair or dean.

There are three main roles that can be added to a course. Please follow the guidelines below to avoid FERPA violation and ensure best practices for Canvas. 

• Observers: This role is essentially the same, but please refrain from using the Waitlist option. Students who are on your waitlist will automatically be added to your course. If you need to add someone who can only view content, but not interact with the course in any way, please add them in the "observer" role. This can be a great way to share your course with others without giving them access to edit content or view student information. A faculty can add this role to their course.

• TA and SI Leader: These roles are very similar and should only be used for Cabrillo student employees who are hired to be teaching assistants (TA) or Supplemental Instructors (SI). These users have the ability to interact with students through discussions and inbox messages, but cannot grade or edit course content. TA and SI Leaders are required to be a students in employment in order to be added to a course. The TLC requires the Department administrator/Dean to provide a list of their entire division to the TLC with TAs and SI leaders at the beginning of each semester. 

• Designer: The main purpose of the designer role is to enable a user to edit/design/build content in a Canvas course without the ability to interact with students, including posting or viewing discussions, grading, announcements, sending inbox messages, and viewing student information. The TLC request form must be used for adding a Designer role. They must be a verified employee. TLC can verify.

If you are experiencing an issue with you Canvas roster not matching your Self-Service roster, or you do not see a course in your Canvas dashboard that you are the instructor on record for, please submit a ticket to IT.

Submit a request using the TLC Request Form. The TLC Team will make a section of your course for you and the incomplete student to complete. 

Submit a request using the TLC Request Form. The TLC Team will copy/duplicate your course with content for you and add the instructor you request to be added. 

This sandbox shell is only for the purposes of developing a curriculum for an academic course. Students are never added to these courses. If you would like a sandbox course, please fill out the TLC Request Form. 

Canvas course release dates correspond with the start date of registration which can be located on the Dates and Deadlines page. Typically registration for summer and fall starts in late April, and registration for spring starts in mid-November. 

For example:  Spring 2024 is November 13th, 2023, and for Summer and Fall 2024 is April 24th, 2024.

The Canvas start date is set to be one week before the Self-Service start date, and the Canvas end date is set to be two weeks after the Self-Service end date. These dates are populated automatically and cannot be manually changed by the faculty member or the TLC. If you have questions or concerns about your course start and end date, please reach out to your department chair or Dean.

The TLC has shared a Google Spreadsheet with the Dean and the Office of Instruction listing all people who have taken the TIDL 1 course (formerly DE Academy) or other approved transferable training. If you have had certification elsewhere, you can contact TLC (TLC@cabrillo.edu) with your certification and description to be evaluated for TIDL 1 equivalency for online certification approval. If you have had experience teaching but no formal training or your training is not sufficient for approval,  you will register for the TIDL 1 course in the VRC. See the VRC or the TIDL Program for more information on registration and dates for registration.

Faculty have the ability to add peer reviewers to their course as an "Observer" which allows the reviewer to view the content of the course. Here is a Canvas guide with instructions on how to add users to a course. However, if more access is required, to add a faculty as a faculty peer reviewer of your course, the faculty of record is required to complete a TLC request form to request the faculty and start and end dates of adding a faculty peer evaluator. 

Issues relating to accessing or logging onto systems at Cabrillo, including Canvas, are managed by the IT department, and they are the best at getting people up and running. Please either submit a ticket or give them a call at 831-479-6392 for the Aptos campus, or 831-786-4777 for the Watsonville campus.

Rationale

At Cabrillo, and during COVID and post-COVID, there has been an uptick in the use of Canvas for non-academic purposes, mostly as a way of communicating with students. We realize that Cabrillo has limited options to communicate with students but Canvas is not a substitute or best practice for the sole purpose of communicating or holding materials. We need to be very mindful of student (and staff/faculty) dashboard clutter. 

Alternatives

There are many ways to communicate with students including:

• The requestor may want to consider Google Drive and sharing a folder for materials, or creating a Google Site/website a Google Classroom, and make public or create a link for those who need access. 

• Guided Pathways, On the Horizon can help to promote events. Here is the link for a request. 

• You may also want to consider a Marketing communications request. 

• Another recommendation is to request departments for faculty to add communication messages in their courses. 

Starting in Summer 2024, the end date for courses is set for two weeks after the last day of classes. This window helps with grading and conclusion of the course. The faculty will always have access to the course under unpublished course in the dashboard but can no longer make any changes.  After the two weeks, students will not have access to a course. It is encouraged that you recommend if they want files or page content, they download those as a PDF. Here is instructions for how to save Canvas pages.

All users (students included) have 200MB. 

Instructors' quota does not impact the students.

And here is some additional information that may help: 

• Canvas does have a limit on individual file size - files should be kept to 500 MB or less.

• Individuals also may upload files directly to their personal file spaces. User files include profile pictures, uploaded assignment submissions, and other files such as attachments to discussions. 

• Files uploaded for a graded assignment are uploaded to user files but don't count against the user's quota. Student attachments to ungraded discussions come out of the users' individual quotas, but attachments to graded discussions do not.

• In course and group spaces, files uploaded as attachments or assignment submissions are placed in the personal file spaces of the individuals who uploaded them.

•  Here are instructions to embed images into discussions that do not count towards user quotas. 

Here is a quick way to check the operations status check of Canvas/Instructure if you are experiencing issues, it will be indicated here: 

https://status.instructure.com/

Student emails are no longer automatically associated with Canvas unless they provided a “preferred email” when they applied to the College or changed their profile in Canvas to include their email.  Students should be advised in your orientation or course introduction to update their profile to add a contact method to receive Canvas notifications. If they do not do this, the student should be advised to go to the course Announcement and any communication in the Canvas inbox directly and/or use the Cabrillo supported Canvas integration, Pronto. Pronto is also a phone App., so students can access communications with each other or the instructor on course matters, inclusively.