Meet our new eLearning team member, Rebecca Brown (she/her/hers), Instructional Designer at North Seattle College!

About Rebecca

Rebecca Brown (she/her) identifies as a white, Jewish, hard-of-hearing woman from Seattle. She taught composition and literature courses at universities and colleges in Washington, Texas, and Florida for 18 years. She especially enjoyed her time as part-time faculty at North Seattle College. Eventually, her love of teaching research writing led her to enroll in the University of Washington’s Master’s of Library and Information Science program. There she discovered her passion for accessibility, campus outreach, critical and antiracist pedagogies, exhibition design, and open educational resources. Upon completing her MLIS, Rebecca worked as an instructional designer at City University of Seattle. She is ecstatic to return to North Seattle College and looks forward to collaborating with as many individuals, groups, and programs as possible. In her spare time, Rebecca enjoys reading YA and horror fiction, meandering through forests, creating digital projects, and drinking too much coffee.

The instructional designer position is responsible for providing the following support:

• Course Design and Pedagogy

• Accessibility and Universal Design

• Critical Pedagogy

• Assessment

• Syllabus & Activity Design

• Using Canvas

• Instructional use for Panopto and Zoom

Please join us in welcoming Rebecca to Seattle Colleges!

Course Set-Up

Import content into your course shell

You can import content into your new shell from a previously created course, or a course export package.

When importing content, you can select what content you want to import. You can leave out old announcements and strip out due dates. These options can save you considerable time.

• How do I import content from another Canvas course?

• How do I import a Canvas course export package?

If using the Adjust Beginning and Ending Dates option end up overlapping the due dates for some assignments, add an extra week for the ending date.

Course Settings

Student Options

Make sure that the options for the following are set up the way that you want them. These are global options for the course, and can be found on the Course Settings page, on the Course Details tab, at the bottom, under “more options” How do I change additional options for students in my course?

• Let students attach files to discussions

• Let students create discussion topics

• Let students edit or delete their own discussion posts

• Let students organize their own groups

• Hide totals in student grades summary

• Hide grade distribution graphs from students

• Disable comments on announcements

Course Navigation

Make sure that the course navigation is customized correctly.

• How do I reorder and hide Course Navigation links?

Pages

• Check to see that all pages that should be published are published.

• Test to see if links are still functional.

• Links to outside content may be dead, and content may need to be replaced.

• Links to internal content should be stable, but it is worth checking them.

Modules

• Check that all modules that should be published are published. If a module is unpublished, all the content in the module will be locked and unavailable to students.

• Check that unlock dates, prerequisites and completion requirements are configured correctly.

• It is worth double-checking Modules in Student View—you will be able to clearly tell what is locked down (it will be grayed-out, and you will not be able to click on it), while unpublished modules will be completely invisible.

• Check that external URLs and external tools are still functioning properly.

Assignments

• Make sure that all assignments are published, are in the correct group, and that group weighting, if used, is configured correctly.

• How do I weight the final grade based on Assignment Groups?

• Check that all due dates are correct.

• Update “Available from” and “Available until” dates if you use them. The date change tool does not change these dates when you import content into a new course shell.

• Delete any empty assignment groups that are called “Assignments.” A new, empty group is automatically created when the course shell is created. This empty group can create a confusing view on the Grades page for students.

Announcements

• Delete previous announcements that you do not plan to reuse. Old announcements are imported from previous versions of a course.

• Change the “Delay posting” dates on announcements that you plan to reuse.

• Note that any announcements that you reuse will still have the original date that you composed the announcement as their posting date. This can create confusion for students.

Discussions

Delete any discussions that students from a previous course may have started. Student-initiated discussions become a part of the course and may need to be removed.

Files

Check file availability settings. If you release files based on dates, make sure that the dates are correct.

Groups

Recreate any necessary group sets. Groups do not export/import as part of your course and must be recreated each time. If you have group assignments, those assignments must be associated with the recreated group sets.

Panopto

• If you have integrated Panopto videos into your course, you may need to change the permissions on your videos or move the videos from the Panopto folder for your old course into your new course.

• How do I move videos in Panopto
  Note that it is better to move videos to Panopto than to copy them. Copying will create an updated version of the video, which takes time. Copying will also require you to update all your links in your course. Moving videos will just shift the permissions of the existing video files to the new course.

• If you are recording a new Panopto video, you must “Publish” your Canvas course first before you are able to record a new video.

Publish your course by the first day of the term.

Be sure to publish your course. Otherwise, students will not see your course.

In fact, publishing the course before the first day of the quarter gives the students enough time to get ready with textbooks and so forth. The students will not be able to post or submit until the first day.

Please note that once courses are published, they cannot be unpublished. Although you may add updated content to your course, students will still have access to any content in the course that you have made visible to them

Automatic Teams in Outlook

Annoyed by Outlook turning on Teams automatically? Joseph Wong of the Teaching and Learning Commons at Seattle Central created these helpful instructions on how to turn off automatically generated Teams links when scheduling in Outlook.

When you send out meeting invitations from MS Office (Outlook Calendar/Teams) and Outlook automatically adds a Teams Meeting link (see image below) at the bottom of your message (whether it is an actual Teams meeting or not), you can turn this feature off. This is useful when you are scheduling a Zoom meeting instead of Teams, avoiding confusion.

1. How to prevent Outlook / Microsoft 365 from automatically adding a Teams Meeting

2. Log in to O365.

3. Click on Outlook.

4. Click on the Gear at the top right.

5. Click View All Outlook Settings at the lower right panel.

6. Click on Calendar on the popped-up window.

7. Select Events and Invitations in the next column.

8. Uncheck the box that says “Add online meetings to all meetings”

9. Close.

Note: This happens when events are created from the online Calendar version of O365.