One-stop for technology help and news
Step by step instructions for migrating content from Vista into a Canvas course site.
The Educational Technology Center in A109 offers workshops and walk-in lab time for you to get training and help with your Canvas site. These sessions are geared to learning the software and features. Check the Technology Training calendar or read descriptions of workshops offered .
Instructure, the company that owns Canvas offers an online help website with guides, videos and a user community where you may connect with faculty from other colleges to share ideas.
If you’ve used Blackboard Vista in the past, it’s likely you’ve used faconline, Bellevue College’s listserv for faculty teaching online. This listserv is still the best way to connect with your BC faculty colleagues to share what you’ve learned about using Canvas, as well as exchange ideas about teaching online. Instructions for subscribing to Faconline.
The Technology Help Desk is your first stop for getting help with technical issues with Canvas. Actually, if you’re reading this—you’re already on the Help Desk website. Options for getting help are available from this page—just look to your right. You can the search for Canvas help in our Knowledge Base or if you’d like one on one help, submit a ticket and someone will follow up with you.
Tech Cafe is a new drop-in help service we’re offering fall quarter during the first three weeks of the quarter. It’s an additional option for more personalized technical assistance with Canvas if you or your students need help. Get more info.
NO. This is not new news; we have messaged this for the past two quarters or more. All courses will have the opportunity to use Canvas for posting materials for their students. The use of MyBC course sites will be discontinued at the end of Winter quarter.
No one will be required to use Canvas, other than those teaching online or hybrid sections. Those wishing NOT to use Canvas will be required to post a message on their Canvas course site stating that it will not be active. Instructions and a short tutorial on how to do this will be provided; the actions needed to do this take no more then five minutes. Full information and instructions about how Canvas will be used in Spring and beyond will be announced on Feb. 19th.
Answer: Access to your spring quarter Canvas sites will be ready by Feb 19th 2013. The only requirement is that you complete the Canvas Faculty Orientation and score 18 or higher on the quiz. As soon as you’ve completed that step, your spring quarter course sites will show up in your Canvas Courses menu. Allow for 3-4 hours from the time you complete the quiz before your course titles appear. Review the step by step instructions on how to complete the orientation and quiz.
All courses in Spring 2013 will have a Canvas class site. This site needs to be published and students need to be informed that the site will not be used for Canvas. Publishing all sites is important so students logging into Canvas will know if there is an available class site in Canvas for their course. For steps on how do that view the faculty guide for Creating a Canvas site for NO Canvas use. These steps will ensure students that the Canvas site will not be active and there will be no communication with the instructor using the Inbox tool inside Canvas.
Yes. All you need to do is hide the Instructor tools that you will not be using, Create a Home Page and add a Welcome note for your students. Publish your Canvas site. For steps on how do that view the faculty guide for Creating a Canvas site for a class that will be MINIMALLY using Canvas. These steps will ensure that the students know that the Canvas site will be active for the quarter, but will not be used extensively for course content.
Migrating a MyBC course into Canvas is really starting from scratch. There is no tool to migrate. But building a course from scratch is much easier than migrating. Follow these simple steps to Create a Canvas course that feels like a MyBC course site.
Answer: It’s likely that some of your students have not yet created their NetID which is required to log in to Canvas. The term NetID is an abbreviation for network account. Your roster inside Instructor Briefcase lists the correct enrollment data. Please inform your students to sign up for their BC NetID as soon as possible. This is a requirement for them to gain access to the course site.
So…
Instructor Briefcase should always be the most accurate roster you can refer to verify registration—this data is coming directly from the enrollment system (HP).
Answer: Here are few good troubleshooting questions you can ask yourself before assuming something is wrong.
If you’ve answered yes to all three of these questions, it’s likely there is something not working properly and you should definitely submit a ticket to the Technology Help Desk.
We’re guessing this is probably your #1 question, especially if you’ve encountered the highly intense process required with Blackboard Vista site migration in the past. With Canvas, content import tools are built-in and we’ve set it up so you can locate your past Vista course site content and pick and choose what content you wish to import. You have the control to do this yourself.
It’s important to note that because many instructors set up their Blackboard Vista courses differently, the import steps and possibly issues may be different for every teacher. Our training workshops and drop-in sessions in A109 are intended to help you work through these issues.
Keep in mind that once you have successfully moved your content from Vista to Canvas, next quarter, the content migration process will be even easier for you.
We do not have a built-in Tool for MyBC course sites. All course materials need to be migrated manually.
You may take the Faculty Canvas Orientation any time. Once you have the sandbox site, you can start building content. You may request a free test site directly at www.instructure.com to begin trying out the site features immediately.
Canvas is an online platform (called a learning management system) that allows teachers to build and maintain a secure web space in which they can share course content, communicate with their students, provide online learning activities and assessments, and keep track of their students’ progress. It is also one of the only commercial open source systems on the market and one of the first to implement open standards for integrating third party tools and content. Canvas is licensed across the country by higher education institutions ranging in size, from small to large. It is also growing in popularity among K-12 institutions and corporate entities, and was recently named as the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges’ choice for replacing Angel course management software in the next few years.
We were required to change. Blackboard announced that the “end-of-life” for their product, Blackboard Vista will be the beginning of fall 2013. BC is required, by the terms of the license, to stop using Vista then. Fall 2013 still sounds pretty far off, right? In reality, our courses must be off Vista well ahead of that 2013 date because of a variety of college business rules. We need to allow time for incompletes and grade appeals to play out after the completion of the final Vista course offered, and that can take a year or more. What this all means is that if we start right about now, we’ll only just make the deadline to stop using Vista by fall 2013.
A team of BC faculty members led the research and evaluation of replacement solution for Blackboard Vista during the 2011-12 academic year. This group evaluated several solutions available but felt Canvas was the best solution for our college
