Turnitin the originality, online grading, and peer review service is now available to USU instructors and students via Instructure Canvas. Turnitin is used to prevent plagiarism and encourage students to use best practices in using and citing other people’s written material. This web‐based service manages the process of submitting and tracking papers electronically through Canvas, providing better and faster feedback to students. Take a look at the following features of Turnitin that makes it such a valuable tool in setting up, managing, and teaching your classes.

Originality Check

An assignment submission on Turnitin generates an Originality Report. The Originality Report is the result of comparison between the text of the submission against the search targets in Turnitin’s resources – directories, repositories, journals, etc. Any matching or highly similar text is detailed in the Originality Report.

When an Originality Report is available for viewing, an icon will appear in the report column of the assignment inbox. The color of the report icon indicates the Similarity Index of the paper, based on the amount of matching or similar text that was uncovered.

GradeMark

GradeMark is Turnitin’s digital system that allows instructors to grade and edit student papers online. With GradeMark, instructors can:

• Drag and drop standard or custom marks to use in assessing and grading papers.
• Analyze and identify areas of concern or track improvement with comprehensive statistics and graphs.
• Use inline, QuickMark, or general overall comments to provide student feedback.
• Evaluate the paper against qualitative or quantitative rubrics.
• Enter a grade for the paper to be automatically saved into GradeBook.
• Review identified grammar and mechanics errors to provide additional guidance for the student.

e-rater

Turnitin has partnered with Educational Testing Service to develop the e-rater grammar feedback technology. Integrated with GradeMark, e-rater automatically checks student submissions for grammar, usage, mechanics, style and spelling errors; providing in depth feedback with on-paper marks.

E-rater feedback appears on the paper as purple comments. Instructors can view and review the marks to provide detailed guidance to improve student writing.

PeerMark

PeerMark is the peer review assignment tool that lets instructors create and manage PeerMark assignments. Students are assigned to read, review, and evaluate one or many papers submitted by their classmates. Instructors can choose whether the reviews are anonymous or attributed, who should be excluded from reviews, or what specific papers should be reviewed.

Enabling Turnitin for Your Assignments

You’ll find the option to use Turnitin under More Options in your Assignment settings. Open your assignment and click on the More Options link to edit the assignment.

Set the submission type as online submissions either as a file upload or text entry. Then, select the Enable Turnitin Submission Evaluations checkbox.

Select the Advanced Settings link to open Turnitin advanced settings. Make your selections and click Update Settings. A small notice sill appear on your assignment indicating Turnitin has been enabled.

Grading Submissions in SpeedGrader

To grade student submissions in Turnitin, click on the title of the assignment form the Assignments list. Click the SpeedGrader button from the Assignment details.

The speech bubble will indicate what percent of your assignment matches Internet sources. Click on the speech bubble to open a detailed originality report in a new window.

Turnitin provides an originality report letting the instructor know how much of the assignment is original. The student in this example matched 100% from Wikipedia for the assignment. Click on the other tabs to see and review the GradeMark and PeerMark results.

For more information on Turnitin integration into Canvas, see Canvas Guides at http://guides.instructure.com/m/4152.

Instructure has recently released an analytics package for Canvas. The package contains both dashboard and detailed views for instructors and administrators. To access the Analytics tool click the View Course Analytics button on the right-side of the course homepage.

The dashboard includes information such as activity, performance and student grades to allow the instructor to get an overall progress report for their course.

Individual student activity can also be monitored by clicking their name in the list of students.

This takes you to a detailed view of the students activity, communications, assignments and grades.

The individual student view allows you to navigate through your list of students the same way SpeedGrader does.

By clicking the arrows you can move through the list of students or use the dropdown menu to find an individual student.

As you hover over each datapoint on the graphs additional information will be displayed about that particular point.

Student View

In a recent update Canvas now has a Student View that teachers can use to see how the course appears and functions as a student.

To use the student view click the Settings link in the left-hand navigation of the course you are in.

In the right-hand panel click the Student View button.

You will be redirected to the course homepage and the area where your name is will be replaced with Test Student along with a link exit the student view.

When you enter the student view you will be viewing your course as your students see it. To exit the student view click on the Leave Student View link and it will return you to your original account.

Threaded Discussions and New Discussion Management Features now Available

With the recent update to Canvas you can now choose to have threaded discussion topics or comment style discussion topics. This has been an expected addition for quite a long time. In addition you can also enable threading on existing discussion topics and from that point on the discussion will be threaded. In this tips and tricks you will learn how to enable threaded discussions for existing topics and new discussions. You will also get a glimpse of how they look and behave.

Converting an existing discussion topic
Note: this process is not retroactive, in existing discussions you may not notice much of a difference till students start to post replies.

First we need locate and edit the discussion topic.

Click on Discussions from the left navigation menu.

Click on the pencil icon to the right of the discussion topic title to edit the topic.

Alternatively you can click on the title of the discussion topic and then click the gear icon to edit the discussion topic.

Below the discussion text click the This is a threaded discussion checkbox and then click Update Topic.

Create a new threaded topic

Click on Discussions from the left navigation menu.

In the right side of the screen click the Start a New Topic button.

After you have entered a title and information click the This is a threaded discussion checkbox and then click Add New Topic.

When navigating threaded discussions there are several new features to help you.

1. Unread replies and total replies
   This will track how many new replies have been posted along with the total number of posts in the discussion. This works in conjunction with 2.
2. Unread/read indicator
   For new posts a blue bar will appear next to the name of the poster and will remain blue for a few seconds while on the screen and then will change to a grey color indicating that the message has been read.

   Unread

   Read

3. Reply management menu
   This menu will allow you to edit or delete posts from the discussion topic.
4. Add Reply to Topic
   The style has been modified to better indicate where you post will go.

You can also click the poster’s name to collapse that portion of the thread for easier viewing of other reply threads.

You can also use the the display options on the right to Collapse All, Expand Unread, or Expand All threads. Additionally you can click the Jump to the Next Unread message button to move quickly to each new message throughout the entire topic. If you want to prevent anymore posts being added you can click the Close for Comments button.

Viewing Quiz Statistics

If you want to view more detailed information on the performance of your students on a given quiz or exam the Quiz Statistics will give you a high level overview. Each Question will have a graph of the distribution of answers and as you hover over each answer choice more information will displayed.

To the right of the individual question details there is more information about the overall performance as well as a link to download the quiz result data as a CSV file that can be opened with Excel.

Downloading Quiz Results

To download the student submission data in a spreadsheet compatible format click on the Download csv button and a results csv file will be generated for you to download.

Once in Excel you can manipulate the data how you see fit.

Recent changes to Conversations

Matt McGhie from Instructure will introduce some new features that have been added to Conversations. Click the link below to see a short video highlighting the changes.

http://vimeo.com/36169133

Conclusion of Fall courses and Student Enrollments

This past week all Fall 2011 student Enrollments were concluded except for year-long and concurrent enrollment courses.

If you need to view past student enrollments for grading purposes in a concluded course click on the People tool.
 

 Click on View Prior Enrollments.

A list of prior users will be displayed along with their final grade.

To view individual grades for students click on their name then click on the Grades for (Student’s Name) button.

Alternatively you can click on the number under the Total column to be taken directly to the student’s grades.

This will show a detailed list of their grades and you can view their submission details, if available, by clicking on the assignment title. If you have same student in multiple courses you can change the course by selecting a new course from the For the course drop-down.

Restoring Student Enrollments

A common scenario we often run into is a instructor wants to give a student access to the previous semesters course so they can finish their course work due to an incomplete or other situation.

You can restore individual student enrollment to your course by clicking on the People tool.

Click on View Prior Enrollments.

From the list click the name of the student you would like to restore.

When the student’s details display click on more user details…

Click the Restore this Enrollment link in the Membership(s) section.

The student will now have access to the course.

Once the membership is restored the link will change to Conclude this enrollment which will allow you to conclude the students enrollment when they are finished.

Instructure Canvas Best Practices Webinar Archives

For the past few months Instructure has hosted webinars featuring instructors and administrators who are actively using Canvas. The webinars have been archived and can be viewed at the Canvas Community Forums. A list of the archives is available at the link below.

http://help.instructure.com/forums/20373403-best-practice-webinar-archive

If you would like to be informed of upcoming webinars and other announcements from Instructure you can visit their community announcement page.

http://help.instructure.com/forums/20349046-instructure-announcements

You can also login to the community site using your A-number and password to be alerted though email when a new announcement is posted. To login to the Canvas Community Forums click the login link at the top-right of the site.

Canvas Conferences

Here at USU, Canvas and Wimba are integrated together for live online classroom based sessions. The tool that allows you to access Wimba live classrooms is the Conferences tool. This post will give an overview of how to create and manage your online classroom (Conference). We will also discuss some common issues that you may encounter and how to avoid them.

Creating a Conference

Start by clicking on the Conferences tool in the left-hand navigation.

Click the Make a New Conference button on the upper-right-hand side of the window.

The Start a new Conference settings will appear and you can make changes to the following options.

Name: Allows you to give your conference a unique name. We suggest changing this to something other than the default Course Conference so it can be easier to find for administrative purposes.

Options: The long-running conference prevents the conference from closing after the duration of the conference has ended. Once a conference has ended it is preserved in the state that it was at the time it was ended. This means that any new course members will be unable to view the archives and you will no longer be able to use the conference for any new sessions. It is best to enable this for frequently used conferences, such as weekly lecture conferences, as the conference will not automatically close and become unusable and the archives will be available to all course members.

Duration: If the conference is only going to be used once and you know the approximate time limit you can specify it in the minutes textbox.

Description: Let participants know what the conference is used for. You can include information such as the phone number and classroom PIN number they can call if they are having audio difficulties.

Members: By default Invite all Course Members is enabled. If you wish to do a special conference with only certain students, uncheck this option and you will be able to select individual students. Keep in mind if you end the conference only those you have invited to the conference will have access to the archives.

When you have finished changing the settings for your conference click the Create Conference button to finish.

Joining a Conference

By default a conference will not be available to students until you click the Start it now button. When you click the Start it now button an invitation will be sent to selected course members with a link to the conference.

After clicking the Start it now button your conference will start and you will be taken to your conference.

The next time you view the conferences page you will see two new buttons, Join it now and End it now where the Start it now button used to be.

Join it now: This will start your conference, students will be unable to enter the live classroom until the instructor enters.

End it now: This performs the same behavior as what happens when a conference passes it’s duration time limit. The conference becomes unavailable except for the archives, to both teachers and students. It is preserved in its current state, new or uninvited course members will be unable to view the archives if any exist. Once you end a conference it cannot be re-enabled.

Editing a Conference

From the Conferences tool click on the title of the conference you would like to make changes to.

The Conference Details will be displayed. The conference details page contains information about the conference, links to archives, and the currently invited course members. To edit the conference click the Edit Conference Button on the right-hand side.

Here you can change the settings of your conference.

If you would like to change advanced settings pertaining to the Wimba live-classroom click on the Manage Advanced Settings… link.

Once you have made any modifications click the Update Conference button to save your changes.

Viewing Archives

From the Conferences page click on the conference you would like to view archives for.

In the External Links section, click the View archives(s) link.

A window will appear listing the available archives. Click on the archive you would like to view and it will open in a separate window.

Best Practices

• If you are going to host frequent conferences such as weekly lectures and hold office hours, you can create just one conference and use the conference description to let students know the times of each. Make sure that the long-running conference option is checked, and do not end it when you are finished with your session. This will ensure that students are not confused as to which conference room to go to.
• Don’t create and end separate conferences for each time you need to hold one, especially for lectures. This can cause problems in the future if new students enroll in your class and need access to archives.
• If you would like to repurpose an existing conference you can use the announcement tool to inform students of the change and re-post the link to that conference.
• If students are having difficulty entering the conference from links sent through notifications to their email, have them enter from the link in the conferences tool.
• If you have given a conference a time duration you may want to add 10-15 minutes and start early so you and your students can deal with technical issues that may arise.

With the start of Spring semester just around the corner we have created a checklist to help you get your courses ready. Below is a brief overview of is included in the checklist.

The Basics:

• Copying your Canvas course
• Update your Syllabus
• Checking content (assignments, quizzes, discussions, etc…)
• Enable the grading scheme
• Assignment group weights
• Ensure that you can see all the sections of your course
• Adding a TA
• Publish course
• Introductory announcement(s) (Optional)

• Copying your Canvas course

See the link below for information on how to copy your course.

http://blog.usu.edu/canvastips/2011/12/05/canvas-tips-and-tricks-dec-5-2011/

When copying your course remember to also copy your settings so your syllabus and homepage settings are included in the course copy.

Update your Syllabus

Check your syllabus for any content that needs to be changed such as dates, and meeting times. If you have linked to a pdf version of your syllabus you will need to unlink or delete the old syllabus link and add your new one.

Click the Syllabus link in the left-hand navigation.

Click the Edit Syllabus Description button.

You can use the syllabus description to post a link to your syllabus, or type or paste the contents of your syllabus in the description.

To upload a syllabus file click the Files tab in the Insert Content into the Page panel.

Click the Upload a new file link and click the Choose File button to browse your computer for your syllabus file. When you have selected

• Checking content (assignments, quizzes, discussions, etc…)

When checking your course content make sure you adjust any due or locked dates. Click below for instructions on how to edit details, and change dates.

Assignments:
How do I edit Assignment details?
Quizzes:
What quiz options are available to me?
Discussions:
How do I edit a Discussion topic?
Modules:
Click the Modules link in the left-hand navigation.

Click the Edit module settings (pencil) button on the module you need to update.

Use the date picker to select a date and enter your time and click Done to close the date picker.

When you have finshed changing your dates and other settings in the modules click the Update Module button to save your changes.

• Enable the grading scheme

Enabling the grading scheme will allow you to publish your grades to banner and display letter grades for assignments. For convenience we have created a default grading scheme that matches USU

In your course click the Settings link in the left-hand navigation.
 

Check the Enable course grading scheme box and click set grading scheme.
 

Search existing grading schemes by clicking the blue magnifying glass to find existing grading schemes.

In the list of grading schemes scroll to the bottom and select USU Standard.

Click the Use This Grading Standard to set the default grading scheme.

Click the grey X at the top of the window to exit the View/Edit Grading Scheme window.

Click the Update Course Details button to save the new settings.

• Assignment group weights

If you need to make any adjustments to assignment weighting you can through the assignments tool.

How do I create Assignment Groups for grading purposes?

• Ensure that you can see all the sections in your course

To see all the sections associated with your course first click the Settings link in the left-hand navigation.

Click the Sections tab to see a list of sections.

If you are missing sections contact the FACT office for assistance at 435-797-9506.

• Adding a TA

At the end of the post below there is instructions on how to add a TA.
http://blog.usu.edu/canvastips/2011/12/05/canvas-tips-and-tricks-dec-5-2011/

• Publish your course

When everything is to your liking and you are ready to teach from your course, you need to publish your course. You can determine if your course is unpublished or published by checking to see if the THIS COURSE IS UNPUBLISHED message is displayed above your course homepage.

To publish your course click on the published link and the Course Setup Checklist will appear.

Click the Publish Course button to finish the publishing process.

• Introductory announcement(s) (Optional)

Once your course is completely published it may be a good idea to send out an introductory announcement letting your students know that the course is available and a message telling them what they need to do next.
How do I create an Announcement?

Styling Options in Courses

Canvas offers several different ways of displaying your course content to your students. By default the Course Stream is displayed in new courses. To change the homepage click the Change Home Page Layout link and you will be be able to select which layout will be displayed to your students. When you have made your selection click the Update Layout button to save your settings.

Page I’ll Design Myself
This will offer you the most ways to customize how content is displayed to your students. The page option will allow you to create your own frontpage with links to your content, including modules, and the assignment list. You can use tables to help you design your page, or if you are comfortable editing HTML you can click the Switch Views link to access the source of the page.

Modules
Modules are a way to organize your course in organizational containers such as weeks, units, or any other structure that works for your course. Modules are also useful for sequencing course materials by having the option of setting requirements and prerequisites. Requirements are tasks that must be completed inorder for the module to be marked as complete. These tasks can require a student to score above a particular score on a quiz, view a document, contribute to a page, or participate in a discussion.
Prerequisites prevent a student from accessing the content of the module until they have fulfilled the indicated requirements.

Assignment List
Assignments in this view are separated into three categories: upcoming assignments, undated assignments, and past due assignments.
Upcoming assignments are any assignments have a due date that is in the future.
Undated assignments are those that have no due date, to eliminate this category ensure that you have specified a due date for all assignments.
Past due assignments are those that the due date has passed. For assignments that have not been submitted and are past due, the date will be bolded and red.

The Assignment List With Syllabus
This view displays your syllabus when students first come to your course, along with a list of assignments and calendar events arranged by due date. This list is automatically populated as you add assignments and calendar events. This feature can save you time if you maintain a timetable in your syllabus. Assignments without due dates will be listed at the bottom. If you are looking for an example syllabus or tips on how to create an effective syllabus see the Online Syllabus Template Tool on the FACT Faculty Resources page.

Files tool
This view is useful for those who use Canvas for supplemental material in their face-to-face classes. This is one of the simplest ways to manage a course in which you just want to allow students to access files like presentations, and handouts. if you have the files already organized in folders on your computer, you can place them in a zip file and upload them into your course. Canvas will automatically unzip the file and your files and folders will be accessible to you and your students. Any modifications to files will have to be uploaded and will replace the existing file.

Importing Grades Using a Spreadsheet

Sometimes grades are collected using another source such as i>clicker, scantron tests, and publisher websites. Or you may just prefer to organize your grades on a spreadsheet. Here is a brief overview of how to handle the import and export of spreadsheets in Canvas:

The Basics:

1. Create a spreadsheet table in Excel (or another program) that meets the layout format Canvas expects (see below for details)
2. Save the spreadsheet file as a .csv file
3. Go to the gradebook in Canvas, select the “Options” menu, and choose “Upload Scores (.csv)”. Follow the steps from there.

The Format:

There are currently 5 required columns that must be in your CSV file. They all must contain the following headers, which are case sensitive, but most columns can be left empty:

• Student: The student’s Last Name ,First Name. For example, Blue, Big
  You need at least one letter from each student’s name in this column, but for best results have the student’s full Last Name, First Name
• ID: The student’s internal Canvas ID. You can leave this column blank.
• SIS User ID: The student’s sourcedid.id from Banner. You can leave this column blank.
• SIS Login ID: The student’s A number. You can match by this as long as you have at least part of each student’s name in the student column.
• Section: You can leave this blank.

Here’s an image, provided by Instructure, that explains the format visually. Click to view it larger:

Demo: Headers and Upload Process

For an overview of these headers, as well as a demonstation of a CSV upload, see http://screencast.com/t/Cc1yIv86

Demo: Sharing Spreadsheet Data Between Systems

• Preparing spreadsheet data from other systems for import into Canvas:
  This typically involves combining a last name and first name column into a single “Student” column using Excel’s concatenate function, and then adding Canvas’s additional required columns and renaming the A number column to SIS Login ID.|
  See http://screencast.com/t/s2Y4bdoqQ
• Preparing a Canvas gradebook CSV file for import into other systems:
  This process typically involves removing or renaming Canvas-specific columns and splitting the Student column into two columns, one for last name and one for first name, using Excel’s text-to-columns tool.
  See http://screencast.com/t/0IUzPvKgQ5

Confused? Try downloading your gradebook.

Perhaps the easiest way to get the format right is to start by first downloading your gradebook as a CSV file. Go to your gradebook and select Download Scores (.csv) from the options menu. Simply edit that file and reupload it.

More Information

You can learn more about grading in Canvas, including how to curve grades, use the speed grader, comment on grades, and much more at http://guides.instructure.com. Go to the Instructors and TA’s section and scroll down to Grades.