UNH uses myCourses (Canvas) for its learning management system. This resource includes suggested best practices and links to how-to documents for using Canvas in your course to provide content and manage interaction and assessment.
General Canvas Support
UNH Knowledge Base
For all Canvas users with articles for faculty and students.
Canvas Guides
Guides provided by Canvas.
Instructure Canvas Community Tutorial Video Series
A collection of over 450 video tutorials for using various Canvas tools.
Content
Using myCourses provides the following benefits:
- A centralized location for students to find course materials and a more efficient way to share handouts and save time and paper.
- Easy tracking and reporting: Use course analytics to view student activities.
- Course content reuse: Copy content from semester to semester.
- Accessibility: Vision impaired students can utilize screen reader software to read accessible documents. Videos with captions and audio clips with transcripts help hearing impaired students and students who learn better by reading. See Accessibility within Canvas and Creating Accessible Documents.
What type of content can be added in myCourses?
You can add the following content in myCourses as learning resources for your students:
- Documents: Canvas supports different types of files that can be previewed inside Canvas.
- Multimedia: You can upload specific multimedia content like videos, audio, and images in Canvas.
- Outside resources/library resources: Links to websites and UNH Library resources can be added in myCourses.
- Third party vendor education resources. External resources currently available for use in myCourses
How-to Guides
Best Practices?
- Organize course content into Modules.
- Under Modules, add content to a Page instead of using just a link to the file, website or video. The Page has a Rich Text Content Editor that provides an area for you to add details about those items and explain why you want your students to read/watch them. The Page allows you to put the link to the file, website or video directly on the Page.
- Links to the assessments in each Module allow students to access them from different entry places.
- UNH Library Reserves puts books, chapters from a book, or journal articles on reserve for a limited period, so you can link to them in your myCourses page. Read about setting up links to eReserves in myCourses.
Assessments
Why place the assessments in your course?
Benefits for the instructor:
- Centralized location for all submissions. Instead of having students email their assignments and having to search through countless email messages for them, use the assignment tool as a place to view all submissions in one location.
- Easy administration. Instead of having students submit hard copy versions of their assignments, grading the assignments, and waiting for the student to pick up their graded assignments, you can have students submit assignments in myCourses. This not only allows you to access assessments in one location, but it streamlines the submission, grading, and assignment return process.
- Assessments are graded online, giving students quick access to feedback.
- Assessments are easy to copy from semester to semester, with modification, if needed.
- Videos and readings can be embedded within the assignment descriptions.
- Track students' learning progress.
- Save resources: No paper waste.
Benefits for students:
- Students can see their grades sooner and in one place.
- Students can better track their own progress.
How-to Guides
Respondus Lockdown Browser - to mitigate cheating on quizzes and tests)
Turnitin Similarity - originality software checker to detect possible plagiarism
Best Practices
- Add clear detailed instructions to the assessment.
- Add Due Dates to your assessments.
- Using Rubrics can make grading easier.
- Using Rubrics helps student understand what is expected of them.