If this is your first time teaching with Canvas, these tips outline end-of-term best practices and UBC’s end-of-term procedures for Canvas courses.
Grading
1. Make sure all assignments are graded
Before submitting your grades, double-check that you’ve entered final marks for each student for all assignments in Canvas.
If there are students in your class who should be receiving a mark of zero on an assignment they didn’t submit, you’ll need to input a ‘0’ for each student. If you don’t submit a mark, the ungraded assignment will not count toward a student’s final grade calculation. (It’s still necessary to input ‘0’ even if you’ve switched on Treat Ungraded as Zero in the Gradebook settings. This function affects only your view of student grades, not students’ view of their marks in Canvas). You can automate this process by setting the default grade for an assignment to zero once you’ve finished marking — all remaining ungraded assignments will then automatically receive zero and will be counted toward students’ final grade calculations.
2. Unmute assignments
If you’ve muted any columns in the Canvas Gradebook while adding grades, make sure they’re unmuted to ensure students can see all their marks.
3. Submit final grades to the Faculty Service Centre
Once you’ve finished all your grading, final marks will need to be uploaded to the Faculty Service Centre (FSC). To add grades from Canvas to the FSC follow these steps:
- Download your final grades from Canvas. See the instructions for downloading a spreadsheet as a CSV with your Canvas grades. We recommended that you save a backup copy of your grades spreadsheet if you plan to make changes and re-upload your spreadsheet to Canvas.
- Adjust final grades as needed in your newly downloaded spreadsheet (for example, if you’re grading on a curve).
- Format your grades spreadsheet (by adding, removing, and naming columns as required by the FSC) and then submit your grades through the FSC website. Detailed instructions for formatting your spreadsheet and uploading submitting grades are available here.
Canvas Course Access
In Canvas, all courses are automatically set to concluded and are archived following the end of term. Once a course has been concluded, it becomes read-only for instructors and inaccessible to students. For the UBC 2017/18 Winter Term 2 semester, Canvas’s end-of-term archival date is set to May 31, 2018, but you can request a new course conclusion date if needed. Learn more.
Planning for next semester
Whether or not this was your first semester teaching in Canvas, it’s worth taking some time to reflect on what worked well in your Canvas course and what you might like to try in future semesters. If you’ll be at the Point Grey Campus on Monday, May 7, we recommend signing up for the Canvas Spring Cleaning Open Studio — this all-day, drop-in session gives you an opportunity to chat with some of UBC’s Canvas experts about how you can take your Canvas course to the next level. Instructors based at UBC Okangan will want to check out the full list of Canvas workshops offered by the Centre for Teaching and Learning throughout July and August.