Canvas for Instructors

From Canvas: what are groups?

"Groups are a small version of a course and used as a collaborative tool where students can work together on group projects and assignments."

How might you use groups in your courses, as an instructor?

• To set up student group configurations at the course level for assignments and in-class work, both graded and ungraded.
• To facilitate semester-long projects so that students can communicate and iterate on documents together.
• To facilitate student-run study groups within courses

312 - Groups Overview from Instructure Canvas Community on Vimeo.

Walkthroughs from the Canvas Guides:

• How do I add a group set in a course?
• How do I edit a group set in a course?
• How do I automatically or manually create groups in a group set?
• How do I automatically or manually assign students to groups once group sets have been created?
• How do I view content and student activity within a group as an instructor?
• How do I assign an assignment to a course group?
• How do I grade group assignments in SpeedGrader?
• How do I create a group discussion in a course?

Chat

The Chat tool allows users in a Canvas course (instructors and students alike) to interact in real-time through a built-in instant messaging tool.

From Canvas: "Chat is a course tool that is available to all students in the course. Chats cannot be limited to specific students. Instructors can use the chat tool to allow students to contact them when online, create virtual office hours, conduct group discussions or study sessions. All users in the course can also access the chat history."

From the Canvas Guide: how do I use chat as an instructor?

Collaborations

The Collaborations feature in Canvas integrates with Google Drive and allow you and your students to create and share Google Docs from within Canvas, making it easy to find and work on course-related Google Docs.

From the Canvas Guides:

• How do I use the Collaborations Index Page?
• How do I create a Google Docs collaboration as an instructor?
• How do I delete a Collaboration as an instructor?

Conferences

From Canvas: "Conferences are primarily used for virtual lectures, virtual office hours, and student groups. [...] Conferences makes it easy to conduct synchronous (real-time) lectures for all users in a course. Conferences allows users to broadcast real-time audio and video, demo applications, share presentation slides, or demo online resources."

Please note: during this time of increased online demand for video conferencing, we are not recommending that instructors use Canvas Conferences for virtual class meetings, as Canvas Conferences has very limited bandwidth and limited recording capacity. Guilford College faculty have other tools available to them for virtual class meetings, such as Zoom and Google Hangouts Meet.

From the Canvas Guides:

• How do I use the Conferences index page?
• How do I create a Conference in a course?
• How do I edit, record, delete a Conference?
• How do I conclude a Conference?