Winter Course Requests Open October 9th
Requests for Winter 2025 courses will open in SPIRE on October 9th. SPIRE will be configured to allow only Canvas courses to be requested. If you’d like to teach in Moodle, you can complete a Moodle exception form, which requires dean-level approval and a justification to stay in the legacy LMS.
A reminder that exception forms will continue to be available through the 24-25 academic year. Moodle will no longer be available for teaching after the Spring 2025 semester.
Essentials of Online Teaching Registration Open
Registration for the Fall 2024 Essentials of Online Teaching - Canvas Edition is now open! The IDEAS Team invites all instructors looking to learn more about developing and teaching online courses, leveraging technologies in Canvas, and creating dynamic online activities. The course will run from October 16 to November 20, with 6 synchronous Zoom sessions and weekly asynchronous learning modules.
New Survey on AI in Online Learning
In collaboration with our campus partners at UWW, the IDEAS team encourages instructors to complete the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) survey on AI use in Online Courses. Completing the survey helps support ongoing research on how AI tools are shaping student engagement in higher education. The survey takes approximately 10-15 minutes to complete, and will close on October 11.
Canvas Updates: September 2024
Recent SpeedGrader Updates - Rich Content Editor Additions
SpeedGrader's Rich Content Editor, available when commenting on assignments, has seen two significant upgrades to the user experience over the past month. Most recently, the option to incorporate math equations into comments on assignments has now been added. The Equation Editor, marked by a square root symbol, allows for the addition of most operations to be embedded directly in assignment comments.
Additionally, instructors will now have the ability to stylize text, including: Headings, bold/italics, underline, jyperlinks, and bullets.
Providing Guest Access to Students and Lecturers
You can give guest access to users who aren't enrolled in a Canvas course in SPIRE, such as a colleague to show them the structure of your course, or to provide course readings and resources to someone not enrolled in your course. Guest access provides a restricted version of student-level access to the course. It is restricted from discussions and other collaborative activities, as well as accessing any student information.
Guest access for students auditing courses must be coordinated with the Registrar, as students must be registered auditors. To request general guest access, send an email to instruct@umass.edu with the name and email address for the individual, the name and a link to your Canvas course, and when the guest access should end.
Planned Downtimes
There is no planned downtime for Canvas this month.