UC Davis Canvas

UC Davis Canvas provides you with the means to organize and share course materials, communicate, and assess students. Canvas Support is available 24/7 from the Help (?) icon in Canvas or at 844-303-8285. Instructure (Canvas) has created a COVID-19 resources page with tools for online learning. You can also schedule a consultation with campus Academic Technology Services staff by emailing canvashelp@ucdavis.edu.

You can use Canvas to:

• Communicate with students
  • How do I add an announcement in a course?
  • How do I leave comments for students in the Gradebook?
  • How do I send a message to a user in a course in the Inbox as an instructor?
  • See below for how to use Canvas Conferences to hold online office hours
• Distribute materials to students
  • Recommendations:
    • Rather than sending students directly to the Canvas “Files” section, we recommend embedding relevant documents or videos in a Page (or other Canvas element), describing the content and providing any instructions for your students related to the content.
    • Use the Modules view to organize Canvas Pages and other resources:
      • What are Modules?
      • How do I add a module? 
  • How do I create a folder in Files as an instructor?
  • How do I upload a file to a course? (images, video, documents, audio) 
  • How do I create a new page in a course?
  • How do I embed a video in a page in a course?
• Keep student grades current in the Gradebook
  • How do I use the Gradebook?

Canvas Conferences

Recommended only for small groups of students or office hours. For synchronous online interactions with individuals or small groups of your students, such as for online office hours, consider using Canvas Conferences, a web-conferencing tool built into Canvas. Please also see our Web Conferencing (e.g., Zoom) page for other synchronous video options.

• What are conferences?
• How do I create a conference in a course?

Canvas Preparedness for COVID-19 Response 

The following information comes from Instructure (Canvas) regarding COVID-19:

Our global infrastructure is designed to scale to meet increased demand. We know many institutions are providing more online options because of the current outbreak. To meet this need, we are ramping up support to help more students and teachers.

The platform automatically scales to support a wide range of concurrent users, and we are ramping up our engineering and support in order to scale much higher if needed. We have worked with AWS for years to ensure we develop our applications to deliver a great experience for students and teachers. 

We know that with an increase in usage and activity may also come an increased need for technical and product support.  Similar to how we manage our technical infrastructure for Canvas, we monitor closely our support volume -- down to the second. We have built a support organization that has the flexibility to respond to increases and decreases in volume quite quickly. In short, we are ready to help extend support when asked by our customers.

More Details:

In the wake of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and pandemic, Instructure has been asked to share our response. We are allowing customers to increase usage on their Canvas instance for no additional cost to get them through the current semester up until July 1st, 2020. Instructure released a weblink (linked below) that I wanted to make you aware of. I’ve also linked a space in the community where other institutions can share/collaborate on contingency plans. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

Tools for Online Learning when the Classroom Closes

Contingency Planning - Community Collaboration