More Canvas for You – Courses and Training
- Spring and Summer 2020 courses have been migrated into Canvas and are available for instructors to get started! Spring and Summer 2020 instructors should have received an email from Dr. Eli Collins-Brown with information on getting started.
- Fall 2020 courses and active student centers and organizations are currently being worked on by the LMS Implementation team and we hope to have a migration date soon; we are targeting March. Spring 2021 courses will be available August 2021, Faculty that want to use these courses for Fall 2021 should import these courses themselves. Here is the how to for exporting from Blackboard and importing to Canvas – Migrating a Course – Exporting a Blackboard Course/Importing to Canvas. Once a course has been migrated, it can be found on your Canvas dashboard which you can access by visiting canvas.wcu.edu and clicking the “Login to Canvas” button.
Canvas training workshops will begin February 18th. We will have workshops available every Thursday and Friday at 11am during the Spring semester; we have included the overview below. Prior to attending the workshop, faculty are encouraged to have started the self-paced training course and required to have completed the migrated course checklist. We are asking that all instructors register for the workshop ahead of time so that we can prepare session information and staffing. To register for Canvas workshops, visit canvas.wcu.edu and click “Register for Canvas Course Workshop”.
Canvas Workshops:
In this workshop, CFC staff will answer questions related to Blackboard course migrations (faculty who seek this kind of assistance should have a completed migration checklist document, to expedite support).
- Staff will also assist faculty who choose to go an alternate route and build a course from scratch.
- For departments interested in requesting a workshop or training for the department or program, a request form is also available on canvas.wcu.edu.
Migration Tips:
- canvas.wcu.edu is the landing page for everything Canvas at WCU, this page has a link to login to Canvas that you can bookmark and valuable information about migration from Blackboard to Canvas.
- All courses will be in Canvas beginning May 17th with the Minimester.
- We have compiled information from our recent Departmental meetings and created an FAQ page. We will continue to add questions and answers as they come up. Visit the Canvas Migration FAQ page to explore our FAQ.
- Canvas is also here to help during the migration. We encourage all instructors to use the help support link within Canvas if you have questions as you are building your courses in Canvas.
- This is the overlap period between Blackboard and Canvas. All faculty have access to Canvas right now.
- A self-paced training course(s) is available in your Canvas dashboard which is the best place to start. All instructors have also been given a development shell to create and copy content into as you are getting familiar with Canvas.
- Canvas Commons is a public resource available from Canvas which offers support, training, ideas from other schools, etc. You can visit Canvas Commons available in Canvas on the global left menu by selecting “Commons”.
- If you want a course prior to 2020 in Canvas follow the steps in from IT Help to export the Blackboard course and import into Canvas.
Canvas Migration Timeline
Development Shell – you are the instructor and can use this to experiment with different functionality in Canvas
We know this 
After an extensive process of review by faculty, students, and staff, Canvas by Instructure has been chosen as our next Learning Management System (LMS). Canvas provides a superior user experience for faculty, staff, and students, as well as mobile capabilities and simplicity of integration and management that competitors, including Blackboard’s newest product Ultra, are unable to match. Canvas is a twenty-first century learning environment that will support WCU’s needs for the next 5-10 years for online, hybrid/blended, and face-to-face instruction.