by Scott Seagle | Mar 12, 2026 | Blog, Faculty Development Workshop, Learning Community, Online Learning, Teaching with Technology
Online Teaching Cohort Starts April 6
What if sharpening your online teaching skills also meant connecting with some of the most thoughtful instructors on campus? This April, the Coulter Faculty Commons is facilitating another cohort in its Excellence in Online Teaching Basics — a 4-week Canvas course that’s as much about community as it is about content.
Through 5 self-paced modules on Canvas, you’ll explore everything from the fundamentals of online learning to course design, student engagement, and beyond.
Each module takes just 1–2 hours to complete and the course includes 4 facilitated discussions where you can share your ideas with fellow instructors.
Whether you’re brand new to teaching online or have a few semesters under your belt, this is your space to learn, reflect, and share what works.
Not sure if the EOT cohort is for you? Contact Scott Seagle at seaglej@wcu.edu to help you get started.
by Aaron Ratcliffe | Feb 11, 2026 | Blog, Educational Technology, Teaching with Technology
Lightboards let you face your students while you teach—writing, drawing, and explaining in real time. They function like transparent whiteboards, allowing you to stay visually connected to students in both live, in-person and pre-recorded settings. In this workshop, faculty will learn how to use lightboards to create clear, engaging instructional content for problem-solving, demonstrations, and concept walkthroughs. No prior video experience required. The workshop will be held Thursday, Feb 19, 12:30-1:30 PM, in-person in Hunter Library 166. Please register below.
by Anabel Livengood | Sep 23, 2025 | Accessibility, Blog, Canvas, Faculty Development Workshop, Teaching with Technology
Would you like to make your course more available and accessible to your students?
The Division of IT, in partnership with the Office of Accessibility Resources and the Office of the Provost, has made a new set of tools available in Canvas to help guide you to make your courses more accessible. This Accessibility Suite is already active in your Canvas courses, but if you’d like more training about how to get the best out of these tools, we urge you to register for this professional development opportunity.
Register even if you can’t attend, and we will make the recording available to you!
Register:
Friday, October 17, 10:30 am – WCU Online Accessibility Tools Update 2025
Or
Thursday, November 6, 3:00 pm – WCU Online Accessibility Tools Update
by Eli Collins-Brown | Nov 17, 2023 | Active Learning, Blog, Canvas, Educational Development, Help Your Students, Learn, Online Learning, Student Engagement, Teaching and Learning, Teaching with Technology
How many days do you log into Canvas and interact with the students? How quickly do you give helpful feedback on activities and assessments? Do you set your students’ expectations by including an email/discussion response statement in your syllabus?
Why do we pose these questions? Frequent interaction and purposeful engagement with students are a hallmark of excellence in teaching and learning. It looks different depending on whether you are teaching in-person, hybrid/blended, or online. We ask students in our in-person courses to log into Canvas every day to see announcements, their grades and feedback, and content. This provides opportunities to increase engagement with students outside of the scheduled classroom time. For hybrid and online faculty, we can use best practices to increase engagement with students who may be residential or remote.
Faculty who teach online regularly or occasionally should be aware of Regular & Substantive Interaction (RSI), a regulation from the Department of Education that went into effect July 2021. RSI is a determination of whether an online course is a correspondence course (which doesn’t qualify for Federal financial aid) or a distance education course. These recommendations also apply to in-person teaching.
Fortunately, we have resources like the Quality Scorecard from the Online Learning Consortium to help us identify how we are meeting RSI and areas where we may need to improve our efforts. Over the next few months, we will share the criteria with suggestions on how to put them into practice.
The scorecard is divided into 6 sections: Course Overview and Information, Course Technology and Tools, Design and Layout, Content and Activities, Interaction, and Assessment and Feedback.
Let’s look at the first two sections.
Course Overview and Information:
- The course includes a welcome and how to get started, as well as an overall orientation. Content is organized in Modules.
- Module overviews make content, activities, assignments, due dates, interactions, and assessments transparent, predictable and easy to find. *A suggested best practice is to include an overview page as the first page of each module.
- Course outcomes are observable and measurable, and congruent with the assessments and assignments.
- Include the online learner success resources and contact information for the department and program, in addition to instructor information.
Course Technology and Tools:
- It is extremely important to use Canvas, WCU’s approved and supported LMS.
- Include information on how to contact the IT HelpDesk in a prominent place so students can find it when they need it.
Remember, these RSI standards are useful in increasing student engagement in any modality!
Next up in this series:
Designing for Student Engagement using RSI
The CFC would love to partner with you to design, redesign, or make improvements to your Canvas course. Let us know what you need through our Consultations Scheduling Page.
Source: Regular and Substantive Interaction, SUNYOnline – https://www.sunyempire.edu/dlis/design-your-course/regular-and-substantive-interaction/
by Jonathan Wade | Jan 5, 2022 | Blog, Canvas, Teaching with Technology
What’s Different about the Canvas Gradebook?
The Gradebook in Canvas and the Grade Center in Blackboard are similar in many respects. The Grades link is how you and your students access the course gradebook – just like the Grade Center in Blackboard. The gradebook is where you will view and grade student submissions and assign weights to assignment groups for Total grade calculation. Unlike Blackboard, you can’t weight a column without putting it an assignment group. Also, you can’t manually create a column in the gradebook like you could in Blackboard, so you must create an assignment for a column to be created in the gradebook, even if that is activity is not submitted through Canvas.
Enhancements to Gradebook include the options to automatically assign a zero score to missing assignments or deduct points for late submissions.
Activities can be graded by simply entering a grade, using a rubric, or using SpeedGrader in Canvas, which is similar to Blackboard’s in-line grading function.
With SpeedGrader you can:
- View student submissions (text entries, website URLs, media recordings, and/or file uploads); preview supported file types in Canvas
- Make annotations on supported files
- Assign a grade based on your preferred assessment method (points or percentage)
- View Rubric to assist with grading (if one is added to the assignment)
- View comments created by you or the student about the assignment
- Create text, video, and/or audio commentary for the student
by Jonathan Wade | Oct 26, 2021 | Blog, Canvas, O365, Student Engagement, Student Performance, Teaching and Learning, Teaching with Technology
Canvas New Features
October 2021
Canvas provides updates to the platform every month without disruption to service. Some of them are minor fixes and others provide additional features and functionality to users. As we reach the middle of the first full semester with Canvas we thought we’d highlight for you some of the most recent updates that may make your work in the online learning environment more efficient and effective.
New Feature Details
Navigation Menus will be “Sticky”
In the past, the left-hand navigation items would scroll with the page so that users would have to scroll back up to navigate. With this change, the navigation menu will “stick”, making the menu visible at all times without having to scroll.
SpeedGrader: Ability to Edit Submission Status
The SpeedGrader sidebar now includes an Edit icon that can be used to change submission status for assignments. Status can be edited the same way as was previously only available in the Gradebook. Adjusting a status in SpeedGrader, will, of course, also update the Gradebook.
Some details about Status
- Setting the status to missing will add a “missing” label. This additional signal could be used to help nudge students toward the completion of assignments.
- If a late policy is enabled, setting the status to late displays the “late” label. Additionally, a text field allows the grader to enter a value for the days/hours late.
- Setting the status to “excused” displays the Excused status, and the grade field displays as “EX” and is grayed-out, and will not be counted in the total for that assignment category. (The excused function will not work well if you are using total points and not using the assignment category weighting).
- Setting the status to “None” removes any labels that were previously displayed for the assignment.
Figure A: SpeedGrader Status Edit Menu Examples
The Edit Status icon is not displayed in the following assignment scenarios:
- Previously submitted submissions (only the most recent submission is supported)
- Concluded user enrollments
- Inactive student enrollments
- Assignments that require moderated grading
- Assignments in a closed grading period
Gradebook: Assignment Search
Another updated feature is the addition of a search field in the Gradebook that can search for assignment names. This gives instructors another way to sort and control their workflow. This allows for a search of student names as well in a separate search box.
Improved Navigation for Course Notification Customization
Canvas allows users to customize their notification preferences for their entire account and to create special notifications for specific courses. For example, an instructor might choose to create a more frequent notification schedule for a fully online course than for a course that is only offered face-to-face. In the past, making granular course level changes took going deeper into the course settings. Now course notification preferences can be customized on the main notifications page using a drop-down menu.
Please note: Students are also able to set their own notifications per course. If you are using notifications to students as a strategy for engaging them, make sure to specify how they should set their notifications for your course so they are not missing out on communication from you.
Figure B: Notifications Page screenshot
User Settings: Microsoft Immersive Reader Additional Feature Areas
To help engage students at all levels of learning and with all learning differences, we have long advised the use of the accessibility checker in the Canvas page editor. Our Microsoft 365 account and the Canvas integration now enable a new tool that allows any user to use the Microsoft Immersive Reader to use the Microsoft AI to give students more options for accessible use of content. Students will have this option visible on their screens so they can use it when they need to.
Figure C: New Immersive Reader Button
If you really want to stay up-to-date with Canvas’ new features, become an insider by subscribing to Canvas Releases in the Canvas Community.
Or Feel Free to Watch the Highlight Videos for Each of These Updates
Release Screencast: 2021-10-16 Navigation (Sticky Navigation Menu)
Release Screencast: 2021-10-16 SpeedGrader (Submission Status Label Edits)
Release Screencast: 2021-10-16 Gradebook (Assignment Search)
Release Screencast: 2021-10-16 Notifications (Course Customization)
Release Screencast: 2021-10-16 User Settings (Microsoft Immersive Reader Additional Feature Areas)
