Crunch Time for Global Studies

While I am generally a very calm person, I must admit to feeling slightly panicked at the moment. I really need to send out the student pre class assignment letter today and I am totally not ready.  As I prepare, I'm making notes for you as to what I'm doing.

• Permission: A couple of weeks ago, I got permission from the eLearning director and my department chair to use Canvas for this class.  Highline isn't moving to Canvas right away, so this will be a bit of a shock for students. Plus, they won't be able to get support from campus or other normal channels, so I had to be sure everyone was ok with that before proceeding. 
• ANGEL: We're not using ANGEL, but some students might still go there. So I set up my ANGEL classroom by turning off all tabs (except course and manage), deleting all content from the Course page except Announcements and setting up an announcement with visible dates for the whole quarter telling students that our class is in Canvas.

• Observers: I set up department chair and eLearning director as observers (what can observers see?)
• Orientation Activity:  I copied and pasted this over into Canvas Pages. I also used the Assignment for the Backup plan and Quizzes for my survey (to do a survey, you add a quiz and choose "ungraded survey").  After adding the content, I organized it in the Modules area.
• Lock Down: this class is still very much under construction. In ANGEL, it is super easy to make the content invisible to students. Canvas is much more open.  As far as I can tell, I can make content inaccessible but not invisible.  I locked down all of the modules except for the Pre Class Assignment and the Syllabus content.  Here is what it looks like:

• Explanatory videos: I made two (well, it ended up being three) videos explaining how students can log into the class, update their profiles and notifications and do the orientation assignment.  I meant for this to be two videos but I forgot that notifications was a separate step when setting up the profile.  I didn't want to re-record it because I needed to invent a new student email address each time I did the recording so I could walk them through signup.  I also tried to make the initial login video general enough that anyone could use it.
• Welcome to Canvas
• Notifications Supplement
• Doing the Pre Class Assignment
• Edit the Welcome Letter: I changed up my Welcome Letter to accomodate the change to Canvas and warn the students what was coming.

Phew! I think I'm ready to send the message to students. This all took me about 3 hours - not too bad, considering I didn't really know what I was doing.  The one piece that gave me headaches was trying to find instructions for students.  More on that in a separate post.