Canvas Curiosity

A St. Kate’s Student Guide to Canvas

Media Mondays By Morgan Shelley

What is Canvas? When did Canvas become part of St. Kate’s? Where will your classes be hosted? How does it work? And why is our university making the switch from Brightspace D2L to something new? Fear not, wildcat, for all your questions have answers!

Canvas is an LMS or Learning Management System that St. Kate’s is transitioning to during the 2022-2023 school year. According to Instructure,

“A Learning Management System is an educational platform that allows schools, colleges and universities to manage their online learning materials and interactions in one place. [It] gathers all course content, daily lessons, assignments, tests/quizzes, feedback, and grading. In addition, an LMS handles student-educator communications and serves as a place for instructors and learners to meet virtually.”

An LMS is meant to be simple, reliable and consistent, making the student experience as straightforward as possible. Transitioning St. Kate’s to one LMS will create consistent student and professor experiences down the line and make it easier for everyone to complete tasks. Brightspace D2L, Canvas and Canvas – OTA Online are simultaneously active at our university during this transition, so there’s a chance that you’re spending time on at least one of these platforms this semester. (You can read more about this on the St. Kate's website.)

If you were unprepared for this change and it's taking you by surprise, you’re not alone! I became very fond of Brightspace D2L during my earlier years at St. Kate’s, and my first few weeks on Canvas were … unpleasant, to say the least. However, navigating Canvas with no previous experience has challenged me to get curious about, well, everything!

My PC Canvas dashboard, minus my to-do list. On the left, there are icon links to my account page, dashboard, courses, calendar, inbox, history and a help page. My courses are displayed as color-coded cards in the center of the page. Credit: The Wheel

Your dashboard functions as home base. It has direct links to your classes and is customizable. Prefer a list view? You’ve got it. Not vibing with a color overlay? Consider it gone! You can get creative with your dashboard display to a certain extent, and I’ve found that this makes the platform more engaging. If you ever get turned around, your dashboard is a great place to return to.

A home page for one of my spring semester courses, Writing for Writers. On the left, there are links to the home page, modules, announcements, syllabus, my grades and classmates and other labels such as course evaluations and Zoom. Recent announcements and modules are displayed in the center of the page and more links are on the right but are slightly cut off. Credit: The Wheel

The layout of your courses can vary slightly depending on your professor’s preferences, but only a little because Canvas is designed to be consistent across the board. Course home pages are like specialized dashboards! There are links to links of links for links. If you need to see all of your assignments, you can find them under modules or grades. Want to email your classmates or check your syllabus? There are labels and links for that, too. And remember: Your professors and classmates are marvelous sources of information if you’re in a jam.

I appreciate that you can communicate directly with your professors through Canvas. This can prevent the dreaded full inbox on *insert day of the week* and create helpful boundaries. (Please note, I type this with nuance.) Another thing I appreciate is that you can customize your notification preferences, a detail included in Brightspace D2L that I’m grateful carried over to Canvas. I never use the calendar because I prefer planners and seeing how many assignments I have to complete in a month makes me want to fade into the void, but I appreciate that everything has its own space. Oh, simple navigation, how I adore you so!

Also, if you submit an assignment before the deadline, there’s a chance you’ll get a little burst of confetti on your screen. When we grow tired of submitting papers, exams, etc. — because we always do — a splash of color on our screens can make a world of difference. Everyone deserves a little pop of something bright every now and then.

It can take time for our brains to adjust to new things because they are unfamiliar, wildcat. I’ve found that trial and error has been the most effective method of Canvas navigation for me, but there might be something different that works for you. Canvas has guides specifically designed to answer your burning questions and links to St. Kate’s-specific resources such as ServiceNow can also help with the transition. There’s even a little welcome tour I clicked through more than once during the first week of spring semester that made things easier for me.

So however you Canvas now or in the future, here’s a gentle reminder that curiosity can take you far in the face of change.

Happy Monday! Take a moment to get curious about something unfamiliar today!

With Love,

Morgan