The Faculty Course Tools were designed by Learning Design and Innovation to help make some regular Canvas administrative tasks more accessible and usable.
Within the suite of Faculty Course Tools, you will find:
- an easy link to request our help with your course
- a tool to rename the Canvas course shell
- a way to combine sections
- a tool to add a user to a course that has ended
- a tool for creating a Sandbox course for experimenting with new course designs.
Currently, this suite of tools is only available to courses in the Arts and Sciences and Thayer subaccounts.
Features
Help with this course
This feature allows you to easily reach out via email to the Learning Design and Innovation, educational technology team. The tool sends the url and SIS ID for the course with the email which allows the team to more easily troubleshoot the right issue in the right course.
Rename Course
There are many cases where faculty would like to add a different name to the Canvas site for a course so that the name is more descriptive for students. The most common cases include:
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courses that are cross-listed and faculty want to rename the course to reflect that the sections are combined
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courses such as seminars that have generic titles in the course catalog but faculty want more descriptive titles for that term's offering.
This tool allows faculty to change the Canvas site only to a name that reflects the course. It does not, however, change any official name in Banner.
Combine Sections
The combine sections tool is designed to allow faculty teaching multiple sections of the same course to combine those sections into a single Canvas site. The tool allows faculty to combine only those sections that were 1) created through a feed from Banner and 2) were not part of an “official” cross-list.
Add User
The Add user feature in Faculty Course Tools was designed to help with a particularly difficult workflow in Canvas — adding collaborators to a course after the course date has ended. This tool allows a faculty member to go into the course where they wish to add users, click on Faculty Course tools and input the netid of the person they want to add to the course. The add user tool will do all of the steps to add that person to the intended course in the role of Designer.
Create a Sandbox
This tool is designed to give faculty an empty Canvas shell to use as a design space for tasks such as building courses for future terms; experimenting with new course layout and design; or experimenting with new tools and features in Canvas. Note that to use these materials in official Dartmouth courses, faculty will need to copy the materials into the Banner-created courses once they become available for the term. For more information on copying courses, please take a look at this knowledge base article.
If you would like to learn more about the Faculty Course Tools or to suggest other features you would like us to add, please reach out to the Learning Design and Innovation group at LDI@dartmouth.edu.