Table of Contents
The Beginning of Course Checklist is a starting point for ensuring you’ve reviewed your Canvas settings and that your course is ready to go for student access at the start of a new course term.
Personal Settings #
- Set Up Account Notifications
- To ensure you receive communication from Canvas, set up your Notification Preferences and contact method in your Canvas Account.
- Note: Students can also customize their preferences and may choose to opt-out of certain notifications from Canvas.
- Organize your Dashboard
- Customize which course cards are displayed on the Dashboard by “Favoriting” courses based on preference, current term, quarter, semester, etc.
- Add or Update Your Profile Information
- Update your Display Name, Pronouns, and Biography from the Account Settings.
- Your profile can be a place where you reiterate your contact information and communication plans for students.
Course Settings #
- Simplify Course Navigation
- For optimum course experience, hide unnecessary course navigation links.
- Review UMW Canvas Course Requirements
- There are a couple of requirements for UMW courses around information you should be providing to students. We have a guide to provide some guidance on how to implement the Canvas requirements for courses.
- Set Up Grades
- Verify the Gradebook is arranged according to your grading policy and your syllabus.
- You can change your Total column to display as Points, if needed
- You can set Late Submission or Missing Submission policies
- Choose Home Page
- The Home Page is the first impression of a course. Select the Home Page option that best fits the needs of your course.
- Publish Course and Content
- Check visibility of individual items and Modules as a whole. Don’t forget to publish your course.
- You may want to use the Validate Links tool in your Course Settings to ensure there are no broken links.
- Note: You can unpublish any items you don’t want students to see.
- Review Course in Student View
- Review your course content from Student View to experience your course from a student perspective.
- Note: Some third party tools may not have student view functionality and a course needs to be published to use student view.