Questions about using Canvas? Post in the comments below! And if you’re reading can answer someone else’s question, please don’t hesitate to respond!
Handouts for Students
– Contingencies for Illness & Coronavirus – some advanced directions for students about communication and what to do in case of campus closuresDownload
Articles About Teaching Online
- Going Online in a Hurry: What to Do and Where to Start
- Teaching Effectively During Times of Disruption
- Teaching in the Context of COVID-19
- So You Want to Temporarily Teach Online
- Bringing Your Course Online – Resources compiled by the MLA
- Please Do a Bad Job of Putting Your Courses Online This article highlights the struggle that many professors will experience as they try to shift materials from face-to-face classes to Canvas for the first time. It reminds us to be aware of student needs and our own expectations and workload.

Some Tools for Online Teaching
- Screencast-o-matic – create short (15min or less) videos to help deliver content to your students. You can record yourself or your computer screen. Creating an account and storing videos is free.
- Here’s is also a helpful tutorial video on the basics of Screencast-o-matic.
- ConferZoom – conferencing tool that allows you to meet with students online or hold synchronous sessions online if needed. You can share your screen to host live sessions or do 1-1 meetings. Creating an account is free (with your district email address). Students can join via computers with video and audio or audio only with their phones.
Accessibility
If you’re doing tutorial videos and screen-casting they’ll need to be captioned! If you’re scanning PDF files, then the files will need to be optimized for screen-readers as well. Resources on both below.
- Techsmith Relay – upload your videos to the library to also have them captioned (Techsmith Relay Tutorials) – This resource will integrate directly into Canvas.
- Free Webinar for Training on 3/26 @ 11:30am – REGISTER HERE
- YouTube Creator Studio – YouTube will auto-caption your videos (15min and under). Instructions for YouTube AutoCaptions.
- FlipGrid – integrates directly with Canvas and has a captions feature.
Scanned PDF documents are not accessible until you convert them for optical character recognition. This conversion can be done using Adobe Acrobat Pro, which all faculty have access to. Using Adobe Acrobat Pro for accessible documents