Overview of Canvas at MPC


What is Canvas?

How to get to Canvas.

How to get help with Canvas.

How to learn canvas.

(Transcript is below.)




Next is an overview of the Dashboard and Course interfaces from the folks at Canvas.  It's designed for students, but teachers should definitely watch it, too!



200 - Canvas Overview for Students from Canvas LMS on Vimeo.



Transcript of Canvas Faculty Basics Overview


What is Canvas?

0:00
Did you know that MPC automatically creates a course website for every single section that we teach? "Canvas" is MPC's course management system.

Every single section in WebReg has a course website in Canvas. Every student who registers for a course in WebReg is automatically put into Canvas. Every student who then later drops from WebReg is automatically dropped from Canvas.

These Canvas course shells are very handy for teachers. They have all the features that teaches typically want in a course.  You can put up your documents like your syllabus and your PowerPoint slides.  You can receive  homework and grade it and send it right back  to students with your comments and other feedback. You can easily use quizzes and discussions and share documents and hold virtual office hours and more.  You can post announcements and send messages to your students.  You can track the progress of your students and all of this with an integrated grade book.


How to get to Canvas

0:57
So, now that you know what Canvas is, how do you get there? Well the easiest way for both you and your students is to go to our main campus webpage, www.mpc.edu, and from there click Lobo Apps in the gray bar. Here you login to Lobo Apps.

Now if students don't know how to log in, they can read the instructions, right here. Click this, and it shows you and your students how to login and down at the bottom, if that didn’t all work, they can click to email WebsiteSupport for help. I’ll close this and get back to the login screen.

If you need help logging in to Lobo Apps, please speak to your Division Office Manager, or contact IT.  You can also email [email protected] just like students do.


The Canvas Dashboard and Global Navigation

1:49
Here I'm going to log in with my username and password and after you login you'll see a screen with a link to Canvas. Also on this login screen you're going to see links to Google Drive and email and other goodies. Here's Google Drive. Here's email and your calendar and over here Canvas.

2:08
If I click Canvas it's going to take me to the Canvas Dashboard, to the Canvas homepage. On the Canvas Dashboard you'll see some of your courses. These are called courses cards. On the right side you'll see things To Do and upcoming items. But you might not see all of your courses here. To see all of your courses use this gray bar on the left. Right now I'm on the Dashboard. Click here on Courses and then All Courses. When you do you will get a list of all of the courses that you're in.

2:43
These little stars are to "favorite" a course. If you click it, it turns color. If you click it again, the color goes away. All of those stars with color will appear on your Dashboard. So at the start of a new semester you'll just come to Courses | All Courses where you will star the new semester and unstar the old semester.

How to get help with Canvas


There are more goodies on this Global Navigation bar. Right here, the Help button is really important. This first item brings you to a form that you can fill in. You put up here your name, and you put here the problem you are having. This form creates a ticket in MPC's help system. It comes right to us here in the MPC Online Education team.That works weekdays, of course. We're not working evenings and weekends.


3:34
If you or your students have trouble evenings or weekends you can phone Canvas directly. This is the phone number for Canvas support. Now they can't help with MPC related issues. They can't help if you can't login to Lobo Apps. They can't help you. If you're expecting to be in a course and you're not in that course, well Canvas can't help you with that. You have to be added to courses automatically by our systems, not by Canvas. But if you have any kind of a Canvas question, or your students do, Canvas can help. Suppose the student is trying to take a quiz and it's not working, the student can call Canvas. Suppose you're trying to update your course on a Saturday night. You're trying to get it ready for Monday. You can call Canvas and get help with pages and the content that you're trying to put into your course. That's a very, very helpful thing.