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CIDI Newsletter

2021 Newsletter - December

The CIDI monthly newsletter to USU instructors shares the latest news, teaching tips, and technology updates to help you succeed as a teacher.

Improve Course Usability

There are a few simple ways to make your Canvas course experience more usable and accessible for every student in your class. We have put together a Canvas Usability tutorial describing quick things you can do (or ask us to help you do) that will make a big difference in helping students find and use your course content:  

Canvas Course Usability Tutorial

In the tutorial, you will find instructions to
There are also resources on improving your course accessibility to provide a more inclusive experience, including a tool that can automatically check the accessibility of all your course content.

Please reach out to us for help in making any of these improvements to your course!

On-Demand Training Resources

Teaching Tools and Updates

  • Canvas Updates
    • Import Warning: You may notice a new warning when you copy course content. This warns you to be careful not to copy the same content from the same course twice. If you do, you might overwrite previous work.
    • Open "To Do" items in a new tab: In your Canvas user settings, you can opt to have the links in your To Do List open automatically in another browser tab.
    • Annotation or Rubric Feedback Indicator for Students: Indicator dots now appear for students next to the File Feedback and Rubric Feedback links whenever a teacher provides feedback using rubrics or SpeedGrader annotation.
    • SpeedGrader Assignment Text Entry Word Count: When students submit an assignment through the text entry option, instructors are now shown a word count for the entry in the SpeedGrader.
  • Zoom Update - Advanced Polling: If you and your students have updated to the latest version of the Zoom application, you can now run polls that include single answer, multiple answer, matching, rank order, and short answer questions.
  • Pressbooks is now available to all USU faculty and staff through UEN. Pressbooks is the leading Open Educational Resource textbook authoring tool. Sign in with your A# and password at https://uen.pressbooks.pub/ to start creating your first book. It can include interactive content and integrate with Canvas--including the Canvas gradebook.

Teaching Tip Highlights

Reusing Course Content in a New Semester

Our tutorial on Reusing Your Course in Canvas can give you a good start for moving your course and updating it. In addition, don't forget to do the following:

  • If you use Atomic Assessments or Delphinium, enable them in the new course before you copy over previous content. This allows the content in these tools to transfer.
  • If you use Proctorio, then once you have copied your course content to the new semester, be sure to open each Proctorio exam using the Chrome or Edge browser with the Proctorio extension installed. This step refreshes the Proctorio setup for each exam in the new course.
  • If you use Group Discussions, remember to rebuild your discussion groups and then re-assign the group discussions to the new group set.
  • If you use the Media Gallery and share the same videos each semester, be sure to visit the media gallery and import the prior course's gallery content.
  • If you list your modules on the home page, be sure to update the modules list and the tab display dates.

Building a New Course from Scratch

If you are building a new course without any prior content to copy, consider using a template. You may also set up a consultation with one of your department's Instructional Designers for help and ideas.


Happy Holidays!

Contact CIDI

For on-demand support with teaching technologies, contact CIDI at cidi@usu.edu, via chat, or at 435.797.9506. Schedule an appointment with an instructional designer to get help making your courses more engaging, usable, and accessible.