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Making the Most of Technology in Your Course

Created to assist faculty in preparing for potential or definite course transitions to online during the Fall 2020 term (due to the COVID-19 epidemic).

Converting Assignments

Setting Up An Online Submission Assignment

You may use the “Assignments” feature in Canvas as an online submission portal for students to submit their assignments, such as papers or presentations. This feature will not only save you time by allowing you to grade without having to download individual assignments, but also automatically sends the feedback to students without any further work on your part. 

To begin, you can create an online submission by starting on the “Assignments” page. Click on the blue “+ Assignment” button at the top right-hand corner of your page. This will bring you to the assignment creation page. 

First, add a title to your assignment in the “Title” field. This text will appear in the Assignments page, and must be unique from other assignment titles (for example, you cannot have two “Reflection Paper” titles. We recommend that you name it something distinguishable, like “Week 1 Reflection Paper” and “Week 2 Reflection Paper”). 

Then, insert the content of your assignment instructions in the text editor below the “Title” field. You may include the instructions from your syllabus, as well as any other pertinent information. For example, you may also link supporting documents, images, or videos to help students with the assignment. Once you have added the assignment instructions, consider the options that you will be setting for the assignment. 

Assignment Options

There are various assignment options available before publishing your assignment:

  1. Points: You may allocate a point value to your assignments in this text field. 

  2. Assignment Group: If you wish to organize your assignment into specific assignment groups (for example, “Reflection Papers”, “Exams”, etc.), you may do so using this dropdown menu.

  3. Display Grade as: This dropdown menu allows you to select how you want your students’ grades to appear to them in the gradebook. For example, you may keep it as a point-value, or you may prefer a letter grade instead. 

  4. Submission Type: This dropdown menu allows you to specify the type of submission from your students. Since this is the online format, you will want to select “Online”. From that option, you will be able to specify if it is a “Text Entry”, “Website URL”, Media Recording”, or “File Upload”. If your students will be submitting a Word document, PDF file, or PowerPoint file, you will want to select “File Upload”. Lastly, if you have selected “File Upload”, you can restrict upload file types (for example, if you only wish to allow your students to upload Word documents, you may specify so in this text field). 

  5. Submission Attempts: This dropdown menu allows you to specify if students are able to upload as many assignments as they wish to the assignment, or if they are only able to upload one assignment.

  6. Plagiarism Review: This dropdown menu allows you to enable our built-in plagiarism review software, which will review each submission for plagiarism automatically as students submit them. We highly recommend that you enable this software. Select “Unicheck (Unicheck Integration for Asbury)” to do so. The default options have been selected based on recommendations from the software providers, but you are welcome to change them based on your preferences. 

  7. Group Assignment: If your students are submitting a group assignment, you may specify so using this option. Do note that if you do so, you must also create these groups in the People page. 

  8. Peer Reviews: We do not recommend using this option as it is not user-friendly.

  9. Assign: The “Due”, “Available from”, and “Available until” dates are dates that allow you to put a timeframe on student submissions. You are not required to fill out any or all of the text fields in this section. This will be covered further down in the “Deadlines and Student Access” section. 

Once you have specified your preferred options for the assignment, you may “Save”, or “Save and Publish” your assignment. Note that if you do not publish your assignments, your students will not be able to view or access the assignment until you do so.