Keep Teaching

It is essential to contact your students with comprehensive information and clear instructions as to what you expect them to do and what has changed. Clearly outline where they should find information inside Canvas and how often they should expect to expect updates.

If you are using Announcements, suggest that students check their notification preferences to ensure they will receive email copies. Also, set Announcements to appear on your course home page.

You can communicate synchronously with students from within Canvas through Zoom, UT's videoconference solution.

Zoom is a centrally supported video conferencing solution available to UT faculty, staff and students that enables you to meet, teach, and learn from anywhere. It is integrated with Canvas, and you can host and join meetings from your mobile device, desktop client or the web.

If you are teaching in one of the classrooms listed on this page, you will have access to Lectures Online service. Lectures Online is a classroom based service offered by the College of Liberal Arts. The Lectures Online system records the in class presentation so students can review the material at a later time. Any instructor teaching in these rooms, regardless of college, can use the system.

If you are using videos in your class, it is strongly recommended that these videos include captions. Please review the "Captioning Videos" FAQ page on the Services for Students with Disabilities website. In addition, the UT Libraries provides a captioning/transcription service for audio and video materials .

You may choose to use alternate video conferencing tools to which you have access individually or for which your school/college has licenses (e.g., WebEx [Dell Medical School, Pharmacy], MediaSite [Cockrell School of Engineering]). Contact your technology department for more information. If you use these tools, make sure that students know how and when to access the video conference platforms.

Asynchronous online discussions allow students to engage in conversations outside of the classroom without having to set aside time for live, synchronous online sessions. Setting up a Canvas Discussion is an easy way to allow instructors to discuss course content or assignments with students, and for students to share work or ask questions.

Group Discussions make discussions in large classes more manageable for large classes with multiple TAs.

Make these files available through the Files or Modules page and make sure the left hand navigation is available for students.

Google Drive and UT Box are tools available to share large media files. Make the links available in Canvas if you decide to use these alternatives.

Google Collaborations is available through the Collaborations area in Canvas. Collaborations can be shared with one, some, or all students in a course, and options include Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. For accessibility purposes, when using Google Slides, you may present these slides with live captions.

Zoom is a centrally supported video conferencing solution available to UT faculty, staff and students that enables you to meet, teach, and learn from anywhere. It is integrated with Canvas, and you can host and join meetings from your mobile device, desktop client or the web. You can use Zoom to record a lecture or presentation and share it with students via Canvas.

The tool is available anywhere the text editor is available, such as Announcements, Pages and Discussions. You can record media for any length of time, but shorter video recordings are recommended. If your video is longer than 15 minutes, you may want to consider recording and uploading using another tool, such as the options listed below. Longer media lengths require a longer rendering time and may be interrupted without a stable internet connection.

The recording will be available for students in the Conferences section of your course. Consider investigating whether or not your school/college has lecture capture tools (e.g., Lectures Online, MediaSite).

Commonly used tools include Screencast-o-matic Screen Recorder, Adobe Spark, and Jing (there are free versions of these tools that you may use).

Panopto is a centrally supported lecture capture solution available to UT faculty, staff and students, It enables you to create online recordings for your students and students to create online presentations.

This feature allows students to submit assignments online, as well as allowing instructors to grade and provide feedback online. Learn how to create an Assignment for online submission, implementing Turnitin to check for plagiarism, and how to grade student work and offer feedback through Speedgrader.

Consider using the Proctorio Lock-down Browser tool, as it integrates with Canvas and works ONLY within the Chrome web browser.