Neil Anderson, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Dr. Neil Anderson, School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

What is your favourite Canvas feature, and why? 

The Canvas Calendar. At first it looks like a fairly simple shared calendar, but when used with the Appointment Tool it’s superb. I use to schedule assignments, book meetings with students and to manage my end of semester demos.

What would you say to colleagues who may be hesitant to use Canvas?

Start with something simple. Log-in and have a look around the interface. It’s easy to use, so once you get logged in for the first time you will start to find ways that Canvas can be used in your teaching. After that, if something you want to do isn’t obvious then try one of the drop-in clinics (you can see the full list of dates and times here).

Can you show us three things in Canvas which have worked well for you? 

  1. Canvas makes it easy to organise your learning materials in a way that suits your module. It’s also really straightforward to embed video and other rich content into your material.
  2. Arranging student meetings is so straightforward in Canvas. As I mentioned above, I’ve used it for lots of types of meetings, but I will demonstrate how it can be used to schedule a large number of individual marking sessions.
  3. I do a fair bit of group work and I’ve found Canvas to be helpful. I use the ’self sign-up’ feature to allow students to arrange themselves into groups and I then use the ‘group homepage’ feature to send feedback to each group after our meetings.

#1: Organising Learning Materials

#2: Arranging Meetings With Students

#3: Working With Groups Of Students