Start of Term FAQs

Please see below for answers to common questions about locating and using your Canvas shells.

Typically, your shells should populate on your dashboard, under “unpublished courses”.

If you don’t see your course shells on your dashboard, try the following steps in order:

1. Check your All Courses menu by clicking the Courses icon in the black left-hand side menu and then “All Courses” at the top.
2. If you didn’t find any courses in the All Courses menu, you may not have been assigned as the instructor in Banner. In this case, check your course assignments one of the following locations in Experience: the class list, detailed schedule, week at a glance, or WOU class schedule.
3. If you didn’t see your course listed, reach out to the Registrar’s Office at catalogandscheduling@mail.wou.edu
4. If you ARE listed as the instructor in Banner/Experience and still don’t see a Canvas course, the script syncing Banner and Canvas may not have run yet. If it has been more than two hours since your were assigned in Banner, reach out to ucs-programming-team@mail.wou.edu.

You or your APA will need to contact and work with the Office of the Registrar to update your teaching assignment in Banner. Canvas and Banner sync regularly to ensure Canvas reflects the information in Banner. You should expect to see changes in Banner reflected in Canvas within an hour. When Canvas and Banner sync, Canvas is updated to reflect changes like updated instructor assignments, newly cross-listed sections, student registrations, and course title changes.

CRNs that have been cross-listed or dual-listed by the Registrar in Banner will be merged in Canvas. Canvas merges these sections automatically by placing all students and instructors in the shell with the CRN with the lowest numerical value (i.e. if CRNs 30299 and 30300, Canvas will put all users in the shell created for 30299).

If your sections are intended to be cross-listed or dual-listed but are still in separate shells, please work with the Registrar’s Office to verify the CRNs have been cross-listed in Banner. Once the cross-list attribute is added in Banner, the CRNs will merge in Canvas at the next sync.

Note: If your courses are merged after initial shell creation, users will be moved to the shell with the lowest numerical value. However, the previous shell continues to exist, with users removed. If you have already begun building the now empty shell, CTL staff can transfer the contents of the now empty shell into the merged shell. You can request this by emailing ctl@wou.edu.

The Center for Teaching & Learning is happy to add graders, lab preparators, teaching assistants, and observers conducting formal, evaluative teaching observations to your course. We can also add students who are providing peer support, such as tutors, in our “student assistant” role.

CTL cannot add another instructor to your course. If you have a co-instructor for your course, please have your department add them to the CRN in Banner. This will grant access to the course.

To request we add a teaching observer to your course, please fill out the observer request form. To request that a user be added in any other role to your course, please complete our form: Add a User to Course Site. 

The Center for Teaching & Learning has created templates for Canvas courses! These templates are optional to use, and can be customized after you download them. One template is based on regular Canvas and will be simpler to use. The other uses features from DesignPLUS and comes with a black and red option. They each include banners on the Welcome page and Weekly Introduction & Overview pages, customized headers throughout, and a syllabus template. Each page also comes with light instructions, and there is a link to a doc with more in-depth instructions included in the Welcome module. View the regular Canvas template here, view a demo of the red DesignPLUS template here, and view a demo of the black DesignPLUS template here.

Options for use:

• If you would like to load a template into a new development shell, please fill out and submit our DEV shell request form. This form automatically creates development shells and can be used whenever and as many times as you need.
• If you would like to add one of the templates to an existing course shell, Canvas Commons is available through the second from the bottom icon in your black left-hand Canvas sidebar. All templates are featured and should show up as some of the first items on the page as Canvas Course Template, DesignPLUS Template (Black), and DesignPLUS Template (Red).

The Center for Teaching & Learning has several tutorials prepared to help you copy course content from your previous courses to your current course.

• Duplicating a Canvas Course
• Importing Specific Content Between Canvas Shells

The best way to collaborate with another instructor is to work in a development shell. Using a development shell is necessary because of the student information housed in courses associated with CRN. It also helps ensure accidental edits or deletions between collaborators don’t impact live courses.

To create a development shell, you can use CTL’s shell generation tool. This tool is a Google form that automatically generates shells within a few minutes. You will be added to this shell as a manager, which allows you to add your collaborators to your shell to co-design materials.

You can import content from the development shell to your course shell once complete. If you will continue collaborating on content throughout the term, we recommend you use Canvas’ “copy-to” feature to send specific items or modules to your course shell as they are built.