Success in Online Learning: Tips & Tricks

There are a number of things you can do to customize your Canvas experience and how your profile appears to others in your Canvas courses. 

First things first, to change your personal settings, when you log into Canvas, click on Account in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen.

To Add a Picture:

Especially with an online class, having a picture associated with your Canvas account is a great way to personalize the online class environment. To add a picture to your Canvas account, from Account:

1. Click on Profile.
2. Click anywhere on the image icon next to your name, and add/change your photo by (a) uploading a picture, (b) taking a picture with the device you're using, or (c) selecting a Gravatar. 
3. Hit Save and you're done.

Record Your Name

Most law school courses are discussion-based. To help your instructor properly pronounce your name when calling on you, you can record the pronunciation with NameCoach. From Account:

1. Click on NameCoach Recorder. 
2. Click the red Record Name button. 
3. Here you can also select your preferred gender pronouns.
4. To record your name, either type your phone number in, and the system will call you to make your recording; alternatively, you can select Web Recorder and record with the microphone on your device.
5. When done, click Submit and Finish.

Note: If you have a preferred name other than your first name that you would like to have used by classmates and faculty, you can change that as well, but that has to happen outside of Canvas. To change your preferred name, go to one.iu.edu and follow the instructions. For more details on this process, where your preferred name will be used in IU systems, and acceptable uses for preferred names, click here.

Control Your Notifications*

Canvas will notify you about a number of different types of course activity - when you're invited to join a course, when a new assignment is posted, when an announcement is made, and more. By default, most of these announcements are sent to your email immediately. You have the option to customize your notification preferences, if you'd prefer to have less (or more) notices going to your email. To change these settings, from Account:

1. Click on Notifications. 
2. This brings up a list of all the different types of notifications Canvas gives, and the default notification settings. Those marked in green are the current settings. A check mark is instant notification. A clock is a daily summary. A calendar is a weekly summary. And a X is no notification.

*Note: If you change your settings such that no notifications come to your email inbox, it is still your responsibility to keep abreast of any messaging from your Canvas courses, as most faculty communicate with their classes primarily through Canvas. So make sure you're keeping an eye on Announcements, any changes to Assignment due dates or additions, and your Canvas Inbox for direct messaging from the professor.

Every faculty member uses Canvas a little differently for their courses, so the best advice is to get acquainted with each course site you're on, to make sure you understand how the site is being used and where to find all the vital information you'll need for that course. In addition, here are a few other tips:

1. Submitting Assignments - when submitting an assignment on Canvas, make sure your submission successfully went through. If you successfully submitted your assignment, a sidebar should pop up next to the blue Submit button, with details about your submission (including the time stamp of when it was submitted).
2. Checking for Feedback - if your instructor indicates they've left you feedback on your assignment, it could be in one of two places. Most commonly, it'll be in the Comments section of the assignment itself. Go to Grades, click on the assignment, and you'll see the written comments. Canvas also offers the option to annotate the assignment itself with comments. If your instructor has done that, within the assignment, you'll see a View Feedback link that will bring up those in-text annotations.
3. Something Missing? If something seems off in your Canvas site - perhaps you were asked to submit an assignment, but there's not Submit button; or you were asked to read something, but the link to the reading doesn't work, or it's the first day of class, and you still can't access the Canvas site! -- if anything like this occurs, please reach out to your instructor. Chances are good that they simply forgot to publish the Canvas site or assignment, or forgot to upload the reading. Oftentimes everything looks fine on the instructor's end, but the student view is very different; so if you ever have a question, don't hesitate to reach out.

For more information, check out the Canvas Student Guide.