Administrators can use the analytics function to view all university courses in Canvas, or filter results by college, department, semester and/or instructor.
Dynamic graphs appear at the top as a visual analytics, and a list of all filtered courses are populated below. Each course that has a syllabus in Canvas includes a hyperlink to access the course syllabus directly.
Corbin-Lewis and the other department heads at USU will no longer have to spend time gathering all syllabi; they will simply need to verify that instructors are updating their syllabi in Canvas each semester.
To support faculty, Mr. Larsen and the team at CIDI also developed a custom tool to simplify the process of creating and editing syllabi in Canvas.
The syllabus tool has functionality based on the open source syllabus creator called SALSA (also developed at USU). The tool can insert the grading scheme set by instructors in the Canvas settings and can automatically load updated university policies and procedures.
Larsen explains, “Sections can be added, edited and rearranged to customize the syllabus for each instructor.”
He also points out that Bloom’s revised verbs and IDEA objectives are preloaded for instructors to insert directly into the learning outcomes section.
With access to course syllabi and analytics the Syllabus Tracker serves the needs of many groups on campus. By creating these powerful tools Louviere’s team at CIDI continues to empower faculty consistent with their mission.
An open source version of the Syllabus Tracker is being produced for use by other institutions using Canvas.
Travis Thurston is an Instructional Designer at Utah State University.
- Syllabi gets open access treatment - April 30, 2014
- The open access movement includes college syllabi, too - February 21, 2014