Transitioning to a new learning management system can feel daunting, but we hope to alleviate some stress by providing an overview of the tools and differences between D2L and Canvas.
Many of the primary tools are the same, it can be a matter of what Canvas refers to them as versus D2L. Such as in D2L, you put your course materials in the Content tool, in Canvas that tool is called Modules.
There are setting differences mostly seen in Quizzes, and we recommend spending quite a bit of time learning more about the quizzing tool and options. Grades (or gradebook) is another tool that will take adjusting to.
Below are the main tool names with information about the tool as well as links to helpful articles on the Canvas Community site.
We will continue to update these over the transition timeline. If you have any questions you'd like to see answered, please use the Contact Us button and let us know!
Announcements in D2L will be in Announcements in Canvas. You can modify your Course Home Page to display recent announcements, too!
How do I show recent announcements in the Course Home Page?
You can find out more information about Announcements by reviewing the Canvas article, How do I use the Announcements Index Page?
In Canvas, an Assignment is defined as any item to which a grade is assigned. This can include paper submissions from students, quizzes, and discussion posts. Items you would like to appear in Grades must be added as an Assignment in Canvas.
Assignment Groups in Canvas are the equivalent of Grade Categories in D2L. Grade items not in Categories in D2L and Grade Items that were unpublished or inactive have been automatically placed in the Imported Assignment Group in Canvas. Please review these items in your migrated courses. If you need them for your course, publish them and move them to the appropriate category. If they are unnecessary, delete them. It is important to maintain better course management hygiene after migrating to Canvas.
There may be duplicate items listed in Assignments for Dropbox folders with no grade in D2L. Delete these duplicates and ensure the remaining assignments are set to the “Online” submission type with the “File Upload” box checked. Additional Assignment Groups may have been created to accommodate these folders. Remove these assignment groups.
For more information about Canvas Assignments: How do I use the Assignments Index Page?
As an instructor, you can control which links appear in Course Navigation. Canvas includes a set of default Course Navigation links shown by default and cannot be renamed.
Links to sections without content that students cannot create content for will be automatically hidden for students and will display the Visibility icon to instructors. For example, if there are no Quizzes set for the course, you will see the Quizzes link with the Visibility icon (eye with slash), but students will not see the link at all.
Reordering and hiding Course Navigation links for Announcements, Assignments, Discussions, and Files also affects all users' course tabs in the Dashboard course view. Additionally, disabling the Files link will hide the Files tab in the Content Selector in the Rich Content Editor for students.
The following course navigation links will still be visible to instructors even if they have been hidden or disabled: Home, Announcements, Assignments, Collaborations, Conferences, Discussions, Files, Grades, Modules, Outcomes, Pages, People, Quizzes, Rubrics, Settings, and Syllabus.
We recommend ALWAYS hiding the following: PAGES, FILES, and reordering the navigation to something like this: HOME, ANNOUNCEMENTS, MODULES, ASSIGNMENTS, GRADES, PEOPLE. If using Respondus LockDown Browser, you must add LockDown Browser to the navigation to access the instructor dashboard.
For more about Course Navigation, review the Canvas article How do I manage Course Navigation links?
The Calendar is a great way to view everything you have to do for all your courses in one place. You can view calendar events by day, week, month, or agenda list. The calendar also includes access to the Scheduler, which is an optional scheduling tool in Canvas.
The Calendar is accessible from the global navigation link that is always visible to you and your students. The Calendar in Canvas is a global feature, meaning users can see all course assignments and events in one place. Calendars can be filtered by selecting or deselecting courses in the sidebar.
To help manage user calendars, courses customized in the courses drop-down menu as a favorite course will always be listed at the top of the user’s calendar list in the calendar sidebar. By default, the Calendar displays a maximum of 10 course calendars.
As an instructor, use the Calendar to:
For more information about the Calendar, review the Canvas article, How do I use the Calendar as an instructor?
In Canvas, D2L “Content” can be found in the “Modules” area, listed in the left-hand Course Navigation Menu. The Modules index page (or just Modules) is where you should place all of your course content, and you can also link all your quizzes, discussions, and assignments here to streamline the course. This is effective for students, giving them one place to see all the material for the course! You can hide/show modules, add materials, reorder, and set date or prerequisite conditions for the content.
When comparing the D2L content to Canvas Modules, we recommend viewing the D2L content from the Table of Contents.
Canvas does not currently support nested Modules (Modules within Modules). If your D2L course had nested modules, those modules will not migrate; the content will be in your Canvas modules page but will appear as part of the main module with a “text header” indicating where that content begins. These text headers are unpublished by default. Make sure to publish those and any other modules that must be visible to students.
For more about Modules, review the Canvas article How do I use the Modules Index Page?
Are you used to being able to copy your previous semester's content into the new course? You can do this in Canvas, too!
Have you combined multiple sections or cross-listed courses in D2L to have one single course? You had to request those from Learning Spaces in the past, but in Canvas, faculty, and support staff can combine your own classes!
Discussions can be created as a communication tool or as an assignment for grading purposes (and seamlessly integrated with the Canvas Gradebook), or simply serve as a forum for topical and current events. Discussions can also be created within student groups.
Discussion topics can be organized as focused or threaded discussions. Focused discussions only allow for two levels of nesting, the original post and subsequent replies. Threaded discussions allow for infinite levels of nesting. Focused discussions are relatively short-lived interactions, while threaded discussions allow replies within replies and may last for a longer period of time.
Notes for Migrated Courses from D2L:
You don’t create a separate Forum and Topic in Canvas, as in D2L. Forum content should have been copied over as a Topic, so you will want to review what may need to be deleted from your Canvas course.
For more about Discussions, review the Canvas article, How do I use Discussions Index Page?
The Global Navigation Menu is located on the left side of every page in Canvas. Global Navigation links provide quick access to frequently used Canvas features. These links provide access to all your courses collectively. Default links include the Dashboard, Courses, Groups, Calendar, Inbox, User Account, and the Help menu
For more about Global Navigation, review the Canvas article, How do I use Global Navigation as an instructor?
Yes, you can still use this third-party tool in Canvas.
For more information about setting up a submission assignment in Canvas with Turnitin, please review the article Canvas – Creating a Turnitin Assignment with the Plagiarism Framework
The Grades tool in Canvas is one of the tools that has quite a few differences from the one in D2L.
The gradebook has many options for sorting, communicating, and displaying grades.
You build the gradebook by building Assignments (papers, quizzes, graded discussions). Only graded assignments, graded discussions, graded quizzes, and graded surveys that have been published are displayed in the Gradebook. Not Graded assignments are not included.
You can use a pre-defined grading scheme or build your own under the Course Settings. You can create a scheme for point or percentage.
If you wish to have a weighted gradebook, you will set that up on the Assignment Index page, where you create assignments by using Assignment Groups.
You can use posting policies in the Gradebook to manage assignment grade visibility for students. Posted grades are visible to students in your course. Hidden grades are visible to you in the course gradebook, but students cannot see them.
You can establish Late Policies for the course or by assignment or establish Missing Submission policies (these are for quizzes and submission assignments, not things done in a classroom)
One important thing you must do in Canvas Grades is to mark missed assignments with a zero so that the grade counts against the student. Otherwise, the Total will not reflect their true running total of points earned.
Note: If your course includes multiple graders, please note that once you open the Gradebook, all existing Gradebook data is stored in the browser until the page is refreshed. Grades are not dynamically updated with any changes made by other graders in the Gradebook or in SpeedGrader.
The Inbox is a messaging tool (email) used to communicate with a course, a group, an individual student, or a group of students. You can use the Inbox to communicate with others in your course.
Notes:
Pages store content and educational resources that are part of a course or group but don’t necessarily belong in an assignment. In D2L, this would be the "Create a File" html content topics you could create.
Any "Create a File" content topics from D2L will be migrated into Canvas as a page.
Pages can be called wikis and shared with specific users to edit/collaborate on. For most courses, Pages will only be used to create content by the instructor for the course.
Pages can include text, video, and links to files or other pages in the course. Pages is a great place to embed videos and have space to provide instructional context.
They can also be used as a collaboration tool for course or group wikis which only specific users can have access. Canvas keeps the entire history of the page to account for changes over time.
The Pages tool should not be displayed to students in Navigation. Created Pages should be added to the Modules page.
In every course, you will see the People tool. This is your course roster or, as in D2L, the classlist. Enrollments are automatically processed from PeopleSoft every evening.
Faculty and Staff cannot manually enroll students into courses; they must come through automatically. Should there be an emergency enrollment concern, please submit a request for assistance using the support form: https://link.ou.edu/canvas.
In People, you will see the student's name, including pronouns if they have elected to display them, their section enrollment, Last Activity, and Total Activity.
When you click on a student's name, you will get a pop-up context card on the right side of the page. It will allow a quick view of their grade, last login, and a way to email them, go directly to their grades, and analytics.
Quizzes in Canvas are assignments that can be used to challenge student understanding and assess comprehension of course material.
Canvas has two quizzing engines. IT Learning Spaces chose to have quizzes from D2L to Canvas migrated using the Classic Quizzes engine. New Quizzes is available to investigate, but it is a still-evolving tool that Learning Spaces is not ready to fully recommend. As such, information will be focused on Classic Quizzes.
What’s Different:
Question Libraries (D2L) are called Question Banks (Canvas.) Question Banks do not support the use of folders.
Surveys are created in Quizzes in Canvas.
Shuffle Answers only applies to the whole Quiz in Canvas. You will need to edit the question if you use “All of the above” or “Both C and D” as answer options.
Shuffle Questions can only be done using Question Groups.
Adding individual questions or using the Find Questions options are recommended by IT Learning Spaces.
Getting Started:
Quizzes are located on the Quizzes Index Page.
There are four types of assessments available in Quizzes: Graded Quiz, Practice Quiz, Graded Survey, and Ungraded Survey. Further description is available in the link below.
Canvas Quizzes have several parameters you can personalize within the Edit Quiz page.
Question Types:
The following question types are available in Classic Quizzes as compared to D2L:
| Canvas Question Types | D2L Question Types |
| Multiple Choice | Multiple Choice |
| True/False | True or False |
| Fill-in-the-Blank | Fill in the blanks |
| Fill-in-Multiple-Blanks | Multi-short-answer |
| Multiple Answers | Muti-select |
| Multiple Drop-down (used for Likert Scale) | |
| Matching | Matching |
| Numerical Answer | Arithemetic |
| Essay | Written Response/Short Answer |
| File Upload | N/A |
| Formula (simple formula and single variable) |
*New Quizzes does have Ordering and Hot Spot question types available.
What if I want to use a Question Library like in D2L?
Canvas uses Question Banks, which are very different from D2L’s Question Library.
More details about Question Banks is in the next accordion modal below.
If you want to utilize Question Banks, the best practice is to use Find Question on the Add Question page.
Adding Respondus LockDown Browser/Monitor:
Canvas does support the use of Respondus Lockdown Browser/Monitor in quizzing.
Best Practice: If you are using proctoring/anti-cheating software, give a low-stakes quiz utilizing it before the first graded quiz or exam. It’s better to see problems in a lower-pressure situation than to encounter them in an actual quiz or exam.
Students must launch Respondus Lockdown Browser first to access Canvas Classic Quizzes.
Moderating Quizzes:
Note: Do not remove Everyone from the original Assign To box. Click Add at the bottom of that box to assign to individual students.
Re-grading Quiz Questions:
This is much easier if you use Find Questions or build your questions in the exam rather than using Question Banks.
Best Practices, tips, and tricks:
Always check your Quiz Statistics-it can show you questions that may need to be rewritten or regraded.
Take a quiz using Student View to see how a student will experience it.
If you are linking files within an exam, make sure your students can access them.
Canvas stamps every click from every user, so if you have any questions about a particular student’s Quiz, check the Quiz Log.
The timestamps in the Quiz Log indicate time within the Quiz, not time of day.
Question Libraries in D2L and Question Banks in Canvas are similar in that they act as storage repositories for organizing questions and reusing questions across quizzes and courses. The main difference is the order of creation.
In D2L, the recommended practice is to create the Question Libraries first and then use those to build quizzes from questions in the library. While you can build the libraries after the fact by searching and adding questions directly from individual quizzes, the process is slightly more tedious. If you need to edit a question, you can do so from the library, and it will update the question in any quizzes that are pulling from the library. You can also set the library always to shuffle questions if you pull from a library. The point values are also set in the library.
In Canvas, you can either create the bank first or you can create the quiz first.
If you create the quiz first, all of the questions for that course go into a bank called Unfiled Questions. If you want to go back and create banks, you can move the questions out of the Unfiled Questions folder. If you want to make the banks first and have the questions pulled into a quiz, you can either use the Find Questions button at the bottom of the quiz or you can create a new Question Group and link that group to a bank. Question Groups are the only way to shuffle and randomize questions pulled from a bank. The main difference in Canvas is that questions pulled from banks are copies of the questions, not direct links.
If you change a question in a bank, it will not update in the quiz, whether you imported directly with Find Questions or linked the Question Group to a bank. Vice versa, if you make the change directly in the quiz, it won’t automatically update in the bank. You will have to change it both places. Another major difference is in the re-grade options.
You can only re-grade questions from the quiz, not the Question Bank.
If a question needs to be corrected or clarified, you need to go in and edit the quiz directly to change the answer.
If students have already submitted, it will give you the list of re-grading options.
Suppose you have the bank linked to a question group (aka, you can’t see the individual questions, only the bank's name). In that case, you won’t be able to regrade questions, and you will have to manually give points back for each student in the SpeedGrader.
The way linking works is that it waits until the student starts taking a quiz and pulls in a copy of all the questions it draws from the bank. If you can’t see the question in the quiz, you can’t regrade. If you are using a bank, using the Find Question button is best practice to add the questions directly to your quiz.
Ideally, in Canvas, you will always build the quiz out question by question and use that as the living record of the quiz. Banks should only be used for questions and groups of questions used repeatedly across multiple quizzes in a course.
Building the quizzes out in a question bank first is not recommended.
There is much to learn about Canvas, and we recommend diving into the Canvas Guides! The guides are thorough and include step-by-step processes alongside graphics. There are also options for video walk-throughs as well.
Canvas Instructor Guides: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/tkb-p/Instructor
