Using publisher content with Canvas can be challenging.  The Educational Technology Center offers support for helping with integrating your publisher tools to your course.  For additional support contact edtech@jccc.edu or ext. 3842

Resources

• Canvas Community – How to Connect Canvas to Publisher Content
• How to add VitalSource Bookshelf to your Canvas course (PDF)

McGraw-Hill

• McGraw Hill Integration Resources
• McGraw-Hill Support by Product
• McGraw Hill Representative Finder

Pearson

• Pearson Integration Resources
• Pearson Educator Support
• Pearson Representative Finder

Cengage

• Cengage Integration Resources
• Cengage Platform-Specific Training
• Cengage Representative Finder

Fixed: Alternative Text for Image Files Copy to New Semester

Alternative text added to image files in Canvas Files area through Ally’s Instructor Feedback will now copy over from semester to semester. Your Ally score will stay the same in the new course. Please note that the Ally score will take some time (up to an hour) to update in the new course due to the system conducting a new review.

Updates to Student Alternative Formats

New Feature: Handwritten Content Now Supported in Scanned PDF Files

Handwritten content within a scanned PDF should be converted to text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for students downloading the Ally Alternative Formats. The availability of this format is dependent on the quality of the image and the handwriting. This is for English only at this time (does not support math or content in other languages).

Math Support: Word Documents Now Available in 3 New Alternative Formats for Students

Students can download three new alternative formats for math content within Microsoft Word Documents:

• HTML Alternative Format converts Office Math to MathML in their browser (webpage).
• Audio Alternative Format should read content from the Math Editor in an understandable way.
• Immersive Reader Alternative Format allows students to access additional accessibility features including the MathJax contextual menu option.

While it’s true Canvas defaults to English, you can switch for a specific class and change the menu titles, buttons, and functions throughout your course. Beware, though, it also changes things in Settings, so make sure you know the language enough to switch it back!

Rubrics establish a common yardstick. Whether you’re assessing a poetic analysis or a coding project, the criteria remain steady. No more subjective guesswork; every student benefits from the same measuring tape.

Additionally, rubrics demystify the grading process. As learners, they understand why they earned an 8 out of 10 and it becomes a roadmap for growth.

Here’s how to do it:

I know, I know – you’ve checked to make sure that those files you don’t want to see are unpublished, but there is often confusion with multiple versions and folder access that may cause an interruption in students being able to see files you want. So, how do you give access to the files without the Files on the menu? Link to them.

Link to them in your modules:

Link them in a Page:

Even open them by default in a page:

And finally – how do you keep students from accessing the Files on the navigation menu? Turn it off in Settings > Navigation tab:

As always, let us know if you have any questions or need assistance with your course. Want to do a full evaluation or course redesign? Let us know!

If you haven’t used the tool before, it asks you to create an account. But it also uses the Microsoft Single Sign-On that provides access to most other college web services. So you don’t need to choose a username or password. Just enter your college email address and you’ll be passed to the familiar sign-on form to enter your usual password.

If accessing the tool from inside Canvas, it may just ask if it has your email address right, since you’re already signed on.

The first time into the tool, it will ask you for a “community” to join. These aren’t the same as Canvas communities, they’re just the tool’s designation for the different areas it serves: Academic Achievement Center, Language Resource Center, Library, Science Resource Center, and Writing Center. And the only reason it asks first thing is that it wants to use one as your account’s initial “home page”. But you can always access the others from a set of buttons along the left side.

This is a great resource for our students, and it’s a great convenience to have it on everyone’s Canvas menu automatically.

For more information on creating saved filters, check out this page from Canvas.

Copy and Paste into your Syllabus tool

1. Find the template source page in the CTL community in Canvas.
2. Select the entire body of the template source page.
3. Copy the selection (via [Ctrl]+[C] or right-click > Copy or menu > Edit > Copy).
4. Enter your Canvas course and open the Syllabus tool.
5. Click the Edit button toward the top right.
6. Paste the selection from Step 3 (via [Ctrl]+[V] or right-click > Paste or menu > Edit > Paste).
7. Remove the instruction block at the top, replace any [[bracketed]] text with the appropriate information, and make any other additions as needed.
8. Click the Save button to the right below the editing box.

To Import via Commons

You can also import the template source page itself from the Canvas Commons.

Click the Import/Download button. A sliding menu will open – select your course and then click on Import.

This will add the template source page as a page in your course, which you can edit and present to students as you would any other page. If you want the content to appear in the body of the course Syllabus tool, you’ll still have to go through the steps above. You’ll just be performing steps 2-3 on your own copy instead of the copy in the CTL community.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot: that is, an app you can have a conversation with. It runs on, and provides access to, a “large language model”: basically a library of text patterns intended to mimic the linguistic working of a human brain in a specific language (in this case, English).

You can have a free-wheeling conversation with ChatGPT, but what really has people talking is that you can give it a “prompt” asking for a text composition with any number of specific characteristics — length, topic, structure, style — and it will return you that very composition.

You don’t have to know anything about the topic or structure or style to get useful results. And ChatGPT doesn’t know anything in its own right about any topics — that’s not the kind of AI it is. It only repeats what it’s read on the internet. But it will repeat it as a new composition rather than as a quote (unless you ask it for quotes, and it might be making those up).

The opportunity for someone to have ChatGPT (or similar tools) compose text which they then pass off as their own is obvious. It isn’t straightforward plagiarism, or exactly a matter of hiring someone to write your paper. It’s potentially like hiring someone to plagiarize for you with such sophistication that it might never be detected as plagiarism.

Fortunately, Turnitin has already come to our rescue. The company, which is founded on plagiarism detection, recognized that tools like ChatGPT are creating text which presents some of the same problems as plagiarism but which can’t be detected as such. So Turnitin has built its own AI to detect AI writing.

The company rolled out the new features on 4 April 2023 in basically all of its services, including the one which we have built into our Canvas LMS. And every sample submitted to it since that date is automatically being checked for possibly having been written by an AI.

Professors don’t need to do anything to activate it (and can’t opt out, except by not using Turnitin). But AI Writing Detection works a little differently from the prior Similarity Report. The major difference is that it is only available to professors and administrators. In other words, when a student looks at the similarity report for their own work, they will not and cannot see the AI writing detection report. A professor will for the same work, but not in Canvas. To see the AI writing detection report requires clicking through the similarity report icon for the student’s submission to enter the Turnitin environment.

Click on the percentage Similarity Icon in the Canvas Speedgrader using Turnitin.  Then you will see a AI icon in the lower right corner representing the percentage of AI content flagged by Turnitin.

The reason for the difference is because of the difference in what Turnitin is doing with AI writing detection. With the similarity report, Turnitin finds actual verbatim instances of pieces of text from a new submission in a prior submission or out on the internet. The only question is whether these similarities rise to the level of plagiarism.

Turnitin’s AI writing detection involves another AI evaluating a submission for the likelihood that it was written by an AI. The AI returns a percentage likelihood, something between 0 and 100%, and Turnitin’s confidence in that percentage is 98%. In other words, Turnitin is 98% confident that whatever likelihood its AI assigns to the writing having been done by another AI is accurate. But that leaves room for false positives (and negatives!) so it’s important that the likelihood only be reported to the professor and for the professor to then decide whether and how to handle the situation.

Turnitin has great further information and discussion available through its blog post announcing the release of its AI Writing Detection.