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.

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.

So when something isn’t working, do yourself and your colleagues a favor and open a ticket with the Technical Support Center. The form for doing that is at

https://planning.jccc.edu/TDClient/37/Portal/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=184&SIDs=1

As the form itself clarifies, if you are dealing with an emergency, please call the emergency help line at (913)469-8500, extension 4357, option 2. From a campus phone the extension can be dialed directly.

After many years’ wait (and through way too many clicks) it’s finally possible for a professor to submit files on behalf of their students in Canvas! There’s one really important limitation: it has to be an assignment whose Submission Type is Online, and the Online Entry Options have to include File Uploads.

1. In a Canvas section, click the Grades tool.
2. Scroll to the right until the assignment’s column comes into view.
3. Click the cell for the student for whom you want to make a submission.
4. Click the Grade Detail icon (a box with an inscribed arrow pointing to the right) that appears on the right edge of the cell. The Grade Detail “tray” will appear on the right side of the window.
5. Click the Submit for Student link.
   
6. Drag and drop files onto the Upload File dialog box, or click the Choose a file to upload link to browse for files.
7. Click the dialog box’s Submit button.

Professors can see the time of submission, and the name of the person responsible, in the Grade Details tray and in the SpeedGrader. Students can see this information in the assignment Details.

If a quiz has questions of the type you need to grade yourself, because Canvas can’t grade them automatically, it’s best to set a manual posting policy for that quiz in the Grades tool. Otherwise students checking on their grades before you’re done grading that quiz will see a confusing mix of information which can easily be misread to say that they bombed the quiz. See the steps for setting posting policies, and posting, below.

In Detail

There are types of quiz question Canvas can grade and types Canvas can’t grade. If a  quiz includes questions of the latter sort, it will hold whole submissions in an ungraded state until someone with “Teacher” role reviews the answers for those questions and assigns points for them. But what this ungraded state looks like to a student is a little different in different places that a student can look, and the differences can be confusing or alarming.

The Grades tool will report a new grade to the student in the form of a “badge” floating next to the tool on the course menu. When the student actually visits the Grades tool, the quiz will be an item on their list of grades, but instead of a number in the numerator it will have a (rocket ship) quiz icon. Hovering over the icon will pop up a message: “Instructor has not posted grade”.

However, if you have the Assignments tool enabled for students, and the student visits the tool after taking such a quiz but before their submission has been graded in full, the quiz will show a number in the numerator which includes zero points for the questions Canvas couldn’t grade. If half the questions on a 100-point quiz were questions Canvas can’t grade, the highest a student would see under Assignments would be 50/100. If all the questions were of a type that Canvas can’t grade, the student will see 0/100. And there’s no popup message to explain.

When a student looks back at their own not-fully-graded submission, either from the link in the Grades tool or the link in the Assignments tool (or from anywhere else) things aren’t entirely cleared up. There are numerous notations that some questions have not been graded, including on each specific question. But there are also numerous notations that the “score” for the attempt is a specific number based on the ungraded questions having a score of zero. If the student is already alarmed by the time they get to this view, it may not ease their mind at all.

The best approach to prevent this scenario is to switch the posting policy for the grades for such a quiz from “Automatic” (which is the default) to “Manual”.

The Steps

To Set a Manual Posting Policy on Grades for an Assignment

1. On the course menu, click the Grades item.
2. On the column heading for the quiz, click the vertical ellipsis menu.
3. Click the Grade Posting Policy item.
4. Click the Manually radio button so that it has the heavy ring.
5. Click the Save button.

To Post Grades for an Assignment with a Manual Posting Policy

1. On the course menu, click the Grades item.
2. On the column heading for the quiz, click the vertical ellipsis menu.
3. Click the Post grades item.
4. If you haven’t graded all the submissions yet, but you want to post the grades for the submissions you have graded, click the Graded radio button so that it has the heavy ring.
5. Click the Post button.

Microsoft always wants to be helpful, so it integrated its Teams meeting feature with Outlook’s calendar, making it easy to schedule them together — too easy. And once an Outlook meeting has a Teams meeting attached, there’s no way to cancel the Teams meeting separately. You have to cancel the whole thing and start over. And your would-be attendees get to deal with all the invitations and cancellations.

So, how many times have you scheduled a Teams meeting as part of an Outlook appointment by mistake? For the first few months of the integration, the answer for me was: “every time!”

How do we stop the madness? Tell Outlook that you don’t want it to add Teams to meetings automatically. That way you can always choose to add Teams when it’s appropriate.

(Do you mostly schedule Teams meetings now anyway, so you don’t want to lose that automation? Further below, we’ll explore the point in the scheduling process that the automation kicks in, so you can leave it enabled but turn it off for individual meetings before it’s too late.)

Tell Outlook Not to Add Teams to Your Meetings Automatically

Outlook Desktop

1. Open the File menu.
2. Near the bottom right corner, click the Options item.
3. On the left-side menu of options, click the Calendar item.
4. Under “Calendar options”, next to “Add online meeting to all meetings”, click the Add Meeting Provider… button.
   
5. Click the Add online meeting to all meetings checkbox until the box is empty.
6. Click the OK button to enact the change.
7. Click the OK button to dismiss the “Outlook Options” dialog.

From now on, scheduling a meeting won’t automatically schedule a Teams meeting for it. But you can always tell Outlook that you want a Teams meeting. Clicking the Teams Meeting button on an appointment window’s ribbon will add the Teams details to the body of the invitation.

Outlook 365

1. Click the Settings icon near the top right corner. (It looks like a gear.)
   
2. In the Search Outlook settings box, type “events”.
   
3. Click Events you create, which should be the first item in the search results.
4. When the “Settings” dialog opens, the main (right-hand) panel should be showing “Events and Invitations”. Under “Events you create”, click the Add online meeting to all meetings checkbox until the box is empty.
5. Click the Save button to enact the change.
6. Click the X button in the top left corner of the “Settings” dialog to dismiss it.

From now on, scheduling a meeting won’t automatically schedule a Teams meeting for it. But you can always tell Outlook that you want a Teams meeting. Clicking the Teams meeting switch (on the right side of the “Location” line), so that the indicator moves from left to right and lights up, will cause a Teams meeting to be scheduled when the appointment is saved.

Stop Outlook from Adding Teams to a New Meeting

Suppose you actually schedule Teams meetings most of the time, so you don’t want to turn off that automation. How do you avoid getting snagged by it for the occasional face-to-face meeting?

The trick is to know when during the process of scheduling the meeting in Outlook that the automation kicks in, so that you can interrupt it. The window for interruption opens the moment you let Outlook know that an appointment is a meeting by specifying an attendee to invite. The window closes when you send the invitation.

Outlook Desktop

In the desktop version of Outlook, fields for inviting attendees don’t show unless you click the Invite Attendees button. If you still have the Teams automation enabled, clicking that button will also poise Outlook to schedule a Teams meeting.

To prevent it from doing so, find and click the Don’t Host Online button on the ribbon — before you send the invitation.

Outlook 365

In Outlook 365, the field for inviting required attendees always shows, but the options for Teams don’t appear unless you actually put a name in the field. If you still have the Teams automation enabled, putting a name in the required attendees field will also poise Outlook to schedule a Teams meeting.

To prevent it from doing so, find and click the Teams meeting switch (on the right side of the “Location” line) so that the indicator dims and moves from right to left — before you send the invitation.

Some of you may read the title of this post and say to yourselves, “That’s easy!” because it used to be. But changes to the Canvas “rich content editor” have rendered this impossible without this one weird trick.

1. In the RCE, open the Insert menu, hover or arrow to the Image sub-menu, and select the Course Images option. (This assumes you’ve already uploaded the image. If you haven’t, select the Upload Image option for this step, take care of that first.)
2. In the Add panel, find and select the image.
3. Dismiss the Add panel.
4. Select the image in the RCE.
5. Click the Image Options pop-up button.
6. On the Image Options panel, switch Display Options from Embed Image to Display Text Link (Opens in a new tab).
7. Click the Done button to dismiss the Image Options panel. Your formerly embedded image has been replaced by a text link to the image.
8. In the RCE, place your insertion point between two of the characters in the text link.
9. Repeat Steps 1-3! (But be sure to choose Course Images in Step 1, because you’ve definitely uploaded it already.) This will embed the image inside the text link.
10. In the RCE, place your insertion point after the last character on the right side of the image and use the Backspace key to remove all the characters on the right side of the image.
11. Place your insertion point after the last character on the left side of the image and use the Backspace key to remove all the characters on the left side of the image. Now all that’s left in the link is the image.

A similar process will allow you to use an image as a link to anything. Just do whatever you need to do to create a text link to what you want, instead of steps 1-7, above. Then use steps 8-11 to get the image into the link and take out the text.

The option was useful if a professor had to enter grades over an extended period of time — evaluating essays for instance — and didn’t want a situation in which some students knew their grade for that assignment while other students didn’t.

That precise option is gone — but in its place is a more complicated set of options around what Canvas calls “grade posting policy”.

Each grade book as a whole has a posting policy, and each column has a posting policy. By default, these are all set to “automatic”: when a professor (or Canvas) enters a grade, the grade is also “posted” — meaning that it is communicated to the student on the spot.

The other option for the policies is “manual”: when a professor (or Canvas) enters a grade, nothing else happens. A professor must subsequently post grades for any column governed by a manual posting policy, using an option in the column’s head.

Once a grade has been posted, changing the policy (for specific columns or for all columns) won’t have any effect on that grade’s visibility to the student. To put a posted grade in an “unposted” state, Canvas provides the “Hide grades” option (also in each column’s head). This option revokes the posting for all grades in a column: it’s the reverse of the “Post grades” option, and basically replaced the old option to mute.

Talking about the “Hide grades” option in the context of grade posting policies is confusing, but necessary for three reasons. First, the icon for a column with hidden/unposted grades is the same: instead of a bell with a slash through it, it’s an eye with a slash through it. Second, you can’t invoke the “Hide grades” option until there are posted grades to hide. (On that row of the column head menu is a note instead, saying “No grades to hide”.

So, if you want to be sure from the outset that no students see their grade for a specific column until you’re ready (in the manner of the old “mute”) you have to do that by setting that column’s posting policy to “manual”. Once a single grade has been entered for the column, the slash-eye icon will show up.

The third reason is that once a single entered grade is in a hidden/unposted state, the same slash-eye icon will appear next to that student’s total grade. If the grade is in that state because of a posting policy you put on the column (or the grade book) at the start of a semester (or that another professor put on a course which you then copied unaware) by the time you get to that assignment or the end of the semester you many not remember (or have ever known about) that. So knowing all the things that icon can mean is important. You don’t necessarily have to understand the intricacies of posting policy, but remember that the icon means one or more grades is or are hidden and that the opposite state from “hide” is “post”.

If you want, check out the main Canvas Guide document on this subject, “How do I use posting policies in a course?” — which includes a truly frightening flowchart!

In each Canvas section, under “Settings” and “Course Details” there are two fields setting the start and end dates for that section in Canvas. The values are set to match the term to which the section belongs, when the section is created in Banner (the college’s big central database).

The Canvas start and end date fields are fields which a section’s professor can edit. However, every time there is an enrollment change — for example, because a student adds or drops the section — the same process which updates the Canvas section’s roster to match the Banner roster also updates the Canvas section’s dates to match the Banner dates.

This means that a professor can open a Canvas section early, but there’s a significant chance that by the time a student tried to take advantage of it being open, Banner might have closed it again — especially because enrollment changes are most frequent in the days before and just after a term starts.

The situation isn’t hopeless, however. Immediately below the start and end date fields is a check box labelled “Restrict students from viewing course before term start date”. By default, this box is checked. A professor can remove the check, effectively providing students the ability to “view” the section and its contents before the start date. We sometimes refer to this state as “read-only”: the section will show on an enrolled student’s “Course List” and enrolled students can navigate through any published content in the section. What they still can’t do (until after the start date) is interact with the content: no assignment submissions, discussion postings, quiz attempts, etc.

But since sometime shortly before the beginning of the Summer 2021 term, the attendance entry tool has apparently disappeared. A tool for entering “Midterm Grades” stands in its place. No midterm grade entry is required of faculty — but a record of a student’s early attendance is.

However, the change is entirely superficial! The tool labelled “Midterm Grades” is the mandatory attendance entry tool. It just has the wrong label on it, and work is being done to restore the proper label.

So, faculty should enter their reports of students’ mandatory attendance into the tool which is presently labelled “Midterm Grades”.