Canvas Access for students

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Michael Bar

• August 08, 2022 02:16

I published (enabled) my courses on Canvas for the coming Fall 2022 semster, with some activities (e.g. quizzes) to help students review their prerequisite knowledge and prepare for the course. Only yesterday, I found out that students are unable to participate in the course until August 22. Here is a screenshot that one of my students sent to me:

Is there a way to allow students to participate in course activities right now?

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  Cristian Alvarado

  • August 08, 2022 02:29

  In the settings for the course check to see if you have the checkbox for disallowing students access until the term start date enabled. 
  
  

  We are also seeing that Canvas is super stringent on participation before and after term dates for both faculty and students alike. If the checkbox doesn’t change this behavior it may just be a “Canvas-ism” that we’ll need to get used to. 

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  Michael Bar

  • August 08, 2022 02:42

  My settings are below. The start of the course date cannot be changed by me. I left the box that restricts access before the term starts unchecked, in hope that students who are rusty with prerequisite knowledge can participate early.

  

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  Cristian Alvarado

  • August 08, 2022 02:52

  This may be unchangeable behavior, then. I will check tomorrow to see if there’s an admin setting I can tweak, but as mentioned before, Canvas is a lot more strict about what can and can’t happen outside of a course’s “term”.

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  Heather-Rose Lacy

  • August 08, 2022 16:24

  Since the department decided that chem180 shall have no prerequisites listed in the bulletin, I have an activity posted to help students check that they have the prerequisite skills. For the past 3 years I have asked students to do that activity 2 weeks before the semester starts. 
  Just letting you know in the hope you can add this thread to the (growing) list of must-have features. I hope the canvas engineers give you the keys to free us from all these canvasisms.

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  Cristian Alvarado

  • August 08, 2022 17:20

  Unfortunately, I've confirmed that the way that this works is that you can let students access the course before the term starts, but you cannot "participate" in a course until the term starts. There's no admin settings to change this. This is core functionality of how terms work in Canvas, so I do not have a lot of faith that this is something that Canvas engineers can actually change.

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  Heather-Rose Lacy

  • August 08, 2022 22:13

  Sounds like I will need to ask that prerequisites be added to the class requirements. May I screenshot this thread and present it to my department? 

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  Cristian Alvarado

  • August 08, 2022 22:19

  Go right ahead. 

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  Michael Bar

  • August 09, 2022 02:04

  Faculty transitioning to Canvas should be notified of this. I used the "Student View" tool in Canvas and was able to take the quizzes. After weeks of no activity on behalf of actual students enrolled, I emailed individual students and found out that they cannot participate in quizzes until August 22. This is how I found out, weeks after inviting students to participate early if they need to review prerequisites.

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  Lauren Tombari

  • August 14, 2022 08:55

  Regarding early Canvas access for students, does this work for us? (scroll down to the Early Full Access section)

  https://canvas.rutgers.edu/documentation/support/setting-early-access-in-canvas/

  I changed the participation field from "Term" to "Course" and that freed up the dates to allow students access. 

  I am not ready for students to access my course yet, so I haven't tried it yet, but would this work for early access?

  

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  Michael Bar

  • August 16, 2022 00:51

  Thank you Lauren, it works! My students are able to access and participate in the course content, such as "Introduce Yourself" discussion forum, as well as quizzes, after I switched the settings from "Term" to "Course", and chose a starting date that passed.

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