RaiderCanvas is the Texas Tech University name for Canvas.

In Fall 2023, anticipating the conclusion of the contract for the existing learning management system (LMS), Blackboard (Anthology), a team of Texas Tech faculty, staff, and students began the required Request For Proposals process to select a new LMS. The finalists included proposals from Blackboard Ultra (Anthology), Brightspace (D2L), and Canvas (Instructure). Feedback was gathered from faculty and staff regarding the LMS search, along with a pilot program that involved undergraduate classes in English and Applied Personal Finance which utilized all three LMS platforms.

Ultimately, the committee recommended the selection of Canvas as the next LMS, and since that time a contract has been finalized. A migration plan for the campus has been implemented for a thirteen-month period, aligning with Anthology’s contract ending in September 2025.  This change brings the opportunity to reset our pedagogy, design, and delivery for online courses and enhance face-to-face and hybrid courses.

• 3rd Party Course Migration (January – February 2025)
• RaiderCanvas Primary LMS (Summer 2025)
• No Blackboard Courses (Fall 2025)
• RaiderCanvas Fully Deployed (Fall 2025)

• All LTIs/courseware have been integrated with Canvas; with the exception of:
  • There is still being work done on Mediasite. If you use the Mediasite integration, you will need to link your videos via a weblink until this piece is completed.
  • Examsoft cannot be integration until we are completely out of Blackboard, which is Fall 2025.
• The setup of vendor settings is NOT automated in the course migration.
• There is a potential that some courses will have sections active in both Blackboard and Canvas. It will be critical to communicate these scenarios to your publisher to ensure their setup has accounted for these variables.

Now! Starting on December 5th, all faculty will have access to RaiderCanvas. You will have a sandbox course that you can use to practice in, a development course to begin developing a course, access to the Growing with Canvas training course, and access to the RaiderCanvas All Faculty course. If you are not able to access Canvas, please contact RaiderCanvas Support.

All faculty will be able to start teaching with Canvas in Summer, 2025 and will be required to use Canvas in Fall, 2025.

Blackboard will be unavailable at the end of Summer II, 2025.

• Canvas Community has a wealth of helpful videos and step-by-step instructions.
  • Canvas Instructor Videos
  • Canvas Instructor Guides
• You will also have access to the Canvas Training Services Portal within RaiderCanvas. This training portal has live webinars and on demand training. Here are the steps to access it and the recommended trainings:
  • On the left Global Navigation Menu, select "Help".
  • Then select "Training Sessions Portal"
  • It will take you to a page asking you to "Authorize" the app > select Authorize.
  • This Training Portal is available until Summer 2025.
  • Recommended Trainings in the Training Services Portal

Please join us for and register for RaiderCanvas Trainings!

• April 15 from 10:00 AM - Noon - Hands-On Building with RaiderCanvas
• April 16 from 10:00 - 10:30 RaiderCanvas Pop-Up Training - Collaboration
• April 18 from 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM Hands-On Building with RaiderCanvas 
• April 23 from 11:30 AM – Noon RaiderCanvas Pop-Up Training – New Analytics
• April 24 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM - Hands-On Building with RaiderCanvas

RaiderCanvas - Global Navigation, Canvas Basics, Assignments and SpeedGrader

RaiderCanvas - New Quizzes and Gradebook

If you need to import course content to Canvas you will use the Import Existing Content option in Canvas. Moving Courses from Blackboard to Canvas

We will migrate one iteration of each course per instructor to Canvas. If you taught both an online course and a face-to-face (F2F) course, both will be moved to Canvas. The course migration process will bring over course content of live courses as well as non-academic, development and template courses that were accessed in the last year and a half.

Courses from the last three academic years will be archived. To ensure you have access to all of your older materials, we strongly recommend you save all relevant course resources to an external storage solution (e.g., Google Drive, OneDrive).

When you access the Canvas Training Portal, you will find information about how to create assignments and assessments, information about assessments, course communication tools, course settings, and the mobile app – and much more.

During the transition from Blackboard to Canvas, course restoral requests will be limited to critical situations only, such as grade disputes, EEOC matters, or accreditation reviews. 

• According to Blackboard guidelines, a course exported from Blackboard (the export package) will automatically expire and be deleted after 30 days from the date it was created; meaning you have 30 days to download and store it on your computer if you need to access it later.
• You will see a pop-up notification from Blackboard about this expiration when you create the exported course package. To avoid expiration problems, save all relevant course resources to an external storage solution (such as OneDrive) or import your course to Canvas.  
•  To import the Blackboard course content to Canvas, you will use the Import Existing Content option in Canvas. Here’s a resource that describes the process: Moving Courses from Blackboard to Canvas.

Yes, the courses sizes will still be 2.5GB. Video files can take up the majority of that space, linking the Mediasite link in Canvas will prevent issues regarding adding content to your course.

Faculty will still have access to Respondus Lockdown; however, we will no longer use Proctorio. Please look for announcements soon for other tools to assist faculty in protecting the integrity of non-proctored, online exams.

We have designed a template for courses that are developed in Canvas. The template emphasizes clean, universal design principles and provides students with a consistent course design when faculty adopt it. We highly encourage you to use this framework.

Rubrics work really well in Canvas! They can be attached to assignments and used to grade and provide feedback. You can create a rubric on the Assignment page or on the Manage Rubrics page. The Manage Rubrics page lists all of the rubrics in the course, while an assignment page displays only the rubric for that assignment.

Additional resources:

• Rubrics in Canvas Overview
• How do I manage rubrics in Canvas?
• Adding a Rubric to an Assignment in Canvas

As an instructor, you can control which links appear in Course Navigation. Canvas includes a set of default Course Navigation links that are shown by default and cannot be renamed. 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 want to emphasize the importance of clean navigation structure. We know that many students will use the Canvas mobile app and maintaining a more minimalistic navigation structure is more helpful when accessing content on a mobile device. For this reason, we do not recommend including external links on the navigation structure.

For example, if there are no learning outcomes set for the course, you see the Outcomes link with the Visibility icon, but students cannot see the link at all. Configured External Apps may create additional Course Navigation links.

Canvas does not have a plagiarism detector built in. TTU is currently in the process of exploring the options for a plagiarism detector.

• Discussions in Canvas allow peer interaction as well as student/instructor interaction. The Discussion assignments can be set to be graded or used as a Q&A area for students.
• How do I use the discussion index page? Your students can even reply to a Canvas discussion with a video by using the "Media Recording" tool within the rich text editor, allowing them to record a video directly within the discussion and submit it as their reply.
• It is very easy to create group sets in a course so that students can have small group discussions with their peers. This is also very helpful with peer review assignments and group projects.
• How to create a group discussion.

Yes! Canvas has a mobile app for both students and teachers. They are available from the iOS and Google Play app stores. From the Canvas Teacher app teachers can grade, communicate and update their courses. The Canvas Student app gives students access to view grades and course content, as well as submit assignments.

Yes, you can give students extended time on quizzes or tests in Canvas. Canvas provides a feature that allows instructors to set accommodations for individual students, including extended time on quizzes. How to give students extra time in a quiz.

You can also give individual students or groups of students access to a quiz or test. How do I give a student or groups of students' extra attempts on a test.

Canvas provides a variety of accessibility features designed to ensure that all students, including those with disabilities, can navigate and engage with course materials effectively. Here are some key accessibility components in Canvas:

• Screen Readers and Browsers
• Canvas Navigation with Screen Readers
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Accessibility Checker in the Rich Content Editor 

We will have an integrated accessibility tool once the procurement process is completed.

Currently all third-party vendor tools have been integrated with Canvas with the exception of Mediasite, Sage Vantage and ExamSoft. All three of these are actively being worked on.

The Canvas dashboard is the landing page for Canvas and the first thing students and instructors see when you log in. For instructors, the dashboard allows you to quickly view upcoming assignments, due dates, student activity across your courses, your ‘to do” list for items that need attention and navigation between your courses.

Yes! There are great resources from Tophat that show how to connect your courses in Canvas, how to add your student roster, how to sync your grades and more.

Follett Discover enables faculty and faculty proxies (e.g., a departmental administrative assistant) to easily discover, research, and adopt course materials in a single interface. Follow these step-by-step instructions to adopt learning materials.

Courses can be cross-listed in Canvas. You will need to email the LMS support team at RaiderCanvas and provide the course information with a parent course distinction. In Canvas, all of the course enrollments will be moved to the parent course. You will work from the parent course and the students in all sections will see the content in the parent course. When the LMS Support Team cross-lists the courses, they will change the name of the parent course, so you and the students can easily locate the course.

You cannot directly "send" your Canvas messages to your email, but you can receive email notifications whenever someone sends you a message through Canvas. These notifications include the message content and allow you to reply directly from your email depending on your notification settings. You can manage your notifications by going to your account settings and choosing the types of Canvas messages you want to receive.

When inbox messages are sent in Canvas they are sent to the students TTU email. Students will also receive an email in their TTU email box when an announcement is posted in Canvas course. 

Yes. To prevent students from messaging the instructor through the Canvas Inbox, navigate to your account settings, and within the “Conversations” section, select the option to “Opt-out of Canvas Inbox.

Yes, there is a setting that allows students to reply to course Announcements. The option to disable this is located in the course Settings. Navigate to your course Settings, under the “Course Details” tab, check the box that says “Disable comments on announcements” if you do not want students to be able to reply to announcements.

The visibility of the Syllabus link can be changed, but the syllabus tool is a very helpful tool for students. The Syllabus feature in Canvas provides an easily accessible link for students to view the syllabus details as well as any type of assignment including the due date in the course.  

Canvas Course Syllabus 

If your course was migrated as part of the K16 migration, tests will come over from Blackboard. There will be some clean-up necessary, and it is recommended that you go through your tests and item banks to be sure they are correct. It is possible that tests with equations will require some modifications and clean-up.

Canvas does allow instructors to create question/item banks, which are collections of questions that can be reused in quizzes. When creating a quiz, instructors can pull random questions from these banks (orsets) to consturct the exam.

In Canvas, there is no dedicated "blog" or "journal" tool, but you can effectively create a journaling or blogging function by utilizing the Discussion tool and setting up individual group discussions for each student so that it simulates a private space for them to post journal entries while allowing you to grade the entries and provide feedback. You could also create a standard assignment with a text submission.

The Canvas Gradebook is extremely user friendly. There are filter options down to the module, as well as filtering by assignment type.  A grade can be automatically added for missing submissions.

The main differences between Blackboard and Canvas for the gradebook are:

• Students can calculate their hypothetical total scores using the What-if feature.  
• You can curve grades for an assignment using a bell curve based on a manually entered average score.  
• Row colors alternate to improve readability and icons show you what still needs to be graded.  
• You can create late and missing policies to automatically apply grades to late and missed assignments.

In Canvas, you cannot:

• Hide rows from the instructor.
• Manually create a column in the gradebook without creating an offline assignment. However, you can create a non-submission assignment in Canvas that will create a grade column to manually enter grades.
• Create weighted, average, minimum-maximum, or total columns. You can weight final grades based on Assignment Groups
• Weight individual assignments (weighting is done by Assignment Group)
• Override the maximum point value of a column 

There are many advantages to using a weighted grading scheme. For example, you don’t need to manipulate points to make your total points work out to a nice even number (like 1000), and you don’t need to shuffle points around when you add, remove, or change an assignment. Also, you can easily ensure that major assignments, like essays or exams, will be worth more than multiple small assignments, such as a series of homework assignments or participation points without worry about the math.

To use weighted grading in Canvas, you will need to find assignments on the left-side navigation and click the +group button. Type of the name of each desired group, for example, “discussions” and “participation.” When you have finished creating your groups, click on the option button next to assignments button (option = three dots and select assignment groups weight. Check the box that says “weight final grade based on assignments groups” and enter the weight of each category as a percentage.  These percentages can be changed at any time and students will be notified when any changes are made.

In the Canvas gradebook, the total grade column displays the percentage grade for all graded assignments that have received a grade. In other words, the total column displays the “running grade,” which does not include any assignments or students that have not been graded. By default, Canvas displays the Total Grade in the instructor gradebook and the student's grade view as a percentage. If you use unweighted assignment groups in your course, you can display the total grade as points. If desired, you can display the total grade as a letter grade by going to settings and viewing the course details page. When you enable the course grading schema, the total grade will be displayed as both a percentage and a Letter Grade (based on the grading scheme).

Recently I participated in a discussion in which someone asked, “What if my students use QuizMate to answer online, multiple-choice tests?” QuizMate is an example of one of the many mobile apps or browser extensions that allow students to snap a picture of a question so that an AI assistant can instantly provide an answer and explanation of a given topic. A more positive application is that this tool could be used to take a picture of text and generate a quiz to test comprehension and recall. These apps typically work by providing instant answers or more extended feedback, for example:

Instant answer:

Exchange rates are affected by:

Economic conditions
Currently traders’ expectations
Country’s gross domestic product (GDP)
All of the above
Answer: d) All of the above

Extended Feedback:

“The economic policies of a country (which are decided by a government) and the trends of its economy effect the value of its currency in the foreign exchange market.”

Answer: The answer is true. The economic policies implemented by a country can impact factors such as the interest rates, inflation, and overall economic stability, which in turn influences the value of its currency in the foreign exchange market. Additionally, the performance and trends of a country’s economy, such as DGP growth and trade distribution, also play a significant role in determining the value of its currency. Overall, these factors are interconnected and contribute to the fluctuations in a country’s currency value in the foreign exchange market.

As AI technology evolves, so will the potential for its misuse. Already we are aware of AI essay generators, problem-solving applications, translation or paraphrasing tools, writing style imitators, plagiarism bypass tools, tools that mimic typing or mouse patterns, optical character recognition (to extract text from pdfs or images) and more. I have undoubtedly missed a category of tools or something new will be introduced tomorrow. No doubt, education has been disrupted.

Can these apps accurately answer questions?

According to a study which used approximately 1,000 test questions from five semesters of exams conducted by Kenneth Hanson at Florida State University, ChatGPT typically answered difficult questions correctly and easy test questions incorrectly. Hanson said, “ChatGPT is not a right-answer generator; it’s an answer generator.” Although I agree that ChatGPT (used as an umbrella-term here for generative-AI tools) often predicts the correct answer or pattern, we are all aware of the hallucinations and mistakes made by AI. That said, AI abilities and efficiencies only improve at a phenomenal rate. This leads to our conundrum of how we might design assessments that out-perform AI?

Are there resources to help?

Instructors at Texas Tech will continue have access to Respondus Lockdown Browser. Respondus records student movements and flags exams if a student leaves the view, their eyes wander, or another person enters the screen. But cheating finds a way, and unfortunately, this is only a deterrent and can be easily circumvented. TTU Online continues to examine additional tools to assist faculty in protecting the integrity of non-proctored, online exams. TTU does not endorse reliance on AI detection tools given their notorious biases and false-positive predictions of AI generated-work but we continue to look for new developments in this field.

This is important:

Let’s start by acknowledging that our identities as educators are being challenged and our workload, burnout, and stress may be higher than ever before. Whew.
I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge our need to emphasize AI ethics and help students identify guiding principles to help them consider responsible use. Not just for their own integrity but also in consideration for the greater good as we consider global impacts and costs of dependence on AI.

Suzanne Tapp, Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Director, Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center

Teaching an online, asynchronous class has become more complicated over the past two years with the accessibility of AI but cheating is not new. After all, students can screenshot and post to Quizlet or CourseHero or even pay a third-party vendor to take a test or write a paper. The following are just a few ideas that may act as a deterrent or offer advice:

Can you reword test problems and questions with fake compound names or images?
Can you group related questions? For example, describe a problem in item #10 and then refer to it in items 11-15 to avoid pointing and clicking on a particular question?
Is it possible to have a rule (documented in your syllabus) that a notation different from that shared in class is not acceptable?
Can you use vocabulary specific to your class and the required resources/readings? For example, can you ask, “What would the author of X say to the author or our chapter about Y concept?”
Reconsider requiring the feasibility of in-person, proctored tests. The logistics are likely to be a nightmare, and these expectations cannot be implemented mid-course.
Don’t try creating background that cannot be read by AI. It is highly likely that you will create something that is problematic for ADA accessibility.
Better but more time-intensive solutions involve course-level revisions such as moving to a project-based evaluation instead of online exams or creating scaffolded assignments that require versioning or history to document progress. It is also important to note that communicating clear expectations related to academic integrity and working to build a positive classroom climate, be it in a face to face or online course, can go a long way. For further reading on this topic, you might find these resources helpful.

Do you have ideas or something specific that’s working in your classes related to testing and AI? I would love to hear about it! Please email me to share your ideas as we continue to crowdsource ways to navigate this new terrain in teaching and learning.

Suzanne Tapp, Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Director, Teaching, Learning, and Professional Development Center