During the 2022-2023 school year, UCSB is migrating to Canvas as it’s Course Management System (CMS). By Fall 2023, support for the prior CMS, Gauchospace, will be dropped.

A key benefit of Canvas is the ability to have a secure centralized gradebook, i.e. one where:

• Instructors, TAs and readers have read/write access to all grades
• Students have read only access to only their own grade

Other benefits:

• Adding/dropping is automatic, and synchronized with course enrollment
• All students and faculty already have a username/password (their existing UCSBNetID).

A consideration whenusing Canvas for actual curriculum content (e.g. content of lectures, labs, homework and programming assignments) is that typically only students enrolled in the course can see that content. This can make sharing curriculum resources more cumbersome.

Canvas Quick Tips (for instructors)

Setting up a reasonable subset of Canvas

When you get a new Canvas course set up, one of the first decisions you need to make is:

• Which parts of Canvas am I going to use?

It isn’t immediately obvious where you do this. Here’s how:

1. Find the Settings menu option at the bottom of the left navigation:

   

2. Click Settings, and it will take you to this:

   

3. Now, you want to click where it says Navigation, and you’ll end up here:

   

4. There are two parts of this page:

   • The collection of things that are being used in the course are in the top part
   • The collection of things that are not being used in the course are in the bottom part
   • Then don’t forget to scroll down and click SAVE or else your changes won’t stick!

   Drag things into the top part if you want to use them; drag things to the bottom if you don’t. For example, here’s a typical collection of tools that might be used for CMPSC 16:

   

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