Canvas Rich Content Editor

By leveraging the Rich Content Editor (RCE) in Canvas Pages, you have the flexibility to enrich your teaching materials with a diverse range of content. This includes not only links to course-specific materials and videos, but also resources such as PowerPoint presentations and external webpages.

For example, you can embed links to your course materials such as your lecture slides (2) or incorporate a video ReCap of your lecture (1).

You are also able to add rich media to your courses, such as graphics and other video. 

Additionally you can link to external web resources (3) you can provide links internal course tools like discussion boards (4).

There is also the ability to embed external videos from resources such as YouTube (5) using the embed function. 

Essential resources for the assessment can be made readily accessible to students by providing pertinent links. These may include links to guidelines, policies, and additional support such as discussion boards.

In the following example, we have incorporated a link to a discussion board (1), enabling students to anonymously pose questions about the assessment. Additionally, we have included an email link (2) for direct communication with the module leader. Links to school policies and university regulations, such as student progress and plagiarism, are also provided (3).

By consolidating all necessary information for the assessment in one place, we eliminate the need for students to search elsewhere.

This approach promotes clarity and guidance, by providing links directly to resources for students rather than students needing to find these resources themselves.

Links can be incorporated into your announcements to guide students towards specific resources you wish to highlight.

In the example provided, we prompt students to review a pre-lecture task located on a Canvas page. By including a direct link (1), students are navigated straight to the resource, eliminating any potential confusion. This ensures that all necessary resources are conveniently provided within the announcement message itself.

Links to the discussion topic and technical guidance on utilising Canvas Discussion boards can be incorporated. This approach is beneficial as it equips students with all the necessary resources for active participation in the discussion, while also providing context to the discussion topic.

In this instance, we are offering a link to the module corresponding to the current teaching week (1). This serves to give students a prompt for the discussion and context for the topic under discussion. Additionally, we provide technical guidance for utilising discussions (2).

Using the Rich Content Editor (RCE) in Canvas New Quizzes allows you to create more engaging and interactive quiz content.

When adding a new question, you can use the RCE to format text, add images, embed videos, and include links, providing context or additional resources within the question itself.

Use the RCE to add rich content to the instructions and descriptions for the quiz, such as videos explaining the quiz format, images illustrating key concepts, or links to study materials (1). You can also provide support links to students to help them understand how to use the quiz interface (2). 

The Find and Replace functionality in the Canvas Rich Content Editor is a great tool designed to make editing more efficient. Imagine you’re working in the Canvas Rich Content Editor and you realise you’ve consistently used the wrong term or need to update a phrase. Instead of manually searching through each instance, Find and Replace allows you to quickly locate and update all occurrences all at once. 

With Student View, you can navigate the course from a student’s perspective, including viewing content which is useful to ensure content is displaying as intended in your course.

You can access Student View from various areas of the course, including Home, Modules, Assignments, Announcements, Discussions, Quizzes, Pages, Syllabus, and Outcomes. You can do this by selecting the "View as Student" button in the top right of the screen, as shown below:

This allows you to view the course exactly as a student would. For instance, students do not have access to the Settings navigation link that instructors can see.

You’ll know you’re in Student View by the persistent box at the bottom of the screen indicating you are logged into Student View (1).

You can reset the Test Student by clicking “Reset Student”(2). This will clear all activity that does not involve interactions with other students.

 To return to the instructor view, click the “Leave Student View” (3) button.

The “View Page History” feature in Canvas allows you to track and manage changes made to any editable page within a course. By accessing the page’s history through the options menu, users can see a list of all revisions, including the date, time, and author of each change. If you need to go back to a previous version, you can restore any of these previous revisions.  

When you’re viewing the page you want to restore, look for the Options icon (1), which is usually represented by three vertical dots in the top-right corner of the page. Click on this icon, and from the dropdown menu, select View Page History (2).

This will open a list of all the changes made to the page, including the date, time, and author of each revision. You can then choose a previous version to restore if needed by selecting the version then selecting "Restore this Version" (3).