Online Teaching - Papers

Teaching Online, 101: A Guide for History Department Instructors 
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Many in the department have, up til now, relied on collecting student papers in-person. These instructions will help you collect them online instead.

To accept papers in this way, you will create an Assignment in Canvas, well before the due date. The Assignment will be the place students go to get information about the paper (including its due date), and also the place they come to upload their completed paper when it is ready to submit. 

To create a paper assignment:

  1. On the lefthand Canvas menu, choose Assignments.

    On the Assignments page, click the blue +Assignment button at the upper-right
     

     
  2. Enter an appropriate title for the paper assignment.
     
    In the body text, enter any instructions you would like to provide for the students regarding the paper assignment.
     
    (You can also, if you wish, paste in links to external resources, or use the Files tab at the righthand side to attach files that you have previously uploaded into the Files section of Canvas. Note however that I do not recommend actually uploading files through this panel--Canvas has a bug which can put the wrong link into your assignment.)
     

     
  3. Scroll down. Under Submission Type, choose Online, and check File Uploads
     
  4. Continue down. Optionally (if student academic conduct is a concern for you), under Plagiarism Review, you can change it from None to SimCheck. The default settings should be fine
     
  5. Continue down. Under Due, put your paper due time. Double-check it carefully--date, time, am/pm
     
  6. At the very bottom, click Save & Publish.  

When the paper Due time has passed you can download the student papers as follows: 

  1. On the lefthand side of the Canvas course, go to Assignments, and click on your paper assignment
     
  2. On the righthand panel, look for Download Submissions.
     

     
    If you click this, all the student submission files will be packaged together in a Zip file, and downloaded to your computer via the normal browser download mechanism (the download may take a few moments to process).
     
    The file-names within the Zip file will include the student's name and student ID number, as well as an indication of whether the upload was late, relative to the Due date
     
    (Note that instead of clicking Download Submissions, you can click Speed Grader to read, comment on, and grade papers online. It can be a useful interface, but it is not necessary to learn until you are comfortable with the basics.) 

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