I want to give you a little “user’s guide” to the course web and Canvas setup since right now it might be a bit confusing.
You might notice, that the website and Canvas are a little hard to navigate right now. I apologize.
There are two things going on: one is we’re still getting things set up, and two is I made a design choice that we might regret. The good news is that you can see the course structure on the calendar. The bad news is that there are lots of empty pages that might get in the way – unless you know the right way to navigate around them.
After a week or two, we’ll hopefully have the kinks worked out and things will go smoothly.
To Navigate the web page:
The most important things will be made as announcements in the News feed (which appears on the course home page). If something important appears elsewhere (for example the details of an assignment are posted), there will be an announcement telling you where to look. The idea is the News page has short messages that point you towards longer messages elsewhere. You can get an RSS feed or emails about announcements. Look at the right side of the web page.
One piece of news each week will be a “The Week in 638” posting. This will happen at the end of the week and summarize what happened in class, and remind you about things for next week. There is also the “Week in 559” widget in the upper right of the course web. Keep your eye on that, since it will have links to posts that we think are relevant for the week.
Make sure you look at the “Class Calendar” page (you can see it at the top of the page – it’s one of the choices). This can give you an idea of what’s coming up beyond a week. Note that there are links to most (or all) assignments. Often these links will be to “stub” pages until we set the assignments. You don’t need to check this regularly – it won’t change, and any important changes will be announced.
In terms of the Canvas page
I decided to make all the assignments ahead of time – putting empty assignment pages so we get a nice syllabus and home page for the class. You can see what’s coming up. If you go to a page before the assignment is set, there won’t be much there – so don’t bother.
With Canvas, you get a lot of control over what announcements it sends you by email. You might want to go to the settings page and adjust it to your liking.
