Canvas Set-Up
Whether you're new to Canvas or to Mesa College, we're here to help you get your course up and running. As an instructor with the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD), you'll have both District support and MOST support.
Types of Support
District Support
If you are new to teaching online at SDCCD, you’ll likely be connected to the folks at SDCCD Online Learning Pathways to get enrolled into the SDCCD Online Faculty Certification Program managed and facilitated by the District. This is a required step across the District for our new-to-online faculty members. Through that certification program you'll meet the SDCCD Online team and the support that they offer.
MOST Support
At Mesa, you have another team available to assist you and support your online teaching efforts: Mesa’s Ongoing Success Team (MOST). Our team includes Mesa colleagues with extensive experience in online teaching and course design who recognize the nuances of teaching online and can help you to navigate the various systems and resources that are available to support you and your online students at Mesa.
Logging In
Canvas is the learning management system (LMS) that we use at our District and across the California Community College system.
- Login URL: https://sdccd.instructure.com/
- Username: your 10 digit Employee ID
- Password: your 8 digit birthdate (mmddyyyy)
Quick Tip: The Student Experience
As you start setting up your Canvas shell, it would be helpful to occasionally review it through the eyes of a student. To get a sense of the student experience, you can utilize SDCCD and Canvas tools.
Intro to Teaching in Canvas
To familiarize yourself with the Canvas experience as a student, you can enroll in SDCCD's Introduction to Teaching with Canvas self-paced course.
Student View in Canvas
See how your Canvas course shell looks for students enrolled in your class. Go to your Canvas shell and click the "Student View" button on the top right.
Looking for some extra tips for setting up your Canvas shell at the start of the semester? Check out our Canvas Course Prep Bingo sheet!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Each District manages their Canvas instance differently. Hopefully this information helps with questions that you may have about how SDCCD manages our Canvas accounts and course shells.
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The URL for SDCCD's Canvas instance is: sdccd.instructure.com
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Canvas teaching shells will be automatically created for you based on what you are assigned to teach in the District schedule. That means that if you are scheduled to teach a class, you should have a Canvas teaching shell available for that CRN when you login to Canvas. It also means that those Canvas shells are created automatically on a specific date (decided by District) after the District schedule for the corresponding semester has gone live.
- Remember if you intend to use the Canvas shell for your course, then you'll need to publish it for it to be visible/available to students.
- If you don't plan to use Canvas, then you'd just leave the shell untouched and it remains unpublished/invisible to students.
Need a Development Shell?
A development shell is a Canvas shell that is not linked to a CRN and therefore will not enroll actual Mesa students. It is helpful if you are developing a course for future delivery, or you want a "clean" copy of your course that functions as a "master copy," or if you are working on a professional development course for Canvas. To request a development shell, you can call 24/7 Canvas Support at 1-844-612-7422 to make that request. Keep in mind that you will need to copy from your development shell into your teaching shell in order to make your materials available to students.
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When you import one Canvas shell into another, it actually merges the two shells. So, if your development shell contains old outdated content that you want to replace with your new teaching shell content, then it's best to first empty the development shell.
- Reset your development shell (Settings > Reset Course Content) This will empty out your development shell.
- Then import your teaching shell into your development shell. This Canvas guide will help: How to I copy course content from one shell to another?
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As the teacher of your Canvas course shell you can enroll other Canvas accounts into that course shell. You will not be able to assign them the role of student, however. (Students will be automatically enrolled into your courses.) To enroll colleagues into your course:
- Go to People on the course menu.
- Click the "+ People" button.
- Search for your colleague by email address (or 10 digit ID)
- Select the desired role and click "Next."
- If Canvas finds an account with that email/ID, you'll be prompted to select the account and add it.
- If Canvas doesn't find an account with that email address, you'll be prompted to search again.
- Role: You won't be able to assign the role of "Student" to the account you are enrolling. Choose from the available roles.