Posted on

Conversations about Canvas Commons

Canvas Commons

All colleagues who have a Teacher role in Canvas can access and contribute to a huge repository of content in Canvas Commons.  You can use Commons to share content with the global Canvas community or choose to restrict its visibility to teachers at Newcastle University.  You can also share content with yourself!

For the Art of the Possible we hosted workshops to explore Commons with Colleagues.  Our participants got stuck in enthusiastically.

What we liked:  

  • Commons is a great way to access generic content e.g. getting started with the library, or to share content across programmes.  (Our induction project team are using Commons to share induction materials with schools this year.)
  • Even if you don’t want to use the content it’s helpful to see how others have approached teaching your subject – it can give ideas and inspiration
  • The ability to gather quiz questions to adapt
  • It could help improve consistency between modules / courses
  • Commons is a good way to hold content that needs to be included in all/some courses – assignment templates, school policies, supports consistency.
  • You can use Commons to hold content that is private to you – making it easy to add content into multiple courses.
  • It makes it easy share content across the institution – rather than importing/exporting or adding permissions
Commons example

Why would you share content to Commons?

  • A way of sharing effective practice, building your reputation, and that of the University
  • Evidence your impact / influence for promotion
  • Building in consistency
  • When you don’t know who specifically will need to access the content
  • By sharing you are contributing to the educational community
  • To share knowledge and expertise

Some Cautions

Several participants commented on the huge amount of material in Commons, we saw how we could filter this by stage (UG/PG) or restrict our searches to content shared just with the Newcastle University.   We saw how we could share permalinks to content elements in Commons to make finding resources easier.

Canvas Commons content isn’t policed so we had good discussions about the need to check content for accuracy, and also to look out for international differences (eg prescribing guidance, legal regulations etc…).  We spoke about how different creative commons licenses could be added to support reuse and about how to give attribution to Commons Content shared with CC licenses.