Welcome to Fall Quarter 2021! As you work to finalize your course sites to begin teaching next week, Teaching & Learning Technologies wanted to highlight something new and something changing about Canvas.
What’s New
Microsoft Teams is now available in all Northwestern Canvas courses via the NU Learning Apps tab.
Microsoft Teams is a secure, cloud-based chat and collaborative workspace that seamlessly integrates with Canvas and other Microsoft 365 applications, including Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The Microsoft Teams integration (also called Class Teams or Microsoft Teams classes) is available in all Canvas courses and allows instructors to create a team to chat and collaborate with their students.
When enabled in a Canvas course, a team is automatically created and all of the students are added as team members. The team will automatically update membership each time a student is added or dropped from the course. Following installation, all Microsoft Teams interactions are handled in the Teams app, not in Canvas.
Installation instructions and resources are available in the Canvas Learning Center.
What’s Changing
BigBlueButton is going away.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, September 14, the Canvas videoconferencing service BigBlueButton (aka Conferences) will be deactivated for Northwestern Canvas. The course navigation item will be removed from all course sites and any details about prior or future sessions will become inaccessible.
For any video conferencing needs in Canvas, Northwestern IT recommends using Zoom. Zoom is available in all Northwestern Canvas sites by default, and information about the setup and use of Zoom can be found in the Zoom Learning Center.
At this time, we also recommend reviewing the guidelines for instructors recording classes as the page has been updated with relevant information for fall 2021. While we anticipate low impact to instructors from the removal of BigBlueButton, please contact canvas@northwestern.edu if you have any questions.
Hero image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay