Early Bird

Canvas Spotlight: Share content with other instructors

Completed pages, discussions, quizzes, assignments and entire modules can be sent to and from your peers.

By Michael Rupert, Todd Wolfe and Alex McDaniel

February 8, 2022

Building a full course from scratch can be quite an undertaking in terms of time and effort. Converting Open Educational Resources, building pages and writing quizzes and assignments are investments of resources that may compete with other priorities (such as interacting with your students). This can be a lot to take on individually.

However, teaching should never feel isolating. This is where we can turn to our peers for help and support. Many of us teach the same (or similar) content and have knowledgeable peers in our fields who may be willing to share content and resources. Thankfully, Canvas acknowledges the need for collaboration in education and provides you with a few quick and easy ways of sharing content.

Canvas has content-sharing tools built in that allow you to send and receive completed pages, discussions, quizzes, assignments and even entire modules. The following tutorial demonstrates the easiest ways to share content and provides some tips and techniques for when and why you might want to share content with another instructor.

Best practices

• You can share individual pages, assignments, discussions and quizzes, or you can send entire modules at once. You can even share an entire course with another instructor.
• Be sure to check the copyright and accessibility of all content before you share it to ensure that it’s usable in a course.
• Be sure to distinguish between “copy to” and “send to.” The former is used for duplicating and reusing items in your courses, while the latter is meant to send content to other instructors.
• Make sure to share only with Metropolitan State University of Denver email addresses, as outside email addresses will be unable to view the content.

There is a lot of nuance associated with sharing materials in Canvas courses, so take a deeper dive by reviewing the following presentation.

Let’s walk through it together

For complete written step-by-step instructions, visit the Center for Teaching, Learning and Design Ready Spotlight tutorial page.