Using Canvas before and at the beginning of the degree project
Degree project courses can involve several challenges, including how to inform students about the process before admission to the course and how to organize students, supervisors and examiners in the Canvas room. There are different ways to meet these challenges.
Reach students with information about the course before admission
Students are often expected to do some work before the course starts. For example, it may be to decide on the research question/subject and supervisor, contact a company or other organisation. During this process, the course coordinator needs to be able to communicate with the students. Before the course starts, students need to have easily accessible information and support on how to proceed with their work. There also needs to be somewhere where students can submit their project proposals.
Canvas can be used in different ways to handle this information, but one challenge can be to ensure that students have access to the Canvas pages. Two variants are recommended, either a public Canvas room, or using the program room.
Public Canvas room for prospective degree project students
In order for the course coordinator to be able to communicate with the students before they have been admitted to each course in Canvas, it is possible to use a public course room where all the important information that students need before the start of the course is available. Are you a course coordinator and interested in a public course room in Canvas for your degree project course? Send a request to e-learning@kth.se and we will help you.
Inform about degree project courses in programme rooms
Another way to reach out to students who are preparing for their degree project is to provide the information in the students' program room. The advantage of this is that the students are used to finding information about their students in the program room.
Organise Canvas rooms for multiple degree project courses
Course rooms in Cavas are created automatically according to information available in Ladok and Kopps, which means that one room will be created per course code. Since several degree project courses can be similar and involve the same teachers, one solution may be to combine several degree project courses into a single Canvas room. For example, EECS has a common Canvas room for all degree projects at the master level at the school.
Group and connect students with supervisors and examiners
Students can carry out their degree projects individually or in pairs. They must be paired with at least one supervisor at KTH and sometimes with additional supervisors who are not connected to KTH. Each degree project must also be linked to an examiner. It can easily get messy for the teachers involved to keep track of the students in the Canvas room. There are different ways to simplify so that supervisors and examiners only need to see the students they are supervising or assessing. The Gradebook can be filtered by groups and sections, so these can be used, for example, in the following groupings:
- Have a group set with supervisors and one group per supervisor.
- Have a group set with examiners and one group per examiner.
The groups can also be used to communicate with student groups.
If the course has seminar groups, these can also be organized with the group function in Canvas. Read about Groups in Canvas .
It is also possible to filter based on sections, but it is a bit more complicated to create. Read about Sections in Canvas .