Managing activities
In this article, we have compiled all the information related to activity settings and options to help you understand their implications and ensure consistency in course delivery for students and course builders.
Activity settings
Each activity has its own settings, allowing builders to configure and customise the task depending on their preference and the purpose of the assignment.
In the table below, you will see a list of each activity configuration and how it works:
Settings | What is it useful for? |
|---|---|
Publish date and time
| Set a specific date and time for the activity to become accessible. Students will not be able to access it before this time. |
End date and time | Define a deadline for submissions. After this time, students can no longer contribute, but they will still be able to view the activity and any previous submissions. |
Assess activity
| Enabling this option marks the activity as assessed, allowing you to assign grades. It will also automatically appear in the 'Grades' section, where you can define its weighting. |
Shared submissions
| Enabling this setting will make the activity visible to all students, allowing them to view all submissions within the course. If this option was not activated during the activity’s creation and submissions have already been made, only an Admin can enable it afterwards. |
Contribute first
| Students must submit their own responses before they can view contributions from their peers. |
Minimum submissions
| Defines the required number of submissions before students can access their classmates' responses. Until this threshold is met, all other contributions remain hidden. |
Hold results until | Delays the release of all student contributions until a specified date and time. Until then, students can only see their own submissions, with a message indicating when class-wide contributions will be shared. |
Voting
| This setting controls the number of votes each student can assign to their peers’ submissions. Students are allowed to vote on any entry except their own. |
Word limit
| This setting imposes a word limit on all input fields within the activity, ensuring that student submissions do not exceed the defined maximum. |
Unlock code
| Requires a password for access to the activity, useful for controlled-access tasks. Students will be unable to view the activity until they receive the password. |
| Permits students to reset and redo the activity. |
| Marks the activity as optional, ensuring interactions with it are not tracked in the 'Analytics' section. For more information on this, please refer to this section. |
Depending on the nature of the activity, each one has its own set of settings, and once a course is live and a student has submitted, the following settings will be locked and not changeable:
Assess activity
Shared submissions
Minimum submission
Maximum votes
Activity options
When in the 'Edit' mode on a page, whether there are already activities added or you are going to add them, you will see on top of the box of the activity two options you can apply to copy the activity on the same page or another, and/or to remove it from the page.
Copy activity
An activity can be copied and pasted on the same page or from one page to another. To do so, you only need to enable the 'Edit' mode, search for the activity you want to copy and click on the 'Copy activity' option that is above the activity box to add that activity to your clipboard.
To paste it on the same page or another one, just go there and right-click + paste or hit CTRL+V (Windows) or CMD+V (Mac) on your keyboard. The newly created activity will function separately while retaining all the data from the original concerning the settings.
Remove
In case you need to delete an activity for whatever reason, you can also do it by enabling the 'Edit' mode and pressing the 'Remove' button. This will open a modal to ask you if you are sure to delete the activity, and once confirmed, the activity will disappear from that page.
How to edit already existing activities
Only in those cases when the activity edition is permitted, if, for some reason, you need to edit an already existing activity, you can easily do it and modify the configuration.
To do so, you only need to navigate to the 'Modules' section in Canvas and find where the activity is added. Once located, please access it and click on the 'Designer View' button. This will allow you to open the page within your LMS, where the activity is inserted, enable the 'Edit' mode and change what you need or prefer in the settings.
After finishing, please save the changes and refresh the page in both sites, Insendi and Canvas, for the modifications to appear.