Instructor Guides

These guides will help instructors to set up an OpenDSA eTextbook instance for use within a Canvas course, and/or add individual exercises and visualizations to their Canvas, Moodle, or Blackboard course. If your institution has its own Canvas installation, then you can attach an OpenDSA eTextbook to any course where you have instructor permissions. If you don't have access to Canvas at your institution, then you can create a Canvas course at the public Canvas site, https://canvas.instructure.com

Note: If you are an OpenDSA developer, then you probably want to set up your own test installation following the directions at https://github.com/OpenDSA/OpenDSA-DevStack. Pretty much you just need to install Docker, and then load everything up to have a complete system.

Note 2: Instructors should not use the Canvas "clone course" feature as a way to copy an existing course with OpenDSA materials. The process described here for creating a course with an OpenDSA textbook sets up course-specific links that cannot be cloned. If you want to clone the course for reasons other than to duplicate the OpenDSA textbook, you can still do that. Just delete all of the OpenDSA modules and Assignments, and then use the directions here to create the new eTextbook materials in the new course shell.

Note 3: Be aware that what you see as an instructor in an OpenDSA module page is not the same as what a student sees. In particular, the instructor view has an extra column that makes content on the module page go outside of the Canvas page boundary. Fortunately, students do not have this problem. You can see what students see if you try looking at the material using "student view".

Instructor Guides

Available Guides