What to do if Canvas goes down

Canvas, the University’s virtual learning environment, is a cloud-based service delivered by Instructure, a global, educational technology company based in the USA. 

In the event that Canvas is temporarily offline, staff and student users across the University and elsewhere are likely to be similarly affected. In most cases, service will be restored quite quickly. Should a longer outage occur for any reason, you may find the information below helpful for supporting your students. 

Canvas is used to support teaching and student learning at Oxford primarily in an asynchronous mode – that is, students can access materials in their own time and instant communication is usually not necessary.  

Much of the existing guidance from the Centre for Teaching and Learning around flexible and inclusive teaching contains ideas about how to design activities in flexible ways, using a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous tools (eg Canvas, Microsoft Teams, Panopto and ORLO).  

If Canvas is down for an extended period, you may wish to refer to your business continuity plans and consider temporarily using additional, University-support tools to:  

• Communicate with students

• Share teaching materials  

• Run online teaching sessions  

• Support collaboration and discussion  

• Support assessment-related activities

Tools for communication and announcements  

Consider establishing communication methods that do not rely on Canvas, and ensure students know where urgent updates would be communicated during a service disruption. The channels may include Microsoft Teams spaces, email distribution lists, and shared SharePoint sites.  

• Creating a team in Microsoft Teams: Teams and Groups are useful collaboration forums within the Microsoft Office 365 offering (Nexus365). Included are shared file storage, chat, OneNote, shared calendar and mailbox. A team can be used to communicate with students, start online meetings, and share class content, documents, links or images with course participants. Request a new Team or Group using Self-Service.  

• Using Microsoft Teams chat: If you already use Microsoft Teams for online meetings with your students, the chat channel should already be in place (as long as at least one chat message has already been posted there) and can be used to send quick messages and announcements to all course participants, as well as to share documents, links or images.  

• Using regular email: The course administrator may maintain mailing lists of students which can be used for any urgent communications, for distributing time-critical learning materials, or for receiving formative assignments.  For more information on how to request and configure relevant mailing lists, please visit Mailing lists | IT Help. 

Tools for sharing teaching materials  

Consider identifying activities or processes that rely heavily on Canvas functionality, such as:  

• Links to assignment information and submission links  

• Reading lists  

• Past exam papers which are alternatively found through SOLO 

• Announcements  

• Quizzes  

• Links to external tools  

• Embedded Panopto recordings  

Teaching materials, readings and documents which were originally created locally before being uploaded to Canvas can be redistributed through approved University platforms, if available.  

• In addition to using Teams for communication and announcements, you may also use it to upload materials. Request a new Team or Group using Self-Service.  

• SharePoint Online can provide a secure and centrally managed space for sharing revision materials with students, particularly where multiple colleagues need to upload and manage files collaboratively. You can request a new SharePoint site using this request form, but please note it may take up to 48 hours: Request a SharePoint site. For more information on whether SharePoint is the right solution for you, please visit Overview: SharePoint Online | IT Help. If you need help on how to use SharePoint, or managing sharing permissions, please visit: Using SharePoint Online | IT Help.  

• OneDrive may be preferred for colleagues directly sharing their own content with a few students or colleagues. For more information on how to share files using OneDrive, please visit: How to use OneDrive for Business | IT Help.  

• Reading lists: ORLO may be used to provide access to teaching resources and learning content during an outage. Go to the ORLO homepage and ensure the search bar is set to ‘All lists’ (not ‘My lists’). Search for your list using your programme name and the title of the course. If there are too many search results and you aren’t sure which one is your reading list, try using the Advanced search option, and selecting ‘List title’ in the dropdown next to the search field. To access further help and resources, please visit: Reading Lists.  You can also search for past papers of your assessment on ORLO. 

• Panopto: While normally access to Panopto is managed through Canvas, if Panopto is made available independently to Canvas, it can be used to access or share lecture recordings and other teaching related video content, though: https://ox.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Auth/Login.aspx. Please note that this route would only work for users who have already previously logged in via Canvas. New users who have not accessed Panopto via Canvas at least once before would not be able to locate their recordings directly through the Panopto link above. 

• Past exam papers via SOLO [https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/discovery/search?search_scope=EXAMP&vid=44OXF_INST:SOLO] 

Tools for running online teaching sessions   

Microsoft Teams can be used for live online teaching sessions. If your links were originally set up via Canvas, the meeting links themselves may still be active in Microsoft Teams or Outlook calendars. Colleagues may wish to:  

• Check existing Outlook and Microsoft Teams calendars for Teams meeting links  

• Re-share meeting links with students via email where needed  

• Schedule new Teams meetings directly through Teams or Outlook if replacement sessions are required  

Tools for collaboration and discussion  

• Mentimeter: While Canvas is unavailable, Mentimeter can still be used to run live polls, quizzes, word clouds and question activities during teaching sessions, helping to maintain interaction and engagement with students. Mentimeter can be run both in-class and online.   

• OneNote Class Notebooks provide dedicated spaces for:  

• shared class resources  

• collaboration spaces  

• individual student notebooks  

• Microsoft Whiteboard can be used to support collaborative teaching activities, brainstorming, diagramming and group discussion during online or in-person sessions.  

Assessment-related activities  

Inspera is independent to the Canvas and should be fully operational and available for examinations. Students can access the platform at oxford.inspera.com and administrators can access the administrative interface at oxford.inspera.com/admin.  

We recommend that colleagues review any coursework submissions content on Inspera for links to Canvas and update these where necessary. Any queries relating to submissions in Inspera should be directed to courseworksubmissions@admin.ox.ac.uk.  

Finding out when Canvas is back up and running   

In the event of any significant outage, you will be notified by the University when Canvas is back online. Information about the current status of all digital platforms provided by the University, including the availability of Canvas, can be found on the IT services status site. 

Information about Canvas status can also be found on the Canvas Status page managed by Instructure, the third-party supplier of Canvas.