If there are widespread service outages or access issues to CarmenCanvas, it won’t be business as usual, but there are alternatives to continue communicating with your students.
The following suggestions can help you stay in touch with your students or even continue with course work. These suggestions assume that the situation does not impact systems other than CarmenCanvas.
Getting the roster outside of CarmenCanvas
Having a list of your students that includes their name.#s will make it easier to communicate with your students outside of Canvas, no matter what method you choose to use. You can get the course roster one of two ways:
- Through the Faculty Center on Buckeyelink
- Go to the Administrative Resource Center’s How to View a Class Roster for step-by-step instructions.
- Download the Roster from your list of course at aegis.osu.edu.
- On the My Courses page, click on the three-dot menu for any of your courses to download the roster.
Communicating via email
You can send a notification directly from Faculty Center, or you can use your choice of email client using the exported course roster.
Sending an email from Faculty Center
Scroll to the bottom of the BuckeyeLink class roster and click 'notify listed students.' This will take you to a Notification page. From here there are two ways you can proceed:
- Write your students a message in the Message Text field. Send the notification from there.
- Notice your email is in the “To” field and your students are listed in the BCC field.
- Copy the students’ emails from the BCC field and use that list in Outlook to email your students.
- Note that if you copy this list you will have to change the comas (“,”) to a semicolon (“;”) for Outlook to determine they are distinct emails. We recommend pasting the list into Word and doing a Find and Replace All “,” with “;” to speed up the process.
Sending an email with an exported roster
When you download the roster from the My Courses page in Aegis, you’ll get a .CSV file with a column of student usernames (name.#). Copy the information in the Username column and add @osu.edu to create a list of student email addresses. Paste the addresses into a BCC field in an email message.
Sharing course materials with students
If needed, you can still share course material with your students even during a Canvas outage. While you could share material over email, we recommend that you share necessary files and content via Microsoft Teams. The steps below outline possible options to setting up a Team channel for collaboration and communication.
Create a Team (there are 4 types).
- Have the team set up to Join via link.
- Create channels if needed. For short-term use, the General channel may be all you need.
- Put any files needed by students in the Shared area of the General channel. Putting the files here means you don't need to share them with students individually.
- You may still have the files you need to share on your own computer. Just upload them to the Shared area.
- If you have files in your personal OneDrive, copy them to the Teams site.
- Extract the email addresses of students from BuckeyeLink or Manage Participants. Send information about joining to students via email. See steps above.
Additional Considerations
While they share a similar name and an integration, CarmenZoom is a separate service from CarmenCanvas, and is still accessible for use with classes during a Canvas outage. You can schedule a meeting at carmenzoom.osu.edu and share the meeting invite with your students over email. Read more about scheduling meetings in our guide on Scheduled Meetings.
The Simple Syllabus platform can also be accessed outside of Canvas. From your dashboard page, you will see cards displaying the courses for which you can manage syllabus documents. Click Edit to begin working on a document. Students can also access their course syllabi from the platform.