Here are additional tips applicable to all general course preparation.

• Canvas comes with a primitive freehand drawing tool within the Speed Grader tool. Speed Grader's drawing tool does not have the "undo" last stroke option. That is, if you are drawing a complex character or marking something by hand, and if you make one wrong stroke, the only choice you have is either to accept everything or to delete everything you have drawn up to that point.
  
  
• Frequently, student's file may not be vertically aligned (i.e., appears sideways). Speed Grader in Canvas does not have an option to rotate the file.
  
  
• If you would like to use a freehand drawing tool to grade student homework electronically, it's better to download it first (right-click + "Save the link as") and use Adobe Acrobat (Pro DC version or higher recommended). Adobe Acrobat allows you to correct the file orientation before using the drawing tool.
  
  
• When adding comments to individual scores in "Grades," make sure you click on the "Post Comment" button. If you just click "Update Grade" without clicking "Post Comment," you will lose the comment. (This is probably a bug in Canvas.)
  
  

If you need accurate freehand markup of student work, we recommend a combination of a tablet PC with a stylus and Adobe Acrobat (More reliable than Draw Tools of MS Office).

• In order to streamline written homework submissions, create a guideline for printing, handwriting answers, scanning, merging scanned images into a single PDF and uploading to Canvas. Here is a sample guideline.
  
  
• If you require submission of Word or Powerpoint files that contain non-Western-alphabet fonts and you need to print them as a PDF for marking up, ask students to "embed the fonts into the Word/Powerpoint file" when they save the file (File > Options > Save > Embed fonts in the file). If students forget to do this and the file contains non-standard, non-Western alphabetic font that does not exist in the instructor's computer, printing/saving such a file as a PDF will generate an error message as shown below and no PDF can be created.
  
  

  %%[ ProductName: Distiller ]%% %%[Page: 1]%% Gungsuh not found, using Courier. %%[ Error: typecheck; OffendingCommand: xshow ]%% Stack: [200 200 200 199 200 0] (w·…“Ä) %%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%% %%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

  
  To avoid this error, the instructor needs to do the following:
  
  
  1. Before printing the file as PDF, open the "Printer Properties" dialog box and unclick the "Rely on system fonts only; do not use document fonts" option.
     
     If this still causes an error message like the one above, do the following.
     
     
  2. Open the Word or Powerpoint file in question.
     
     
  3. Select everything (Ctrl-A) in the Word file. (If the offending font is used in a Powerpoint file, you may have to repeat the following on every slide.)
     
     
  4. When the entire text is selected, select the closest font your computer has (e.g., Gungsuh → MSGothic). By doing this, you are replacing the offending font with the font your computer has.
     
     
  5. Now print/save the file as a PDF.
     
     

When students upload files for "File Upload" type of assignments or quizzes, the instructor needs to be aware of some issues as listed below:

• File type issues: Some non-Windows users (Mac or other operating systems including mobile devices) may upload files that are not compatible with Windows computers. If the instructor does not have access to Mac or other computers/devices that generated those files, the instructor:
  • needs to require students to save the work as a certain type of files (.pdf or other image files like .jpg) before uploading them. OR
  • needs to convert the files to Windows-friendly format themselves (See File Conversion information here).
• "Corrupt" file issues: Sometimes, homework files students upload can be damaged during the upload process. To avoid this possibility, the instructor can make students responsible for comfirming the successful upload by downloading their own uploaded files and open them by themselves to see if the upload was successful or not. This way, students can catch a damaged file.