teaching

Workflow for creating accessible documents for Canvas and Perusall

/ Donna Campbell / Leave a comment

Near the end of last semester, we (WSU profs) were informed that we needed to make our documents comply with the new accessibility guidelines coming in April 2026. We don’t have any help with this, but after 50 or so hours of creating documents over winter break, I’ve worked out a workflow that I’m setting down here, primarily so I won’t forget it the next time. There may be better ways, but this works.

The guidelines specify that we should not use .pdfs (even if they have been through OCR [Optical Character Recognition] scanning), not use bold but use headers (H2, H3, and H4 are available to us in Canvas), not use tables, and so on. I can’t follow those guidelines in this post because of WordPress–sorry.

First, acquire the text online, if possible.

  1. If it’s already online and in the public domain, that makes life easier. Project Gutenberg is an obvious choice.
  2. Also try HathiTrust. The entire issue of Fire!! is there, for example. I was able to get Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies and Jade” and Joel A. Rogers’s “Jazz at Home” for my Jazz Age/Harlem Renaissance class. The page images are there, but to create a text document to paste into Word do this:
    • Sign in through your institution
    • Select Text under the Download panel on the left
    • Check the box on the upper right-hand side under the page number to select the pages to scan
    • Click on Download. You now have a text version that you can clean up for posting to Canvas.
  3. JSTOR is also useful for getting critical articles if you’re excerpting older material. It has already been through an OCR process, and selections can be copied and pasted into Word for the process described below. Since I’m teaching undergraduate courses, we are not always reading the entirety of a critical piece, although the link to the source material is always provided.

If the source material isn’t online . . .

. . . this means you’ll have to copy, scan, OCR, transfer or convert to Word, clean it up (inserting page numbers and making paragraphs be paragraphs) and proof it before putting it into Canvas.

  1. Copy and scan to .pdf. There are three or four basic ways to scan something to a .pdf so that you can work with it. Here are my experiences with each:
    • Copy the material from the book using a printer/scanner/copier such as most departments have and then scan the copied pages. This is the method I mostly use, because a flattened text makes for a better .pdf. I have a printer at home that can do this as well.
    • Scan directly from a printer/scanner/copier such as most departments have. The problems: if I forget a page, it’s a nuisance to go back and rescan, etc.
    • Use a phone app such as ScannerPro. ScannerPro and other such apps (I’ve used a few but ended up choosing ScannerPro) can directly convert the image to OCR text, which is an advantage. They work okay, but they work better with flat materials than with book materials.
    • Photograph the materials. If you’re copying from a book, this has the same disadvantages (curved surfaces) as the book scanner. Also, you’re adding another step: gather picture pages into a document -> convert to .pdf (easiest in Preview) -> send to Adobe for OCR.
    • Use a book scanner to copy. In theory, this should work well. In practice, it sometimes creates a mess like this, which causes mayhem with the OCR process and produces gibberish that you then have to clean up. I had the settings set to make it appear flat, but it didn’t work.

2. Convert to an OCR-enabled .pdf and possibly to Word. You can do this with Adobe. Google Docs actually works better than Adobe at this conversion. Upload the .pdf to Google Docs and then open the document.

I tried ABBYYFineReader but didn’t have much luck. I tried GPT4, which I even paid for because it is supposed to be a wizard at this kind of thing, but it flapped its pretty little hands at me and said either (1) not now or (2) I can’t do this.

  1. You open the .pdf in Adobe and tell it to Recognize Text (OCR). You can do this with a batch of .pdfs at once. At this point I usually rename the file with _OCR.pdf on the end so that I can remember whether it has gone through the process or not.
  2. Plan A: Adobe also has a “Convert to Word” feature (not in the free version, I don’t think). Sometimes the conversion still leaves a lot of cruft in the document that you have to clean up, and if you’ve scanned two pages to a single copier page, it’s going to be more work to convert it.
  3. Plan B: Once you have the OCR-ified .pdf, you can open it, highlight each page, Control-C to copy it, and Control-V to copy it into a Word document.

3. Clean up the Word document.

  1. Even if you end up with a reasonably clean Word document, you might still have to make changes. For example, copying and pasting into Word can leave paragraph marks between sentences:

You can’t get rid of these (if you wanted to) by using the Word line-spacing feature. Here’s how you can get rid of them:

  1. In Word, go to Search – Replace.
  2. Highlight a paragraph.
  3. In Search put ^p [the paragraph end symbol]
  4. In Replace put a single space.
  5. Hit the Replace button each time before going on to the next paragraph.
  6. If you Select All the text and then hit Replace All, that will leave all the text in a giant lump. (Ask me how I know). This might work well for short pieces or pieces without dialogue, because then you can pick the page numbers out of the lump and format the paragraphs as usual. If there’s a lot of dialogue, you’ll be recreating a lot of paragraphs.
  7. Put in the page numbers from the source you’re using. I use brackets and Heading 4 to show that these are pages. I tried using paragraph numbers at first, but it was too cumbersome.

4. Create a page in Canvas. Our Global Campus (online WSU) encourages us to have everything possible right in Canvas, and that’s easy to do with Pages.

  1. Go to a Module and click on the + button on the gray bar.
  2. You want to Create a Page and then Name the Page.
  3. Once the page is created, copy and paste your Word document into it. Leave a downloadable copy there for students who prefer to read that way.
  4. This makes a clean, readable copy for students. (Note: I use Bold as well as Heading 4 to mark page numbers because it is easier to see page numbers that way. I can take out the bold if needed.)

5. Use the Canvas page in Perusall.

If your class uses Perusall, this may be helpful. For a long time–too long–I didn’t realize that a .pdf had to be run through OCR to be highlightable in Perusall. (There was conflicting info about whether Perusall did this automatically.)

This semester, there’s a new or at least new-to-me feature wherein you can put the Canvas page right into Perusall. One of the options under Library is to fetch a Canvas page:

It will ask you to confirm that you’re logged in to your Canvas page and then uploads the document. You can then add it to the Assignment by editing the Assignment to which the reading has been assigned.

If you make a change to the Canvas page, you will have to re-upload it and re-add it to the Assignment (deleting the old one), since the change won’t show up in Perusall otherwise.

I think it makes a cleaner, more inviting space for student comments.

Despite the time commitment, I like the way this materials redesign looks.

Using Zoom on the desktop and PowerPoint on the iPad: a game-changer for making my class videos

/ Donna Campbell / Leave a comment

This week, I figured out how to write on PowerPoint slides with the Apple pencil and record that in Zoom. You classroom tech wizards can skip this post because you doubtless have a far better solution, but this one was a game-changer for me. I’m writing it down for two reasons (1) possibly to help those teaching online who aren’t tech wizards with an easy method to mark up and record their lectures and (2) so I don’t forget how to do this.

Background: Last year, WSU moved from Blackboard to Canvas, which includes Panopto as a video capture suite. I dutifully took the several weeks of training in all this from WSU’s office of AOI (Academic Outreach and Innovation), but I ran into a roadblock when trying to record with Panopto. I could never trust that it would actually show just the PowerPoint, as I told it to, and when it did show the PowerPoint, it would only show the speaker’s view. AOI couldn’t solve it, and neither could I, so I went to plan B.

Plan B was Zoom, which does a great job of recording PowerPoint and a tiny picture of me in the corner, so the students know that I exist and am not exclusively, or even primarily, a disembodied voice. Here’s the process:

  1. Open a Zoom meeting. Click on Share Screen, and go to the three dots that indicate more settings. Click on Record on this Computer. Note: I learned to share screen before I started recording after recording a lot of videos that began with my large concerned face clicking around to share after the recording started.

2. After you record the lecture, stop recording, end the meeting, and navigate to where the recording is on your computer. On mine, it goes to the Documents – Zoom folder. I don’t edit it because (1) I don’t have time and (2) I hate those videos where every pause is edited out, leaving the viewer gasping for breath.

3. Once the .mp4 recording is available, upload it to Panopto – Upload Media.

3. This will take a little while. After it’s uploaded and ready, click on Edit. Edit allows you to turn on Smart Chapters (based on the titles of your PowerPoint slides) and also to generate Automatic Captions. You can then Share the video link in other places in the Canvas course space (Modules).

4. The captions and so on will take a little while to render, but that’s basically it.

Now here is the game-changer part:

When I was recording with Zoom and using PowerPoint on my desktop, I could annotate slides using the Zoom tool. But if you use the Zoom annotation tool, the annotations hang there on all the subsequent slides like decorations on a Christmas tree, unless you remember to clear them for each slide. By the end slide, the whole thing looks like a Jackson Pollock.

This latter task assumes that you can juggle four things at once–Zoom, the annotation tool, the turn-off-the-annotation tool, and your brain. It also assumes the mouse will click on these instead of balking and sulking in a corner somewhere.

Enter the iPad! If you bring up the PowerPoint on an iPad and use an Apple pencil for annotations, these problems disappear.

  1. Connect the iPad to your desktop or laptop computer. I use a cable, since it’s usually more stable than AirPlay, but you could also use AirPlay.
  2. Open a Zoom meeting, click on Share Screen, and choose iPhone/iPad via Cable.
  3. Open the presentation in PowerPoint on the iPad and select Draw. Make sure the Apple pencil is already connected via Bluetooth.
  4. Go to Slide Show – Start and begin your lecture. You can use the Apple pencil to write things (much easier than manipulating a mouse), circle, cross out, and otherwise use the kinds of emphasis and explanations available when you’re writing on a whiteboard in a physical classroom.

Best of all, once you’re finished recording and are closing the PowerPoint on the iPad, it asks you whether you want to preserve the annotations. I always say “No, in thunder,” but you could choose to keep them.

Would a whiteboard feature be easier? Maybe. I’ve tried whiteboard features like Google Jamboard but couldn’t get them to do what I wanted; also, Jamboard tended to snap itself shut at odd moments. Trusty old PowerPoint won’t quit, and it is wonderful for annotating and discussing text when you’re doing close reading.

Would a document camera be easier? I sometimes use a little inSwan USB Document Camera that I bought for teaching from home at the beginning of the pandemic, which does a good job of showing actual books. But to use that for close reading and discussing texts means switching the camera view in Zoom in the middle of the video, and it’s not necessary if you have the text already typed in to PowerPoint.

inSwan Document Camera with Documate.

So, in short: this method is easy, reliable, and fun. I can’t ask for more than that from a tool for teaching.

Teaching Online: Everybody Has a Voice, and Everybody Gets a Response

/ Donna Campbell / Leave a comment

Here’s one of the things I like best about teaching online: everybody has a
voice, and everybody gets a response.

That’s not a new idea; a lot of people, including me, have thought and
written about this for years.

But in thinking about online teaching this morning as part of my daily
love/hate meditation about Canvas, this is what struck me:

When students write in the Discussion Board, and you respond to them with
encouraging comments and questions, it’s the only place where that specific
kind of interaction happens.

Think about it: in a face-to-face class, you have the dynamic
of calling on students who raise their hands while encouraging those who don’t
to participate. Often you can do this through various kinds of class exercises,
but one technique could be somewhat stressful for students: calling on them to
answer a question that you’ve asked.

Sometimes this gives them a chance to shine, especially if
you can see that they have something to say but seem to be holding back. In-person
teaching is an exercise in constantly reading the room, looking to see how you
can engage everyone, so this can work. But what if the student is tired, not
feeling well, didn’t read the assignment, or is otherwise giving off signals
about not being called on? And what if this happens a lot, so you can’t draw
them out?

In a Discussion Board, though, the students’ thoughts are already
there. You don’t have to put them on the spot. You can just listen and then reply—not
with a grade, or criticism, but with encouragement and specificity. I can’t
respond to everyone every week, but I can systematically reply to everyone over the course of two weeks.

What I like about responding in the Discussion Board is that
there’s no upvoting (I guess Canvas has this—whoever knows with Canvas?—but it’s
not turned on) and that this is spontaneous; I’m writing with my voice rather
than with teacher voice.

WSU’s Global Campus, which runs all the online classes, mandates
that everything except student office hours is asynchronous—that is, I can’t do
lectures or hold any sort of group meetings. Yet there’s an immediacy to responding
in the Discussion Board that approximates what happens in a face-to-face class.

This is extra work, in a way; the Discussion Board posts
still have to be assigned points at the end. I still think it’s worth it.