Mastery Connect + Canvas Integration Best Practices

[Cason]

If you are a district administrator using both the Mastery Connect (AMS) and Canvas (LMS) applications, you already have the tools for a successful year. You can easily deliver learning activities through Canvas and visualize student levels of understanding using the power of Mastery Connect from any Canvas Course. 

As you get ready for another year, here are a few best practices to help administrators and teachers quickly set up Mastery Connect courses, so they can focus on what matters most: the students!

Copying Course Content

A common Canvas practice is to copy course content from a previous year's course and reuse the content in the new school year. This saves teachers an incredible amount of time! However, it is important to check if the course contains Mastery Connect Assessments prior to linking the new school year tracker. 

If Mastery Connect Assessments exist after duplicating the course, we recommend completing the following steps before linking to this year's Mastery Tracker:

1. Once course content has been copied into the new school year course shell, click Assignments in the course navigation menu. The assignment list will contain a list of all assignments. Any Mastery Connect Assessments will still be connected to the previous year's Tracker.

2. Look over the list of assignments for any that contain the Mastery logo. These are the assignments that will need to be removed. To delete the Canvas assignments, locate the 3 dots at the end of each of the Mastery Connect Assessments and select delete.

3. Repeat this process until all previous years assignments have been deleted.

4. Now you will be ready to connect to Mastery Connect using the Mastery Tracker link in the course navigation menu.

Teacher Access

We are working to make using Mastery Connect with Canvas seamless and easy. It is important that both Mastery Connect and Canvas use the district provided email as their primary email. 

Teachers can confirm their Canvas email in their Canvas account settings:

1. In Canvas, select Account in the Canvas global navigation, in the upper left
2. Select Settings in the Account drawer
3. In Settings, the email will be listed in the upper right (the primary email will be indicated by the star next to the address)

Co-Teachers 

Collaboration is a powerful tool for teachers in Canvas and Mastery Connect alike, but teachers may need to take an extra step to ensure they will have success with their co-teachers using the Mastery Connect/Canvas integration. 

If your teachers have co-teachers that share the same Canvas course, we recommend they add their co-teachers as collaborators to their trackers in Mastery Connect:

1. In the Canvas course, select “Mastery Tracker” in the course navigation

• Link the Canvas course to the correct Tracker, standard set, or Curriculum Map, if this step has not been completed

2. In the tracker, select the 3 dot menu in the upper right 

3. Select People in the drop-down menu, then Add Collaborator

4. Add any co-teachers as collaborators to the Tracker, allowing them to use the assessments and Tracker

Tracker Creation

In addition to creating Trackers from preloaded standard sets, Mastery Connect allows Trackers to be created and linked to Canvas courses from Curriculum Maps. Curriculum Maps can serve as a ‘blueprint’ for Trackers. These maps allow teams at the district- or school-level to organize standards to match a scope and sequence, add assessments, and resources. When Trackers are created from a Curriculum Map, all unit organization, assessments, and resources will be mirrored in the Tracker.

As the Curriculum Map is updated with additional assessments and resources, it can be synced by the teacher to update the Tracker with the new resources. Any assessments in a Canvas-linked Tracker will automatically create unpublished Canvas assignments.

When teachers are Creating a Tracker from a Curriculum Map from within Canvas, select “Create New Tracker From Curriculum Map” from the dropdown menu.