Journal Options in Canvas

Journal Assignments are a great opportunity to have students reflect on their learning throughout the course and apply it to their personal lives and experiences. 

If you use Journals in your course, you may be wondering how to handle this kind of assignment in your Canvas course. You have a few options for how to deploy a Journal that is private between the student and instructor.

You can either treat the Journal like a traditional assignment and have students submit a document for each Journal entry or treat the Journal like a Discussion and create a Group Discussion for each student where each post is a separate Journal entry.

Submitting a Document

If you want to keep things simple, you can create Canvas Assignments in a separate Journal Assignment group and have students submit a document as their Journal. If you choose to do this, you may want to consider creating and providing a Journal template document that contains sections for each of the Journal entries the student will submit. This way each student knows how many entries and has a centralized document to add to for each entry.

The easiest method for Journals in Canvas is to create a standard Canvas Assignment with an Online submission type for students to submit their Journal document. If you create a template document for their Journal, provide a link to it in the instructions of the first Assignment and then ask students to add to that document for each entry and submit the same document for each subsequent Journal Assignment.

Using the Discussion Board

You can create a Group Discussion for each student which is private between instructor and student, but allows them to create posts throughout the course timeframe which are timestamped and threaded to show development over time.

To create the Journal:

1. Click Discussions on the course menu.
2. Create a new Discussion using the + Discussion.
3. Name your Discussion (e.g. Self Reflective Journal).
4. Enter the Journal instructions and settings (such as grading).
5. Select This is a Group Discussion.
6. Click New Group Category.
7. Title your Group Set Name the same as the Journal Discussion title.

8. In the “Group Structure” section, select Split students by number of groups and enter the same number as the number of students in the course. This will automatically create a group for each student.

   

9. Click Save.
10. Click Save again to create the Journal Discussion.

Rename each group to be the name of the individual student:

1. Click People.
2. Click the Self Reflective Journal tab (or whatever name you gave your group set).
3. Click on each group name to reveal the name of the student assigned to it.
4. Click the three dots on the right side of the group name and select Edit.
5. Change the name of the group to be the name of the one student group member and click Save.
6. Repeat for all groups.