Welcome to Your Canvas Community

Communities are Canvas sites that allow you to coordinate and communicate with Ball State faculty, staff, and students. They’re used by departments, programs, and organizations to store files, announce events, share resources, and much more!

Request a New Community

Once Ball State approves a community request, the community is created and supported by the Teaching Innovation Team, a part of the Division of Online and Strategic Learning. If you have any questions about a Canvas community, give us a call (765-285-1763) or send us an email (strategiclrn@bsu.edu).

Canvas communities are open for 3 years after they are created. After 3 years, we will email you to ask if you would like to extend the community or close it.

What Features Does a Canvas Community Include?

Canvas communities at Ball State are almost identical to traditional Canvas courses. The only difference is that they do not connect to a course in Banner, so you cannot use them for academic courses. This also means that graded work in a Canvas community does not actually connect to a student’s grades at Ball State.

Otherwise, all of the features of Canvas are available to you, including but not limited to:

Announcements
Assignments
Discussions
Files
Modules
Quizzes

The 3 Community Roles

Canvas communities use 3 unique roles, each of which begins with “Community.”

Community Admin

This role is similar to the Teacher role in Canvas, with the added ability to add or remove Ball State users to the Canvas site.

Community Instructor

This role is functionally identical to the Teacher role in Canvas. Community Instructors cannot add or remove Ball State users to the Canvas site, but they can add, remove, or edit all content in the Canvas site.

Community Participant

This role is functionally identical to the Student role in Canvas. Community Participants cannot add or edit content in the Canvas site, but they can view content, submit Assignments, take Quizzes, and more.

How to Add Ball State Users

Select People from the course navigation
Click the +People button
Insert Ball State email address(es)
Select one of the 3 Community roles listed above from the dropdown
Click Next
Verify the user name(s)
Click Add Users

Users external to Ball State must be manually added to the community by our team. This process requires additional approvals and may take up to a week. Contact us to get started.

Want to automatically add certain Ball State users? We can coordinate with IT to connect your community to Banner, automatically adding users with particular Banner attributes. Contact us to get started.

Get Support for Your Canvas Community

The Teaching Innovation Team would be happy to support you with your Canvas community in any way. We can help you brainstorm, identify solutions to your problems, organize your community, and more!

strategiclrn@bsu.edu
765-285-1763

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