How can my students upload and share files in bCourses?

A knowledge base article about How can my students upload and share files in bCourses? provided by the UC Berkeley IT Service Hub - Knowledge Portal

Students do not have access to upload files into the Files tool of a course site. Only those who have the Teacher, TA, or Lead TA roles are able to upload files. However, there are a few options that would allow students to upload files into bCourses for the purpose of sharing them with the entire class. 

Use the Discussions tool

Enroll everyone in the course into a Group

Create a Wiki Page where students can link to files shared via Google Drive or Box

Use the Discussions tool

The Discussions tool allows students and instructors to interact via message posts. Users can attach files to a discussion post, thereby sharing their files, which will be available to the entire course to view and/or download. Click here for a screenshot of what this would look like. 

Before using the Discussions tool for file sharing, make sure that students have permission to attach files to discussions in your course.

Opportunities

  • Quick, minimal set up for instructor and easy to use for students- simply create a Discussion forum where students can post replies with their file attached

  • If you enable threaded replies in the Discussion settings, students and instructors can provide comments/feedback to the file being shared

Risks

  • Only one file attachment allowed per post

  • Files are not organized in any particular way other than by most recently posted and thus may not be easy to find

 

Here are the relevant help articles:

 

Enroll everyone in the course into a Group

There is a Files tool within a group space that functions similarly to the Files tool in the main course site. Instructors can create a Group and add all students of the class into it, which gives students the ability to upload to the group space's Files tool.

To learn more about how Groups work, read this Canvas Guide: What are Groups? 

Opportunities

  • Students can upload and organize files easily into the Files tool of a group space

Risks

  • There is only 500mb of storage space for files within a group.

  • Because there are other tools available in the Group space that are similar to those found in the main course site (e.g. Announcements, Discussions, etc.), it may cause some confusion about where students should go for their main class activities. Being clear that only the Files tool will be used inside the Group space can help mitigate some of the confusion.

  • Instructors must manually add students to a group, which may be especially tedious in a large class. Also, instructors will need to keep adding students to the group as they register for the course.

 

See these Canvas Guides for instructions:

  1. How do I add a group set in a course?
  2. How do I manually create groups in a group set?
  3. How do I manually assign students to groups?

 

Create a Wiki Page where students can link to files shared via Google Drive or Box

Instructors can create a Page and enable a setting that allows anyone in the site to edit the page. Since students are able to edit the page, they can add links to files or folders that are saved in their bDrive or Berkeley Box accounts. Here is an example of what this could look like.  

Opportunities

  • Quick and minimal set up for instructors- simply create a page and set it to be editable by "Students and Instructors" or by "Anyone" in the course

Risks

  • Because anyone is able to edit the Page, students might accidentally edit/delete other students' links or entries.

  • This requires some additional work for students to upload files into their bDrive or Berkeley Box accounts, get the link, and add it to the Wiki Page (see links below).

 

Here are the relevant help guides:

  1. How do I create a new page in a course?
  2. How do I edit a course page as a student?
  3. How do I create a hyperlink in the Rich Content Editor as a student?
  4. Box: How Do I Share A File Link With Other People?
  5. Google Drive: Share files from Google Drive (see under "Share a link to the file")