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Knowledgebase: Canvas > Canvas for Instructors
Using Wooclap for Learner Engagement
Last modified on 05 September 2025 05:04 PM

Wooclap has been selected as the University of Alberta's centrally supported student response system. Wooclap is an online polling application that can be used through Canvas to interact with learners during and after lectures. The service offers numerous workflows for creating engaging questions that can be delivered to students in live lectures and afterwards. 

As a starting point, instructors can watch this screen recording of CTL's Introductory Wooclap webinar delivered June 11. 2025.

 

Contents:

Adding Wooclap to a course

Wooclap needs to be linked to a Canvas course using an assignment:
(Note: For Submission Type to be available, 'Display Grade as' must be set to one of Percentage, Complete/Incomplete, or Points)

1. First, click on the +Assignment button on the top right.
    Then set the Submission type to external tool:

2. Click Find:

3. Click Wooclap to open the resource link:

4. On the resource link modal screen, select one of the following:
    - Create from scratch (Select this if you intend to create from scratch OR re-use your existing polls in Wooclap)
    - Duplicate an existing event (this creates a duplicate copy of the event in Wooclap) 
    - Choose a template is currently not available.

    Then click Continue:

5. This will then take you back to the selection screen. You can resize the window or scroll down to see more options. 
    Open in a new tab is checked by default and is recommended. Click Select.




6. Add an "Assignment Name". [Please note that if you had entered an assignment name prior to this step, it will be replaced by "New Wooclap Event" and you have to re-enter a name at this step]. Configure the other assignment settings. Click Save. Once added, clicking the tool link will show a button to launch the tool.

Once the tool loads, you will land on the new Wooclap event -- either blank or containing existing questions -- where you can add or edit questions and configure your event:


If you selected Duplicate an existing event, you will see a dialogue box that allows you to search through all your existing Wooclap events and select one to copy all of the existing questions from. This will leave your existing event unchanged:

Once an event is selected, scroll to the bottom and click Confirm choice.

Here is a quick video to summarize:

Creating Questions and Events

Once you are working directly in Wooclap and you have accessed an Event, clicking New question allows you to select from a wide variety of question types - hovering over each question type will provide additional details and usage guidelines:

LMS authentication

To sync your grades to Canvas, you have to make sure to activate the right authentication method in the main settings (LMS login), before you start the event. This then enables you to synchronize the Wooclap event with your LMS and push grades to your gradebook. Only events that are created through Canvas have the LMS Login option - if you have created your session outside the LMS (see below), participant grades can only be uploaded via CSV file.

Delivering Presentations

Wooclap events and questions are displayed to students by clicking the Start Event button or Display button at the top of the event or by clicking Display to the right of specific questions:

It is also possible to use Wooclap events and questions with Google Slides presentations. There are 2 ways to do this, as described in this article: How to use Wooclap in Google Slides:

  1. You can install the Wooclap add-on or extension to your browser to insert interactions (questions/events) directly into the presentation.
  2. Or, you may upload your presentation into to Wooclap. (This method also works for .ppt and .pptx files.)

Please note that Google Slides presentations are different from PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF files because questions can't be inserted  between the slides of the presentation. You can, however, easily switch between your slides and real-time votes. 

Instructors using PowerPoint ; How to insert presentation files into your Wooclap events shows you how to combine Wooclap with PowerPoint, Keynote, and PDF presentations by importing them into Wooclap events.

Please note: it is currently not possible to use the Wooclap PowerPoint add-in with U of A devices. We are currently working with the vendor to get this resolved. 

Self-Paced Sessions

Instructors can use self-paced sessions [previously known as Participant's Pace] to have participants answer questions asynchronously.

Grading and Synchronizing with Canvas

Once an event created through Canvas is completed, you can click on the "Synchronize with LMS" button to push the grades to the gradebook. You can then choose which items you want to sync (there are three options available: Results, Attendance, Participation). This action will push the grades to the Gradebook. Note that you can only synchronize one of the three. 

Please note that the Attendance option will only show up if you have the "Attendance sheet" turned on in settings.

 

  • Participation is scored based on the number of questions the participant answered compared to the total number of questions requiring an answer. This score is then converted into a percentage in the LMS environment.
  • Results represent the points earned based on the correctness of the answers. Questions without a correct answer (such as open questions or word clouds) are not considered when calculating the results.
  • Attendance is only available if the attendance sheet is activated. Participants receive points for attendance once they have signed the attendance sheet: 100% for signing in and 0% for not signing in.

Using Wooclap Outside Canvas

Note: Students must access events through Canvas to ensure their answers are passed back to the gradebook.

Direct access to Wooclap is available at https://app.wooclap.com/auth/login by clicking on Continue with Google then logging into and selecting their UofA Gmail account:

At their first access, users will need to Choose the correct Google account to pass through to Wooclap:

This email must be in the format ccid@ualberta.ca and not an alias email (e.g., first.lastname@ualberta.ca); otherwise, users may not be able to access their created content via Canvas. Using the email in the correct format should allow instructors to access using either mechanism using the same account.

Once instructors create events in Wooclap, they can click the Display button at the top of live meetings to have learners join the poll (whether authenticating or not). They can also get a direct participation link to share in advance for their event at the bottom left of that screen:

Getting Help or More Information

For additional information on creating and delivering events, Wooclap provides built-in help through the question mark icon in the bottom right:

 

For users who want to begin with a more formal guided overview, please see Wooclap Essentials for Presenters as well as this guide for beginners.

Instructors can also register for training webinars provided by the vendor.

Known Issues:

Issue/Problem Summary Known Workarounds
Entering special characters breaks LaTeX formatting in question/answer display

If a special character (i.e. &, %, $, #, etc) is entered along with any formatting code, the display breaks and shows only the LaTeX code.

Special characters can be escaped by enclosing them in backslashes, e.g. \&\

this will prevent the issue.
The PowerPoint Add-in for Wooclap does not work

If you add the Wooclap add-in for Wooclap directly into a PowerPoint presentation, it will give an error as we do not have our CCID login linked yet. 

You can add an existing PowerPoint presentation into your Wooclap and it works with no errors. 
Adding Wooclap to Google Slides has no issues. 

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