By Alycia Gilbert

A well-built and easy to navigate course Canvas can be an extremely useful tool for your composition class. Especially if you’re teaching a hybrid course or navigating a pivot to online teaching, having a solid Canvas site can support your students—particularly in finding materials, assignments, and deadlines. In March 2022, we held a Canvas building session to share models and advice for effective Canvas design.

Here are some tips and frameworks for building out your own course Canvas!

Beginning to Build

Your Canvas site should be developed in service to your pedagogical goals for the course; from what tools you choose to integrate to the way you organize your materials, it’s always helpful to start building your site based around your learning goals for the class. Do you want to use out-of-class time to scaffold toward group discussion, for example? Then students could find Canvas discussion posts useful ways to brainstorm prepared thoughts. Do you need students to analyze images or film clips? Then you might integrate YouTube or an annotation tool like Harmonize or Hypothesis into your Canvas site.

Here are some other key components to consider while you begin to build your site:

Navigation

When it comes to navigating your Canvas site, always consider the user-experience from the student perspective. Good navigation considers the way students move through your site and how you can make that movement intuitive and clear. You should definitely account for:

• Where do you want students to go first?
  
  Setting your homepage to the location students will access most; for a long time, I set my homepage to the syllabus, but found that students weren’t scrolling down through all of the syllabus materials to reach the course calendar easily. Now my homepage is set to my course modules, where students can more easily find what they’re meant to be doing that day. If you’re an active Canvas Announcements user, then the Announcements section might be a good choice for you!

• How will students find materials they need?
  
  Hosting materials in your course files without linking to these files elsewhere can be confusing for students to navigate or remember. Think strategically about organizing your files into easy to understand folders and subfolders and linking to specific files in your syllabus or course announcements. You might also share materials through your modules based on the week or day they’re assigned.

• Guiding Documents
  
  Especially when using modules, guiding documents laying out the week or providing a course overview can be useful tools to help students navigate your course materials, assignments, and more. Below, I’ve included a few screenshots of how I use guiding documents for my course modules.

• Navigation Menu – Tailor it to your course!
  
  Pro-tip: the navigation sidebar for your Canvas course can be edited to only include the tools and sections that you want to use in your course.
  
  To remove sections:
  
  Go to Canvas Settings (located at the bottom of your course’s navigation sidebar), then to the “Navigation” setting.
  
  To add additional tools or pages:
  
  Check out the removed sections list at the bottom of this page, or by clicking on the “Apps” tab in Settings and checking out the apps listed there. For more experimental tools, check out the Canvas App Center by clicking “See some LTI tools that work great with Canvas” in the page’s description.

Modules

If you organize your course through modules, our two most important tips are parallelism and consistency—make sure that you have a structure for your modules that you follow through with for each section.

For example, I organize my modules by week, including any assignments or tasks that have Canvas submissions for clear access. I also begin with a “Start Here!” module with a Course Overview and guiding documents:

Each Week then has an Overview page and is organized by class meeting. For each class meeting, I always include In-Class Materials and Course Tasks (homework) so that students know where to go to find readings and assignments:

How you organize your modules is up to you, but it’s best to go in with a clear plan that’s cohesive across your course!

Accessibility

Don’t forget throughout to do accessibility checks throughout your building process with Canvas’s Accessibility Checker, especially for your course materials and any images used. The library offers a Conversion Service That makes PDFs accessible for screen readers!

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If you need help building out your Canvas site, please don’t hesitate to contact an AD on staff! We’d love to collaborate with you to design a site that suits your teaching style and pedagogical goals. And for further help, check out the recording of our CIC Winter Workshop here!

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