Tag: course design

Canvas Building Session: Tips for a Flexible and Accessible Canvas Infrastructure

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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.
Image of a Canvas site's setting page on the navigation tab.
Image of Canvas App Center.

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:

Image of course overview page, which includes an image of a cassette tape and a brief course description.

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:

Image of a Week One Overview, which includes an image of an old polaroid, a brief description of the week, and links to assignments students will be working on this week.
Image of a a daily page in the module, which includes an In-Class Materials section with links, as well as a Course Tasks section that links to readings and a YouTube video. At the bottom of the page is a link to the course assignment due at the end of the week.

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!

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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Tips and Approaches for Multimodal Revision

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By Alycia Gilbert

Note: This post was originally developed for the Winter 2021 CIC Workshop and published to the CIC Blog; however, I thought it was especially relevant now, as students begin their second assignment sequences and instructors begin planning their requirements for the portfolio. Even if your course materials don’t lean too heavily into multimodal composition, this post raises applicable questions and provide tips for scaffolding the revision process for any major project. In resharing this post, I hope that it’s a useful prompt for considering how to define substantive revision for the portfolio, how to prepare students for revision, and how to set reasonable expectations for the revision process considering the scope of the project and the length of the quarter!

Both with my own students and with other instructors, I’ve had a lot of conversations about anxiety when approaching multimodal projects—specifically, anxiety over how to tackle revision. I’ve felt that anxiety myself; developing a philosophy on multimodal revision can be tricky, but it’s an absolute necessity for a portfolio-based writing course. What does substantive revision look like for a multimodal project? What do you emphasize as the end-goal of multimodal revision? And what do you do with multimodal assignments that are difficult to revise within the course’s timeframe?

While everyone’s approach varies with context (and often even by assignment!), here are a few tips for facilitating and framing multimodal revision:

Scaffolding the Revision Process

Assignment sequences that allow you to pace out feedback and the timeline for revision can make the whole process much less daunting, both for you and your students. To scaffold the revision process into your course design, you might…

  1. Consider dividing projects into preliminary drafts

    Preliminary drafts are often easier for students to revise; they’re much more malleable, and students are often more receptive to feedback during the drafting stage. This also helps focus your feedback, which can be geared toward students actualizing their project. You might have shorter assignments that ask students to first create scripts, storyboards, mock-ups, “minimum viable product” drafts, or pitches, depending on the nature of their multimodal project.
  2. Create opportunities for peer review during the drafting process

    Similarly, incorporating peer review into the earlier stages of drafting provides students with concrete insight into how their project is working and where they could make adjustments. These early interventions create a more collaborative class environment and make it easier to resist the urge to backload revision at the end of the course.
  3. Set clear expectations for revision and articulate them before feedback

    Potentially as early as in your syllabus, in your first few class sessions, or within the assignment prompt itself, you might find it helpful to clearly state what goals and expectations the class will have with revision. What does substantial multimodal revision look like for your course? For an assignment? If this is a question that you want your class to negotiate from project to project, what general, core expectations might you let these individual negotiations stem from?
  4. Consider crowd-sourcing assessment criteria with your class

    Not only does this create space for students to more actively and equitably engage with their own assessment, but establishing a communal vocabulary for assessment can make understanding and incorporating feedback easier for students. It can also make peer review more effective, as well. You might begin with the course outcomes and ask students to brainstorm what these outcomes would look like specifically for the assignment, or you might have students assess a past sample together.

Process Over Product

In framing revision, it can be helpful to emphasize gaining and understanding new skills over producing perfect final products—this allows students to experiment with genres they may not feel like they have mastery over and places the focus on growth, student choice, and active use of course outcomes.

  1. Use reflection prompts or revision plans

    These encourage students to demonstrate knowledge of course outcomes and concepts, as well as to explain their rhetorical choices as composers. Revision plans create space for students to explain what they would revise if they had time or were asked to do so; revision plans keep the focus on the process of learning multimodal composition and negotiating feedback with questions of rhetorical effectiveness, while acknowledging the time constraints of the course (“If I had more time to work with this project, I would…”). Additionally, these types of assignments tie in well with the goals of the final portfolio and incorporating metacognition.
  2. Provide multiple opportunities for students to reflect at different stages of the composing process

    Reflecting across a project’s composition helps students break down the creative process and see how feedback, revision, and trial and error shaped their work. Ask students to focus on the effects of their compositional choices and incorporate evidence from their compositions.

Giving Feedback to Multimodal Assignments

Sometimes, anxieties about facilitating multimodal revision are tied to broader anxieties about giving feedback on multimodal projects. In addition to emphasizing process over product, here are a few things that might demystify the feedback process:

  1. Be aware of time management

    Multimodal pieces often take more time to grade, but it’s important to experience the piece in full—the pace at which the audience engages with the material is a rhetorical aspect of the text. You might try to develop systems for responding quickly and effectively to multimodal texts, like taking screenshots or marking areas to return to after your first viewing.
  2. Consider Higher Order Concerns for multimodal feedback

    With multimodal projects, keeping tabs on how much revision you’re guiding students toward can make your feedback more straightforward and their revision process less overwhelming. Like in any other composition classes, use rhetorical principles to guide your comments. With HOC in mind, you might focus feedback on:
    • The composition’s effectiveness in addressing the rhetorical situation
    • Where the composition could better meet the requirements of the assignment or tie to the course’s overall goals and conversations
    • How effectively the composition uses multiple modes symbiotically, rather than considering the modes separately in your feedback. Does the composition combine appropriate modalities effectively to communicate the piece’s purpose? Or do the multiple modes overlap in ineffective, redundant ways or seem extraneous?

An effective, consistent feedback system and scaffolding revision into your course are just a few of the larger approaches that you can take to make multimodal revision a little less intimidating in the composition classroom. Let us know in the comments if you’ve got any tried and true approaches to framing multimodal revision to add to this conversation!

For further reading, check out these sources that helped inform this post:

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