Category: Content types

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Canvas Course Design Content types

Managing Sections

Courses and sections work together in Canvas. Sections help subdivide students within a course and offer section-specific options such as varied due dates for assignments, discussions, and quizzes. Sections can also be used to create student groups.

Think of the Course as the location where students will:

  • access course content
  • interact with the instructor
  • interact with other students

Sections are groups of students created to manage administrative differences within the course. Each section still has access to the content within the course as well as the instructor and other students. However, the Sections allows the instructor to:

  • Manage different instructional timelines
  • Vary assignment due dates by Section
  • View/Manage grades by Section
  • Assign TAs or Facilitators to specific Sections for grading

At the Geisel School of Medicine, Sections will likely be used to:

  • Manage Clerkship Rotations
  • Manage OnDoctoring Facilitator Groups
  • Manage Small Group discussions

To learn more about Sections, feel free to view the Course Settings Video and the Sections Tutorials on this page.

Course Settings Video

Skip to 3:46 to watch the portion of the video on Sections.

Sections Tutorials

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Content types

Creating a Homepage

The Home Page is the first page your students see upon entering your Canvas course site. There are several options for designing a Canvas Home Page:

  • Recent Activity Dashboard – Displays the most recent announcements, messages, assignments, and discussion posts in your course.
  • a Page I’ll Design Myself – Has the same content capabilities as a standard Page. Also referred to as the Front Page.
  • the Course Modules/Sections – Sets your Modules area as the Home Page.
  • the Assignment List – Show all of the assignments in a course, with upcoming and recent assignments at the top.
  • the Syllabus with Assignment List – Lets you add content like a course description, links, images, etc. in a rich content editor and also displays all of the assignments in your course. It’s a combination of “A Page I’ll Design Yourself” and “The Assignment List” options.

To return to the Home Page from anywhere in a Canvas course site, just click on the Home button on the course navigation.

To learn more about customizing the Course Home page, feel free to view the Course Layout Customization Video and the Homepage Tutorial found on this page.

Homepage Tutorials

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Categories
Canvas Course Design Content types

Creating a Syllabus

The Syllabus page allows instructors to edit the syllabus description. Within the syllabus description, instructors can use the Rich Content Editor to post:

  • a course banner
  • the course description
  • a brief introduction
  • class guidelines
  • weekly reminders
  • other important information. 

Instructors can copy and paste content from Word documents directly into the Rich Content Editor or create original content inside of the Rich Content Editor. The Rich Content Editor also allows instructors to embed videos and input HTML.

The Content Selector that appears in the Sidebar when editing the Syllabus description will also allow instructors to link to files or other locations within the course from the Syllabus description.

Syllabus Tutorials

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Canvas Course Design Content types

Using the Calendar to Distribute Content

Canvas Calendar Events can be used to distribute lecture notes or remind students of session details. While creating Events can be a laborious process, doing so benefits the students because:

  • Creating events with due dates provides reminders to students on their Dashboard and in their own Calendar.
  • Students will receive automatic notifications via their preferred communication channels, such as text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, or personal email addresses.

Calendar Tutorials

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Canvas Course Design Content types

Creating Modules

Modules have already been discussed in Step 2: Module Design Model. To review, Modules can be used to:

  • Organize course content by unit, day, week, topic or Outcome
  • Create prerequisite activities that students must complete before moving on in the course
  • Track student progress through a sequence of learning activities

The Geisel Instructional Technology Staff highly recommends that instructors add or create all course content in Canvas (via Pages, Files, Assignments, Quizzes, etc) before organizing everything into modules. 

The other option is to map out your course within Modules using “placeholders” to create an outline of what each module should cover. The potential issue with this approach is that it is easy to forget to update the “placeholders” with the final content.

Module Tutorials

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Categories
Canvas Course Design Content types

Building Content in Pages

Why Use Pages?

You can link to a page from anywhere in Canvas that has a rich content editor. 

Here are some suggestions for using Pages:

  • Create a page for each class meeting or week. Within that page, include links to readings, assignments, and external content.
  • Embed audio and video files. These could be videos from YouTube or TED. You can also link to Relay recordings of you lecturing or demonstrating something.
  • Create a page with instructions and resources for an Assignment.

Add a Page to Module

To add a page to a module:

  1. Select + icon to the right of the module.
  2. From the Module Options, select Add Content.
  3. From the Add Item window, select Content Page from the Add Dropdown list.
  4. Select the Page you wish to add from the Files List.
    Note: If the page has not yet been updated, select the [New Page]option.
  5. If you wish to offset the page in the Module listing, select an Indentation option.
  6. Select Add Item when finished.

Remember, one way to make modules shorter is to link to pages that contain narrative and content instead of creating a long list of files by adding them directly to the module.

Add Pages to Other Tools

To add Pages to a page or other tools:

  1. Click on the Links tab that appears in the Sidebar.
  2. Select Pages.
  3. Select the Page you wish to add.
    Note: If you’d like to create a hyperlink from a word within the page, highlight the word before clicking on the File.
  4. The page you selected will automatically be added to the text area.
  5. Click Save Changes when you are finished editing the page.

Pages Tutorials

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Content types

Add Course Files

Each course has its own file repository into which instructors can upload any documents, readings, or media files that will be used in the site. Instructors can link to files in the course-file repository from anywhere in Canvas that has a rich content editor.

Below are some examples of how you’d add Files to a Module and to Pages. The process seen in Pages will apply to adding files to Events, Assignments, Quizzes, Discussions, etc.

Adding file to a module

  1. Select + icon to the right of the module.
  2. From the Module Options, select Add Content.
  3. From the Add Item window, select File from the Add Dropdown list.
  4. Select the File you wish to add from the Files List.
    Note: If the file has not yet been updated, select the [New File] option.
  5. If you wish to offset the file in the Module listing, select an Indentation option.
  6. Select Add Item when finished.

Add Files to a Page

To add files to a page:

  1. Click on the Files tab that appears under Page Tools in the Sidebar.
  2. Select the File you wish to add to the page.
    Note: If you’d like to create a hyperlink from a word within the page, highlight the word before clicking on the File.
  3. The file will automatically be added to the page.
  4. Click Save Changes when you are finished editing the page.

Files Tutorials

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