It’s a well-known principle in web design to keep the layout, navigation and content consistent in order to help users become familiar with a website. This, in turn, helps users to use it effectively and find the information they are looking for.
The same principle can be applied to Canvas courses on a programme.
Typically, students have a number of courses within their programme and if each course has a different layout, structure or uses different terminology, this could make for a confusing experience.
Canvas is easy to use and has a number of tools to help you make your course look great. Canvas allows you to modify your course settings or use different types of content to make the course more useful to students, or more unique to a course’s particular needs. But this is where courses can diverge and make the experience a little confusing to students.
The Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team in conjunction with a number of staff have conducted a recent review of courses across five programmes. The review helped to identify the differences between Canvas courses and decide what is appropriate to make more consistent. We also spoke to students to understand how much this affected them.
Talk to your programme team about your processes to ensure a consistent approach is being delivered across all courses in the programme.
Canvas makes it easy to create and maintain high-quality online courses. Below are some top tips to improve consistency between your Canvas courses:
Navigation Menu
Each course has a navigation menu with around 20 possible links to various parts of the course which can be re-ordered or removed entirely. They link to assignments, announcements, quizzes and other tools.
Keeping these links in the same order across each course will help users to understand the course layout quickly. You can edit the navigation menu in the course settings.
Course Homepage
Different homepage options can be chosen for a course including the course Activity Stream, a custom page created by staff, the course Modules page (which structures resources into topics), the assignment list or the syllabus page. Custom pages and the modules page are two of the most popular options.
Whatever you choose, it helps to adopt the same option for each course to keep a consistent experience. You can choose the homepage by clicking on the button in the right-hand menu of your course.
Feedback
There are numerous ways to provide feedback on student assignments. You may use Word and upload documents to Canvas, use text annotations directly onto the submission, audio or video feedback or use the rubric tool. Each of these options allows markers to adapt feedback delivery depending on the needs of the assessment.
A recent review of LJMU VLE online feedback found that students do not find it easy to access feedback, particularly when the tool or type of feedback is inconsistent between modules. The LJMU TEL team are developing a number of tools to help staff and students understand this issue, however, technology can only go so far in improving access. Consider standardising the way feedback is delivered in your programme to improve ‘feedback literacy’ among students.
Module Handbook
The module handbook contains important information about the course. Even within the same programme, however, the document is referred to using different names.
Whilst file naming convention is important for all files, for the module handbook it is particularly important for it to be named appropriately and consistently incorporating the module code where feasible.
Canvas also allows you to set a different display name than the filename in the modules page. A descriptive filename containing the module code is useful if the file is downloaded. The display name, set to Module Handbook or Module Guide, for example, makes it easy for students to find.