Designing Your Course

Whether you teach online or in-person, you can use the Canvas learning management system to share course materials, assess learning, and communicate with your students. This page will show you how to use templates and tools in Canvas to leverage design principles like modules and alignment for your course regardless of delivery method. By following these strategies, you’re on your way to creating a high-quality learning experience for your students.

STEP 1

Organize your course for student success.

Students learn better when they can find and access material easily and identify how content and activities are connected throughout the course. Before delving into your Canvas course site, use our course planning worksheet to lay out the course content. You can use this worksheet to check the alignment of course and module objectives with instructional materials, activities, and assessments. Alignment occurs when these key course elements work together to help students focus their learning and ensure they achieve stated outcomes.

STEP 2

Use a quality course template.

When designing a course in Canvas, an important first step is to use a course template. A well-designed template will make your course easier to navigate and position it to yield better learning outcomes and a better student experience. By importing the ODL quality course shell into your Canvas site, you’ll automatically build your course on selected standards based on the nationally recognized Quality Matters (QM) rubric. While the QM rubric outlines standards for online courses, instructors have found it a valuable resource in organizing face-to-face courses.

STEP 3

Use syllabus & module overview templates.

The course shell provides templates for home and start here pages, syllabus, and module overview, as well as pages for discussions, assignments, and quizzes. The syllabus template is customizable, accessible, and responsive and includes university policy blocks that can be updated automatically when the page is edited. Use the module overview template to give students a clear understanding of module content, including objectives, materials, assignments, activities, and multimedia. From here, you can use the DesignPLUS Multi-Tool to populate your Canvas course site quickly and easily.

STEP 4

Communicate with students.

Canvas offers options like integrated email, announcements, and discussion boards to help you facilitate communication with students. Use announcements for class updates and feedback on how students are doing. Kaltura Express Capture can help you make announcements more engaging, and SpeedGrader will enable you to offer personalized written, audio, or video feedback. If you teach online, something as simple as uploading a picture of yourself and a brief bio with reasons you love teaching the course can help students feel more connected by increasing what we refer to in online learning as "instructor presence".

STEP 5

Assess student performance.

Canvas offers tools to measure student performance and learning, including quizzes, group projects, discussion boards, and the plagiarism detection tool Turnitin. To help you ensure academic integrity for high-stakes exams, the FSU Testing Center offers proctored testing by request, with priority scheduling for distance learning courses as well as for high-enrollment face-to-face courses. As an online alternative to in-person proctored exams, consider open-book tests, discussion forums, student portfolios, or multimedia presentations. See Ensuring Test Integrity for options that will help you promote the academic integrity of your course assessments.

STEP 6

Keep universal design in mind.

Using Canvas tools, you can ensure course content is student-friendly regardless of ability or learning preferences. Use Ally to identify and address inaccessible content. Ally automatically converts files into alternative formats, helping you meet a principle of universal design by providing students multiple ways to engage with content. If you include video in your course, we strongly encourage you to use the Kaltura media platform, which automatically generates video captions that you can easily edit. See Making Accessible Content Easy for additional accessibility resources or schedule a consultation with one of our experts.

STEP 7

Teaching online?

In addition to the tips above, we would be pleased to help you design your course to meet standards in the nationally recognized Quality Matters (QM) rubric through the FSU Online Quality Initiative. Focusing primarily on design rather than on content or delivery, the rubric helps ensure an online course is structured to achieve the desired learning outcomes. Courses that incorporate standards from the QM rubric are easer to navigate, provide materials in a variety of formats, and result in better learning outcomes. We provide training, stipends, and hands-on support to help you prepare your course to achieve high-quality certification.  

Additional Resources