Organising your Canvas course space
Use these three checklists below to ensure that your learning content, course structure and settings, and assessments are ready for students.
Learning Content Checklist | Course Settings Checklist | Assignment and Quizzes Checklist
Once your course is reviewed and finalised, remember to publish the course!
Learning Content Checklist:
Banners for Canvas courses can be requested from the eLearning team. To aid consistency, template banners are available that can be used across a programme or school.
You should be using the Canvas course template, which has placeholders for instructor photos and contact information.
Banners for Canvas courses can be requested from the eLearning team. To aid consistency, template banners are available that can be used across a programme or school.
You should be using the Canvas course template, which has placeholders for instructor photos and contact information.
You should be using the Canvas course template. Have you completed the pages on Orientation and Expectations, Feedback, and Assessment?
The expectation is that students will have access to the first two weeks of learning content when the course goes live.
A discussion forum should be made available for knowledge sharing, and building community.
Accessibility and inclusivity are key considerations throughout the Central Learning Environment (CLE).
More on Accessibility | Designing for Accessibility and Inclusion
Consider the student experience of working through the content. Modules allow you to build knowledge progressively, as well as encouraging consistency.
This supports searchability and makes it easier to update, re-use, or re-organise content. You can quickly spot outdated files or duplicate materials.
Keeping only current materials helps ensure students are working with accurate and relevant resources.
Course Settings Checklist:
Check the course title and code is what you expect, e.g. BIOL21252 Parasitology.
In the People section, check that all teaching staff and TAs are present with the correct role.
Remember that anything unpublished will never been seen by students.
Make sure the dates have rolled over and the linked resources are still relevant.
More on the Reading List
If you are using Lock Until, Requirements and Prerequisites, make sure they all work together as you intend. Use Student View to check how the flow works.
Check that Discussions, Groups and Gradebook settings are appropriate.
By default, the template has announcements visible on the Home Page to ensure students see them when they enter the course.
Check that you have made the relevant navigation links visible to students. View as Student is a useful way of checking this.
Assignments and Quizzes Checklist:
Please ensure that you are working with the appropriate teams (e.g. Assessment and Progression) when setting up relevant assignments.
Make sure the ‘due’, ‘available from’ and ‘until’ dates are correct and in accordance with the University assessment guidelines.
Make sure extra time has been correctly allocated.
Make sure you have clearly signposted assessment information on why, how, what, when, where, etc.
Practice tasks or ungraded activities should be ticked as ‘Do not count this assignment towards final grade’.
If you choose ‘Percentage’ it automatically calculates the percentage from the maximum points available for the assignment.
Using anonymous marking is part of the University’s assessment guidelines.
This is quite a complex process and will require careful planning.
Canvas rubrics are automatically shown to students for transparency and consistency.
Remember that assignment groups in Canvas are for students to actively collaborate on a task.
Make sure your weighting reflects the allocation of marks across summative assessments, with formative assessments weighted as zero.