Section 1: Designing and Creating Your Course
In Section 1, you will learn how to customize your user profile and settings, create and sequence course content, and finalize and publish your course.
This section contains the following chapters:
- Chapter 1, Getting Started with Canvas
- Chapter 2, Building Your Canvas Course
- Chapter 3, Getting Ready to Launch Your Course
Chapter 1: Getting Started with Canvas
Welcome to the updated Canvas LMS Course Design! This revised edition will guide you through the world of Instructure Canvas as a Learning Management System. This book covers the use of Canvas as a powerful and revolutionary tool for education, both in the traditional classroom and in virtual and hybrid learning environments.
The chapters in Section 1 explain how to set up your Canvas experience, from setting up your personal profile to designing and building your first course. Section 2 focuses on teaching you about the tools and features Canvas offers to meet the needs of educators, students, and guardians. With all the skills you will have gained over the course of these two sections, Section 3 will provide you with additional resources for any questions that may arise, as well as practical ideas for ways to cultivate many of the skills necessary for contemporary learners to succeed. As a product, Canvas has been designed to meet the unique needs of its users within contemporary education. As a powerful educational tool, Canvas opens the door to countless possibilities for you and the students you teach as citizens of the digital age.
As we begin our exploration of Canvas, we will cover the two main instances (or versions) of Canvas that exist and how to access or create your Canvas account for each instance. First, you will learn how to navigate the layout of the site. Once you know your way around, you will learn how to set up your Canvas profile, enter your contact information, adjust your general settings, and configure your notification preferences.
Next, we will learn how to join a course that your school has created for you in an institutional instance of Canvas or how to create a Canvas course yourself. Once we have created a course, we will be ready to move on to building a course in the next chapter.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Reviewing instances of Canvas
- Accessing Canvas and creating your account
- Navigating Canvas
- Adjusting your profile, settings, and notifications
- Creating your Canvas course
Technical requirements
To complete this chapter, you will need the following:
- A computer or tablet with internet access
- An up-to-date internet browser such as Chrome, Firefox, or Safari
- An email address to create a Canvas account with
- Any instructional materials or documents that your institution has provided
Reviewing instances of Canvas
A wide range of institutions across the world use Canvas as their institutional Learning Management System (LMS). In addition, Canvas can be used in a variety of learning situations outside of traditional institutions. To accommodate the different situations in which users may find themselves while teaching or learning, there are two instances or versions of Canvas you may wish to access depending on your teaching situation.
Let's discuss the two instances of Canvas that you may encounter.
Institution-specific instances of Canvas
If the school that you work for uses Canvas for its LMS, you will most likely receive information from the IT department or an administrator regarding the best way to access and use Canvas. Institutional instances of Canvas typically have certain features and settings preset to ensure that every user within the institution has a similar experience while using Canvas.
Canvas is a highly customizable LMS, which means your institution's IT team can customize aspects of Canvas, such as how accounts are created, the look and feel of the site, how courses and course rosters are created or managed, which features are available to users, which settings certain users can access or adjust, additional integrations, and more. As you work your way through this book, it is important to keep in mind that every feature that's discussed may look or function in a slightly different way if you are accessing an institutional instance of Canvas rather than a Free for Teachers account.
Each situation is slightly different, so reach out to someone in your IT department or administration to get specific information for your school, especially if the instance of Canvas you are using looks or functions in a different way than described in this book.
Free for Teachers instance of Canvas
Canvas offers a Free for Teachers instance of Canvas for educators who do not have access to Canvas through their school. This instance of Canvas allows you to register using any email address, then create and build courses that you would like to teach, regardless of whether you work for an institution that uses Canvas as its LMS. Free for Teachers accounts include access to the features and functionality of Canvas, some of which may be limited, altered, or restricted for those using an institutional instance of Canvas.
While Free for Teachers accounts have access to the robust features and settings available through Canvas, the default design of Canvas remains user-friendly and intuitive, especially for the most important features and settings.
Note
All the examples and screenshots in this book have been taken from a Free for Teachers account since institution-specific instances of Canvas may look different and have customized procedures, features, settings, branding, or color schemes. If you are using an institutional instance of Canvas, prioritize the instructions and guidance that have been provided by your school or IT team in addition to the information in this book.
We will go over how to set up a Free for Teachers account in the next section, where we will begin with a discussion of how to access Canvas.
Accessing Canvas and creating your account
In this section, we will learn how to access Canvas. To begin, you will use your web browser to access the Canvas website by using common web browsers such as, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari. First, we will address how to log in for in...
