Organizing your Site Empowers You & Your Students.
Consistency is KEY! Setting expectations and keeping to it.
Communicating Effectively
- Cut down on students confusingly asking you what they need to do and where to find it.
- Use Canvas Announcements
- Nothing good will come from keeping them.
- Your files will be archived each term. You will always have access to your prior term courses and files.
- Ensure your students are accessing updated content and not old content because the link wasn't updated or students getting confused because there are multiple versions of the files.
- It's hard to detect if students are accessing old or new when files are linked elsewhere. You can be notified of links to outdated files if the files were deleted when opting into Content Link Error Notifications.
- Break it down.
- When linking from other parts of Canvas, it can be hard to know where you need to point to.
- Make it easy on yourself. Don’t make yourself scroll through a long never-ending list when pulling from modules or the rich content editor.
- Have greater control and fail-safes regarding student access to content. Set unpublished status to ensure all files in the folder will not be accessible to students (i.e. exam keys).
- Assigned Readings
Use Canvas Pages, not Canvas Assignments for assigned readings.
Keep Canvas Assignments for student submissions and for grading for consistency's sake.
Canvas Pages allows you to set the content as a to-do-list item for the student. It will appear on the course homepage and in student notifications.
- Documents You Often Need to Update for Reuse
Instead of re-uploading a document you will edit for reuse or often needs editing, type, and/or copy and paste the text into Canvas pages. You can easily make the edits there and notify students that changes to the content have occurred.
- Experience your course site is from student perspective. Preview with the Student View feature.