Organizing courses with Canvas' modules

How will students access your course content? For some reason, this mundane question regularly occupies my mind. So much so that I have dedicated an entire article (this one) to how I have used Canvas’ modules in different ways. I did make the assumption that you have some prior experience with Canvas as a teacher. Still, I hope you find my musings helpful.

Modules with parallel structure #

Once upon a time, during a pandemic in the not too distant past, I found myself taking ACUE’s course “Effective Online Teaching Practices”. I was a learner and, for the first time, found myself as a student in a Canvas course. The course was designed as a series of modules. And every module had the same structure, differing only in the name of the module itself which, initially, seemed odd.

But, as I progressed through the course, I found that the parallel structure of modules was very useful to me. First, I knew what to expect in each module even though the content and learning objectives were different. Second, I knew how far I had progressed through a module and approximately how much more time I needed to invest before completing it. The course helped me appreciate the design of our own Introduction to Programming (CSC108H), where weekly “Prepares” and “Performs” were sandwiched around lecture hours. And it got me thinking about the organization of my own modules.

So, when I found myself teaching Computer Organization (CSC258H1) for the very first time in the Fall of 2022, I took the opportunity to apply what I had seen. I decided to use one module for each week and I divided each module into 3-4 parts: (1) Prepare, (2) Learn, (3) Demonstrate (if there was a lab that week), and (4) Connect (see animation below). For example, the Prepare part of a module included links to a quiz for a textbook reading. I made the decision to not use Canvas’ pages at all. This had the advantage of not only showing everything that was in a module on the Modules page, but also making it all “one click away”.

When the Fall of 2023 rolled around, I was once again assigned to teaching CSC258H1. This time around, I wanted to include fine-grained learning outcomes for my students. But I also did not want these learning outcomes embedded in the materials. Rather, I wanted students to see them before they downloaded a slide deck or accessed a quiz. And so I was faced with the dilemma of how I should integrate these learning outcomes into some kind of parallel structure.

While in 2022 I avoided Canvas pages completely, in 2023 I relied on them heavily. Pages gave me significantly more flexibility with how I communicated materials with my students. And they fit well with Quercus’ “Next” navigation system. The animation below shows both the overall structure and how clicking “Next” navigates from one part to the next. Note that I also extracted the recommended textbook questions from my slides, including them directly on the page.

The modules in 2023 have a parallel structure. But, unlike the modules of 2023, there is basically no information about what a module is about. You have to click through to a specific page to have some understanding of the topics and learning outcomes for a given module. There are some ways to address this, such as editing the module name (e.g., “Week 2 - Combinational Circuits”). But depsite the limitation, I preferred the 2023 organization because I found Pages to give me much more wiggle room in how I communicated with my students.

Organizing material with two or more instructors #

When you are not the only instructor for a course, you may face an explosion (of sorts) of material. For example, it is likely that each instructor is using their own slide deck, live programming code, etc. In addition, there are common materials that all instructors use, like worksheets. How do you communicate all these materials to students? One option is to keep a separate Canvas course website for each section. But our department typically merges all sections into one, so I admit to having no experience with this. Instead, I share some approaches when all instructors are sharing the same course website.

The first approach I was exposed to I call “The Matrix”. It is essentially a very large table, with links to almost every material. The animation below shows how this might be organized. Unfortunately, Canvas’ editor makes it very difficult to make the table look anything resembling “pretty”.

Even with only two instructors, there is still quite a bit of material. This was especially true in the Fall of 2020, where the pandemic meant that every live-streamed lecture was recorded and posted. In a course with six hours of lecture per week (CSC110Y1), you ended up with some fairly large modules as shown in the animation below.

That’s a lot of scrolling for one week! Unfortunatley, Canvas doesn’t give you a way to have multiple “Modules” pages, or to display specific parts of a module to only one section. I have yet to encounter a “neat” solution to multi-instructor courses.

Locking modules #

In Canvas, modules have other settings that may be useful for sequencing the materials in your course. In particular, every module can be “locked” until a specific date and time. At a high level, this means that students will see the module (and all its published items) on the Modules page, but it is “grayed out”.

When I create weekly modules, I make one module unlock each week. I feel this is a great way for students to preview the entire course at a glance. But it also has the added benefit of creating a “progression” toward the end of the term, as fewer and fewer modules are grayed out each week.

In addition to the “grayed out” visual effect, items inside a locked module are also locked. For example, even though I have a published quiz or assignment (that is clickable from Quizzes or Assignments), if it belongs to a locked module, then students cannot see its contents until the module is unlocked. This is yet another Canvas quirk to learn about, but I find it useful because it means I can leave everything in a published state. Then I can keep editing things until the module is unlocked. And I don’t have to worry (unless I want to) about the “Available from” settings for Assignments or Quizzes.

Conclusion #

I have mainly used modules as containers for a week’s worth of course material. But this is not always the case; sometimes I use modules as containers for a category of course material (e.g., lectures, labs, etc.) In the end, however, I find myself increasingly confined to the “Canvas method”.

The benefit with following the “Canvas method” is that my course is consistent with other courses at the university (well, at least those instructors who also use Canvas). But the import/export course feature leaves a lot to be desired, and the rigidity of what I can do in modules (and other parts of Canvas) has me contemplating alternatives that use Cavnas as a “bare minimum”. Of course, I would need time to explore and implement such alternatives so, until then… modules!