Organizing your materials and activities in Canvas will help an online or hybrid class go more smoothly for both you and your students. Structuring your material consistently provides some of the same conceptual grounding and sense of reliability that a physical classroom does. When students know where to find things, their energy can go into the learning itself. A great way to organize your Canvas course site is by using Modules. Modules allows you to group course content, activities, and assignments by week, making it simple and clear to find what is needed each week.
An important part of organizing your course effectively is deciding what elements of the class will have the most impact and value done synchronously, with everyone together, live at the same time. Lectures, for example, are rarely high-impact in this way. Instead, save your synchronous face-to-face time, whether on-site or online, for activities such as Q&A, one-on-one feedback, small group discussions, or other collaborative work. This applies equally to both in-person time and video-conference time!
You can record lecture-style material at home, using Kaltura Capture, or you can come to campus to record in one of the Lecture Capture enabled classrooms. If you’re new to using Kaltura, consider signing up for one of our workshops on it. To schedule time in a Lecture Capture room, simply put in a request; our Lecture Capture team will schedule you in.
Once you have decided on your synchronous course activities, it will become far easier to plan what activities can take place asynchronously. For example, you may wish to use a Canvas Discussion to collect questions after students view lecture recordings. This will allow you to target points of confusion during your synchronous meeting time, and will let students who cannot attend still get their questions answered. If you teach a writing intensive course, you may wish to use the peer-review feature of Canvas Assignments to do the initial part of review online, saving your synchronous class time for a deeper discussion of the issues noted in the review. Scaffolding your synchronous activities with online pre-work in this manner reduces stress for everyone, and will make it easier for you and your students if you need to move fully remote again during Fall.
We have provided LSA templates by Course Type as a guide for what elements you might want to include in certain types of courses, and how they might be organized. If you’d like to have Modules with blank site elements ready-made for you to fill in or expand on, import one of the LSA course templates from Commons. See Importing LSA Canvas Course Template for how-to instructions.
It is also a good idea to include a “Getting Started” module which gives you a single location for instructor contact information, a course Question & Answer forum, a current-situation survey for your students, and any other stable or global items (e.g. a link to your office hours meeting). All of the LSA Canvas Templates include a Getting Started module.
If you would like to discuss how to organize your course, or how to build it in Canvas, you can always contact us at LSATSLearningTeachingConsultants@umich.edu.
