“Life truly begins when you put your house in order.”— Marie Kondo
While Marie Kondo wants to know if our belongings “spark joy,” when it comes to organizing our Canvas course pages, students are looking for something more concrete: organization and ease in navigation. This can be complicated by the range of materials we add to our Canvas courses: readings, assignments, videos, and more. We know the benefits of scaffolding assignments, but scaffolding also creates more material. So how should we organize that material so that it is easy to find and logically structured? The answer is simple, but effective: Canvas Modules.
Take a podcast assignment, for instance. Replacing a final exam with a multimedia assignment like a podcast is a beneficial, authentic mode of assessment with many applications. But as any instructor who has assigned a podcast knows, scaffolding is essential both in reducing student cognitive load and in creating better final products. That means that a scaffolded podcast assignment might include several smaller tasks or assignments with multiple due dates, technology training videos, and a peer review.
Now imagine if all of these parts are explained on a single assignment page. Maybe in a Course Readings Module the instructor has included research on the subject of the podcast. There’s a peer review assignment listed with that week’s other assignments, which have nothing to do with the podcast. There’s a video tutorial for Adobe Audition… somewhere. Confusing, right? Not only does this (lack of) organization make it hard for students to find what they’re looking for, it makes it hard for them to see how the various parts of a scaffolded assignment fit together. That structural understanding is key for them to understand why they are doing what they’re doing, which is the metacognitive work that turns assessment into learning.
Enter Canvas Modules.
Canvas Modules are a natural choice for organizing scaffolded assignments because they offer a way to visually group each part of the assignment together in a logical structure. For instance, in the module below, students can see what the overall assignment is going to be, and all of the materials that support that assignment, whether they are mini-assignments, readings, or links to outside resources. With everything in one place, it’s easy for them to see how everything fits together, and what’s more, this organization shows them that we are breaking up a challenging assessment into manageable tasks. This can help alleviate some of the anxiety that students experience when faced with major assignments.
Beyond reducing anxiety, there are several other pedagogical advantages to scaffolding an assignment like this. We are able to intervene early on if a student seems off track or, in the case of the podcast example, has chosen a topic that either is not appropriate or will be particularly challenging. The mini-assignments not only provide an opportunity for easy-to-grade feedback throughout the process, but they are also good accountability checks. Are students keeping up? If several students are stumbling on the same step, this might be an indicator that we need to spend more time on that step, or add more resources to the module. An extra benefit of using modules is that when it is time to use this assignment again in another class, it’s easy to move the whole module over to a new Canvas course.
Interested in using Canvas Modules, but not sure where to start? Reach out to the Learning & Teaching Consultants today!
References:
For more resources on scaffolding assignments, including sample writing assignments, check out this resource courtesy of The Sweetland Center for Writing: Effective Assignment Sequencing for Scaffolding Learning.
