Canvas Design: A Creative Conundrum
One of the biggest challenges to building a course in Canvas is knowing where to get started. You open up the course shell, and before you is a blank course welcoming you with four words: “Create a new Module.” Ah, yes, a classic case of the Canvas course writer’s block – punctuated with the looming question, “where do I begin?”
Meet the Champions of Canvas Creation
You aren’t alone in this creative quandary. In fact, our design services team encounters folks all the time with this very problem. Let’s meet a few champions who have overcome this Canvas hurdle, inspired by the real-world examples we have witnessed.
- Mr. Garcia, a middle school educator at Panda School, always put his heart and soul into his lessons, however, he felt his lessons lost their “Garcia” spark when transferred into the digital space. He really wanted to craft a course that felt like his classroom, however, designing a course experience customized for the multiple subjects he taught was a time-consuming task.
- Panda School’s 6-12 English and Math curriculum departments were tasked with creating an educational resource hub for their faculty to use by the next academic year. They initiated planning the course template together, yet found that their specific department's needs for course templates diverged. While they aligned on the goal to provide standards-based accessible content, they knew that their courses would require different approaches customized to their department aims.
- Bamboo District’s Teaching and Learning team faced their own Canvas course challenge: they wanted to design professional development for the district’s schools, like Panda School, with a unique “look and feel” that modeled the district’s Four-Dimensional (4D) Competencies Framework. To accomplish this goal, they needed to curate several templates with professional designs that exemplified the 4D Framework.
What did Mr. Garcia's struggle, Panda School's diverging departmental needs, and the Bamboo District's professional learning vision all have in common? The fundamental need for efficient, effective, and adaptable course design in Canvas.
Success Empowered by the Template Subscription Service
So, how did each of these Canvas champions overcome their course building challenge? The answer lies in their use of a powerful tool: the Template Subscription Service. Institutions and organizations who use this service are able to grant their instructors access to over 60 course templates crafted by our design services team. Once set up in your Canvas instance via its seamless LTI integration, the Template Subscription Service puts an extensive library of Ready-Made Templates and Design Packages at instructors' fingertips for easy, one-click installation, instantly banishing the dreaded Canvas writer’s block. Consequently, this seamless access empowers a diverse range of course creators, from individual teachers to entire departments and districts, with both a wealth of design choices and a significantly simplified workflow.
But the Template Subscription Service offers so much more than just ease of installation! Here are some other great benefits:
- Instructure’s design services team adds new templates for a variety of audiences each year
- Access is provided to templates that meet a variety of audiences: Elementary, Secondary, Higher Education, and Professional Learning course templates
- Specialized templates for Canvas for Elementary users, catering to both primary and upper elementary/secondary levels
- Each template is built with a core commitment to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and WCAG guidelines for accessibility.
Where Can I Learn More?
Do the stories of our Canvas Champions resonate with your own experiences? Are you ready to unlock the same level of success and simplify your course building? Reach out to your customer success team today to learn more about the Template Subscription Service.
