Cleaning Up Your Canvas Course
As the school year wraps up, it’s a great time to wrap audit your course content. Before you export everything for next semester or share it with your fellow colleagues, you should consider trying these best practices to clean up your course.
Checking Course Structure and Navigation
A clean course is an accessible course. Ask yourself, “were my students easily able to find the assignments and resources this year?” or “did i have only the useful links available on my course navigation menu?”. Ensuring your course is set up in a way that is easy for students to navigate is crucial.
Action Plan:
- Disable Unused Links - Ensuring you have only useful course navigation links enabled and disabling the unimportant ones. This keeps the course navigation menu clean and simple for your students.
- Reorder Modules - Ensuring that your modules are listed in an order that makes sense with how your class flows.
- Update Availability Dates - Updating the availability dates of assignments, pages, files and discussions so it lines up with the following semester’s dates so you don’t have to worry about it later.
Checking for Broken Links
If you are not familiar with Course Link Validator in the Canvas course settings, then you definitely should be! When you open your course settings, you have the ability to check all your links in your course at once and see if any are broken! You can learn more about validating the links in your course here:
https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/articles/661141-how-do-i-validate-links-in-a-course
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Organizing Those Files!
As you progress through the school year, you probably add a lot of files that may be unorganized and messy. Deleting files that you no longer need and organizing files that you do need into respective folders is ideal for file organization. For more advice on organizing your files into folders, check out
https://community.instructure.com/en/kb/articles/662845-how-do-i-move-and-organize-files
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Review Course Home Page
Review your course home page and make sure it does more than just provide information… use it as a home base for accessing course content! You can add icons / buttons that you create on platforms such as Canva or FlatIcon (flaticon.com) to your home page and add useful links to those images so they work as quick access links for your students!
View As Student
As you finish your course clean up, you may want to consider viewing your course as a student so you can replicate what your students would see in your course, especially if you’re making a new course copy or sharing the course to commons for future use for yourself or with other educators in your department. As you’re in student view, be sure to look for:
- Any content that is published that shouldn’t be
- Any broken links that your students cannot access
- Files and resources are in the correct folders
- The correct dates appear to the content under your modules
- How user friendly the course is and how easy your resources can be found
- Any important images or files that don’t load correctly
- Anything else important to your course that impacts the learning experience!
There you have it!
Doing a course clean out is one of the best things you can do to ensure that your course remains fresh, clean and easy to navigate with little to no issue. Ensuring that your course can be navigated easily is crucial for student success. Happy course cleaning!
