I Have a Homepage Template! Now What?

To celebrate Teacher Appreciation Week, Instructure’s Instructional Design team shared two free homepage templates that you can use in your courses! Now that you have the templates, what do you do from an instructional design perspective?

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Curious to learn more about best practices and features/products to consider for onboarding courses? Look no further than this blog post! 

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New Year, New Canvas

Unlock the potential of your virtual classroom with three powerful resolutions, ensuring accessibility, inclusivity, and engaging interactions in your Canvas courses for the upcoming semester.

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GenAI: Your Ultimate Teaching Assistant!

Say goodbye to the days of relying solely on student helpers for classroom tasks! Enter the era of Generative AI (GenAI), revolutionizing education by becoming your go-to assistant at any time. In this blog post, we explore how GenAI, including ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude, can skyrocket your productivity in course development, and grading. While the debate around academic integrity continues, the undeniable benefits of saving instructors' time take the spotlight. Discover how GenAI can swiftly generate outlines, assessments, learning materials, and more, helping you reclaim valuable time.

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Reading Your Classroom When It's Online

Writing directions that help your learners get everything they need from an assignment can be tough! Let’s look at some ways you can upgrade your assignments that result in better outcomes.

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Canvas Course Evaluation Checklist v3.0

In this post, we share our newly released Canvas Course Evaluation Checklist version 3.0. This version includes newly added items to support full Course content builds at your institution. Learn why we updated the checklist and get your very own copy.

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4 Canvas Features that will Leave You Charmed

Look no further, because we’ve got the lucky charms you need to make your Canvas experience magical!

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5 Golden Rings Giveaway: Course Stickers

Who doesn't love course stickers? Add a little sparkle to your course with our course sticker freebie.

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5 Golden Rings Giveaway: Wrapping Up The Year

Let's kickoff Day 4 of our giveaway with a...

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5 Golden Rings Giveaway: New Year's Resolution

It's Day 3 of our 5 Golden Rings Giveaway and we are so excited to hear about your Canvas goals for the New Year. Sharing will enter you in a drawing to win an awesome prize!

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5 Golden Rings Giveaway: This or That?

We are so excited to bring to the community a "This or That" game and a chance to win some swag!

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5 Golden Rings Giveaway: Caption This!

Let’s start this holiday party with a fun picture-captioning activity that enters you in a drawing for some awesome Instructure swag!

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Learning Services' 5 Golden Rings Giveaway

You do not want to miss our 5 Golden Rings Giveaway! Not only will you have a chance to win actual prizes but you will also love the assortment of jewels we have to offer you this season!

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Maintaining Engagement Through the Mid-Semester Slump

Student engagement is a key component of good instructional design and, like many elements of instructional design, it is more difficult online. So how do you engage students in an online course? Well, Canvas has got you covered with tools and tips to connect with students and keep them coming back!

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ID Horror Stories: Put Poor Design to Rest

When looking at the cauldron of instructional design, it all boils down to cognitive load. Put poor design to rest and reanimate your courses with a few simple principles that will leave you fearless in the face of course-building horrors.

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Best Practices for Formative and Summative Assessments in Canvas

Formative and summative assessments are integral steps in the process of learning, but how can you bring them to life in Canvas? Whether you’re new to the platform or you’re a Canvas pro, we’ve got you covered with all the tools to build engaging formative and summative assessments in your Canvas class.

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Accessibility in Online Course Design

"A11y" stands for "accessibility." It is a numeronym, with 11 representing the number of letters between the letter "a" and the letter "y."

Accessibility (A11y) is the practice of making web content accessible and usable for as many learners as possible. When content is not accessible, many learners lose out on class engagement which creates obstacles in their academic journey. Let's dive into some accessibility basics and learn how to improve inclusion, equity, and accessibility in the "digital classroom."

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Ready, Set, Launch!

The Instructional Design team has been working hard to launch our ten newest Ready-Made Templates! We think you’ll love them! Check out this post to learn more about what each template has to offer, and get a glimpse of how we collaborate here at Instructure.

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Turn the Page on Your Canvas Course

The ID team shares tips and best practices for wrapping up a semester or academic year in Canvas. Read more to find out what you can do to make the transition from school to summer as easy as turning a new page in a book.

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Teacher Appreciation ID Giveaway

Instructure’s Instructional Design Team has created some punny stickers for your course. We hope you’ll stick with us (get it?!) and check out this blog post!

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The Dos and Don’ts of Icon Maker

The Instructional Design Team at Canvas has compiled best practices in using Canvas’s new Icon Maker. Read more to find out the Dos and Don’ts of Icon Maker!

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Four Tips to Spring Clean your Canvas Courses

Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing! The ID team is here to help you Spring Clean your Canvas course with four easy tips you can implement today!

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New Year, New Course Goals

Have you ever made a promise to yourself you didn't keep? I've spent so many years making new year's resolutions, only to break them within two weeks of setting them. Each time, I set my expectations too high without the proper systems set in place to achieve my goal. For me, this year has been different. Using the SMART goal-setting framework, I have finally felt successful in my progress, giving me the confidence to pursue more challenging and deeply-rooted goals. What do you wish you could achieve for your classroom; whether it's online, in person, or hybrid? Take some time to explore this blog post for resources and strategies for setting achievable goals this year.

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Design Tips for Pages in Canvas

Ever see a super inviting and well-thought-out page in Canvas and think, “OoooOoOo! I want to be able to do that!” but then wonder how? Or maybe you have even begun experimenting with visual design in your Canvas courses and just need some tips and tricks to up your game? A well-designed page will not only complement and enhance the content you’re delivering but also create an engaging learning space for your students. Take a moment to read through this blog post for some simple things you can start incorporating into your courses today.

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Today my heart is overflowing with gratitude for the incredible Instructional Design team at Instructure. A few years ago, I envisioned creating a course focused on accessibility, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I wanted to share the knowledge that had dramatically changed the way I put content together in an online course, such as: how to design with mobile in mind, using styles and headings to increase consistency and support screen readers, how to ensure you have sufficient color contrast, as well as best practices regarding alt text, captioning videos, and hyperlinks. And then, when I became more familiar with UDL (Universal Design for Learning) principles and began applying that framework in my own courses, well, it’s safe to say it revolutionized my design process.

We love the AWESOME new feature “Canvas for Elementary.” In our desire to support any and all users who have enabled this interface, we’re providing a free resource you can find in Canvas Commons, Canvas for Elementary | Course Card/Banners. Simply import the module into your existing course and you’ll have all eight files. Select the file that best represents your course and use it as your course card (which will then automatically show up as the banner in the respective course). Have more questions about the Canvas for Elementary feature? I’ve gathered my favorite resources from the Canvas Community.

As educators, we want our students to have the best learning experience possible! What creates the optimal Canvas experience? I like to think of a Canvas course as an experience, similar to an experience you might have when visiting a hotel. Your experience at a budget inn will not likely not be the same as an all-inclusive resort, right? As an Instructional Designer, I’d like to share three best practices that I believe make the most considerable impact on student learning and help give students that state-of-the-art experience.

We’ve all experienced that feeling of being lost...like when we step onto a college campus for the first time, enter a new shopping mall, or exit an airplane into a new airport. We have that uneasy feeling of not knowing where to go or what to do. Our first reaction is to find our way. We naturally look for a directory, a map, or a guide to help point us in the right direction. With all the other changes and uncertainty surrounding our students, there should be no question about where to go and what to do in their online classrooms. This brings us to our topic of discussion: Rethinking Page Design - Creating a Gateway to Learning. 

I love inspirational Ted Talks and thought I’d share a few of my top educational ones with you as well as Canvas features that support some pretty great ideas… “Ideas worth spreading.”

For many educators, 2020 has brought a shift in delivering content from face-to-face to using a Learning Manage System (LMS) such as Canvas. Some find the change exciting and exhilarating. Some find it scary and frustrating. Regardless of how you’re feeling about the shift, learning how to add an element of humanness to your course is a good return on investment. What are the top three things you can do to humanize your online course? Why is it important? What Canvas features support humanizing learning and how can those be easily implemented?