Content heavy courses in Canvas

[kmatson]

I am working with a faculty member who has tons and tons of content on glaciers and volcanoes. He has lots and lots of images. We tried tabs with Pages but we aren't sure that is sustainable has he keeps breaking the containers. It also leads to one long page to edit. I know we can break it into more pages but I am wondering if any of you have classes with lots and lots of content and images and have come up with anything besides really long pages with lots of content to read and images to view. I am not looking for a video to replace it just a better way to organize lots and lots of content. This is when I wish Canvas had the modules within modules worked out.

Thanks in advance for any ideas,

Karen

[stephanie_pope]

Hey Karen,

Many of our AP and history courses have tons of content i.e. images, videos, and text. Some of the ways we visually tackle this is:

• Use the "decrease" or indent to visually group content in the modules view. In modules, we typically begin a unit with no indent, and then decrease content i.e. discussion, quizzes.
• Highlight the methodology behind the course. For instance, my own course is structured: Warm Ups, Vocabulary, Assignments, Discussions, Wrap Up- I use image headers to break up each section of content. One of our math courses uses: REACH (Ready, Explore, Activity, Closure, and Homework). One page is likely to have all 5 sections but have image headers to help visually separate the volume of content.

Hope that helps! I would love to hear other ideas, suggestions, and/or feature ideas.

Stephanie

[kmatson]

Hi Stephanie,

I like the indents on the module side however, I don't find indenting within modules all that helpful because students dive in to modules and then "Next" through them never seeing the indents. If those indents translated somehow as we "next" through the module that would be helpful.

I also hear what you are saying about highlighting the methodology behind the course and we are but we have so much content to get through first.

• Volcanoes everywhere
• Columbia River Basalts
• Lava Plateaus of the Pacific Northwest
• Lava Plateaus of the Pacific Northwest II
• Lava Plateaus of the Pacific Northwest III
• Lab
• Assignments

These all have a tab filled with content and images. What you are left with for the faculty is one huge page to edit. The students have the tabs for each topic area so they aren't as overwhelmed and can see the chunking but I am still looking for something better for everyone.

Thanks so much,

Karen

[dhulsey]

SoftChalk CLOUD​ sounds like a perfect solution here, but it is also a paid solution. It is the one I use.

How do your faculty like PowerPoint?  Office Mix might work and is free.

Perhaps some faculty use OneNote? They might check out OneNote Class Notebook​. I haven't tried this one, but it is on my To do list.

All three of these options are also capable of interactive assignments that write to the Canvas gradebook through LTI tools in Canvas.

[kmatson]

Yes totally LOVE SoftChalk and it would be great here!

Karen

[kmatson]

I really like and use OneNote will have to try OneNote Class Notebook.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Karen

[stephanie_pope]

Hey Karen,

I totally get it- tons of content. What about an accordion? It's gonna do the same thing as tabs....basically. Another options is linking to wiki pages that aren't visible on the modules view. This will decrease the amount of pages, but it may cause confusion for students. For example: "Lava Plateaus of the Pacific Northwest" is an actual page listed in modules, then the II and III are linked wiki pages (not visible on the modules view) at the end of the of the tabbed content. The trick is finding a clever way to highlight the importance to continue clicking through.

Thought?

Stephanie

<p>This accordion will appear will text, images or videos (embedded) can be added.</p>

<p> </p>

<div class="enhanceable_content accordion">

<h3><a href="#">Section 1</a></h3>

<div style="padding: 15px;">

<p>Section 1 Content</p>

</div>

<h3><a href="#">Section 2</a></h3>

<div style="padding: 15px;">

<p>Section 2 Content</p>

</div>

<h3><a href="#">Section 3</a></h3>

<div style="padding: 15px;">

<p>Section 3 Content</p>

<ul>

<li>List item one</li>

<li>List item two</li>

<li>List item three</li>

</ul>

</div>

</div>

[kmatson]

Stephanie,

Yes I will use tabs and I think more pages too. The only issue with tabs is faculty break them and then trying to find what little snip-it of code was deleted or moved by accident can be hard and not so scale-able.

Thanks for all your thoughts and input.

Karen

[cholling]

I agree with you about the issue of not "seeing the indent" once within the modules. If this were my course, I would try a visual representation within the "nexted" pages something with a colored table banner or an icon at the top of each one -- something that would indicate that the student was "in" a particular module. I'm thinking, for example, of the APA manual that has a slight gray edge down the side of the page and when you look at the book you can see where the different modules start.

I think you could something to show that the "Volcanoes everywhere" module has a green header, and every page in that module has the same green, then choose a different color for "Columbia River Basalts". If you have a lot of individual headers though, you might "run out of" colors, so a different option would be to assign an icon to each topic that is prominent on the overview page then carries through a little less obvious, but yet consistently, throughout all of the pages of that section.

Cindy.

[gailc]

Hi Karen -

My first thought would be to weed out some of the content and or images to what is really needed. Is all that information necessary or does it confuse rather than help the user? My next step would be to incorporate another program as some of your replies hint. My suggestion would be the application Sway - more engaging than PowerPoint and easily embedded into a Canvas page/assignment.

Gail

Gail Chambers
Online Programs Designer
gailc@cciu.org

[kmatson]

Hi Gail,

The faculty member doesn't want to weed out any content so that is not an option. I do like the SWAY option. That is a super easy tool to build in!! Thanks for the idea I am working on turning a loaded tabbed page into a SWAY page.

Karen

[kmatson]

Gail,

How did you get around the sign-in? We are a Microsoft school but I don't want students to have to sign-in to view content.

I used the embed code they provide and added that to a page and it loads and looks great but then I had to login to Office. Do your students have to login to?

Thanks so much,

Karen

[surrencm]

Hey Karen,

When you go to the "Share" feature in Sway, if you select the option "Anyone with a link" that should help.  We use Sway for some supplemental material and normally link out to it, but hopefully that setting will help when embedding as well.  Just be sure to select that option before copying the embed code.

Good luck!

Monica

[kmatson]

Monica,

Thanks so much for that tip, I will give it a try. The SWAY software works great with Canvas in terms of we could have one window open with Canvas and all the content and one SWAY window open and literally drag and drop all the images. Could not have worked slicker.

Karen

[biray]

You may want to check out this video

This video is currently being processed. Please try again in a few minutes.

​ where  @jperkins ​ shows cools ways to embed SWAY into Canvas to make amazing, dynamic (and mobile-friendly) pages. Also, your teacher can always consider embedding Google docs as pages, too.

Hope it helps!

[orwinr]

Another option for embedding content on a Canvas Page is FOLD Fold is an easy to use tool that allows you to create stories that are rich in multimedia content and based around the concept of "Cards"; narrative cards and context cards. Narrative cards allow you to tell the story in text and the context cards provide all of the various types of media. Context cards can bring in video, audio, photos, animated gifs, twitter feeds, locations from Google Maps, text, links and in the future remixes of other peoples context cards.

I should note that by default, all stories created on FOLD are Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) ​. You do have the option of retaining copyright on your narrative cards at the time of publishing but your context cards will always be Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International— CC BY 4.0. ​Their TOS, found at: https://fold.cm/terms say, "If you do not want to license your Context Cards under the CC-BY license, then do not create them on FOLD." If you can live with these terms these stories embed really well on Canvas pages and you would be amazed at how much content you can squeeze into a FOLD Story 😉

Here is a link to their "What is FOLD" story. Enjoy!

[snarej]

Karen,

A couple of options come to mind - you could build in Weebly and display the site through the External URL tool. Alternatively, if you prefer to work within the Canvas environment, have you thought of using the Quiz tool as a content delivery tool? You can create 'questions' that are not actually questions but rather pieces of content and in the settings enable show one question at a time. (With this said, it sure would be nice to change the title to something more applicable than 'Quiz'...maybe in the new quiz engine coming soon!).

Good luck!

Jane

[caitlin_stiles]

Hi Karen,

I hear you I have a similar challenge with my courses. I have three courses which have +35 modules within them and each module has 15 plus pages to follow. The amount of content we're working with is huge also.

Take a look at the discussion topic I posted a while ago as there were some helpful suggestions: Too many Modules | Options for resorting/structuring content however, none that seem to resort/fix the layout of the content for our needs.

Best of luck!