Templating New Pages, Assignments, and Discussions

[reedbrian]

Has anyone written or found some code that can be applied so that whenever  a teacher creates a new page or assignment or discussion instead of having that new page, assignment, or discussion be completely blank it can already have our district-approved template on it? We offer page, assignment, and discussion templates in a teachers-only Module that they can duplicate, but would love it if teachers that bypass those templates could still be afforded the templated items whenever they create a brand new item.

[jerry_nguyen]

@reedbrian 

There is a 3rd party LTI (Plugin) called "DesignPLUS" from Cidilabs that allows you to build a library of templates, you can check it our here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Partner-Listings/Partner-Listing-Cidi-Labs-Instructional-Design-T...

[reedbrian]

@jerry_nguyen  Thank you for the suggestion. We have been longtime CidiLabs customers and use it to design all of our templates. However, we also do not currently provide our teachers access to it since we want them to focus on delivering the instruction and not on content design. So what I'm looking for is when a teacher clicks the + button to create a new page, assignment, or discussion the new item automatically populates with our templated design instead of having to leverage CidiLabs or another option that requires them to spend time getting the template. Right now, we do provide a sample page, assignment, and discussion in every course that they can just duplicate and use. However, we have several teachers who do not bother to use them, and we'd like to encourage the accessibility and equity that our templates provide. So if you have any insight on CSS or any other code that we might be able to use to hack our instance of Canvas I'd be all ears 🙂

[jerry_nguyen]

@reedbrian 

The only way I can think of is to use custom Javascript to inject custom HTML to the tinyMCE editor

[reedbrian]

Thanks, @jerry_nguyen   That is exactly what I'm looking for and the reason for my initial post. Are you familiar with how to write that Javascript code or know where I can find it? I might be better-served reaching out to CidiLabs directly, and I will do that. But I thought I'd ask you as well.

[jared_flaherty]

this, of course, can be done at the Course Level via Course Templates

this could be a cool feature request that is more granular that drills down to discussion/page/assignment templates