In my statistics course where there are lots of assignments, I take the opposite approach of @Chris_Hofer . He knows a lot about instructional design whereas I teach but don't have the instructional design background.
I put the information about the assignment on a separate page and call it something like Introduction to the Carbon Dioxide Analysis or Instructions for the Veritasium Discussion. The assignment itself is called the Carbon Dioxide Analysis or Veritasium Discussion. Another example is Study Guide for Quiz 3.1 Understanding Probabilities and Quiz 3.1 Understanding Probabilities. Each assignment has a link to the corresponding instruction page and each instruction page has a link to the corresponding assignment.
My instructions tend to be lengthy and I found these problems with putting them in the assignment themselves.
- Most of the time that I fetch a Canvas page that involves an assignment, it includes the assignment description. When I was fetching discussions, it included the discussion question as the assignment and the as the discussion so it was in there twice. There was also an issue, probably resolved now but this started the process, where pages with lots of mathematical content in a discussion were timing out because of the double inclusion. My Canvas seems slower than everyone else's. I've had Canvas people masquerade as me and have confirmed that it's slower, but we don't know why. Anything I can do to speed it up gets consideration.
- Many of my students were skipping the study guide when I had it at the top of the quiz. I had no way of knowing if they were reading the instructions or just ignoring them. By placing them into a separate content page, Canvas would register when they looked at the study guide and when students do poorly, I could tell whether the student had actually looked at the study guide.
- The lengthy instructions in the discussion question caused people to have to scroll a long way to get to the response. Now, the responses are near the top without a lot of scrolling because the instructions for the discussion merely say to see the other instructions. It also forces students to go look at the instructions in an intelligent manner because there is no way they will be able to answer the discussion without doing so.
- For discussions, I have the original due date for when the initial post is to be completed by and the available until date as when the discussion wraps up. They are to be posting during that time, but the discussion disappears off the calendar and to do list once they have made their initial post. I add a non-graded assignment near the final date that reminds them to continued posting. This assignment contains a link to the instructions and the actual discussion. This isn't a problem per se as I could link to just the discussion and I do that in other classes, but I get to highlight that there are instructions they should read before they start the actual assignment.
- For regular assignments, my instructions are just about turning in the assignment, which is what they're ready to do when they get to that point. It takes out the instructions about the assignment, which is something that they should have done before they ever get to the submission part. The same philosophy applies to discussions where they are required to do some work and prepare something before they make their actual discussion post.
- I used to put the study guide for an exam as part of the exam assignment in Canvas. This makes sense at face value because the study guide is essentially the guide to the assignment, but the assignment is collected on paper and pencil and I needed the due date to be the date of the exam. In some of my calculus courses, we have time for a review day before the chapter test and I want students to have looked at the study guide before they come to class. With the study guide on the assignment, I cannot have two due dates, but if the study guide is its own page then I can have two dates.
- Splitting up long projects that culminate in a single submission also allows for separate manageable instructions and different due dates for each section. If you want the students to be working on the introduction one week, the methodology the next week, the analysis the next two weeks, and the conclusion the week after that, then putting all of that into a single assignment is bad. Many students use the To Do list as their sole source of what to work on and you can only have a single due date. That means that these students don't start working on the project until the final part is due.
- I also use headings to separate sections on my pages. Heading 2 for the section headings and Heading 3 for sub-section headings. I try to not go more than one sub-level of heading deep if at all possible. This is based on some of what I've read of Edward Tufte's designs. See the Fundamentals section of Tufte CSS where a quote is "If you feel the urge to reach for a heading of level 4 or greater, consider redesigning your document." I sometimes have lengthy assignments that get turned in as a single assignment. When my instructions become too lengthy, students start missing parts of it. Breaking it up into smaller sections makes it easier for them to get all of the steps. For example, three lists of five things is better than one list of fifteen things. When I feel the page is getting too long and I should violate that design principle to properly organize it, I create separate pages with instructions for a particular aspect of the project on each page. It also helps because the less scrolling that students have to do, the more likely they are to get the information.
The Canvas approach to assignments has been an issue of confusion for some. There have been more than one feature request to change the wording on the buttons. I've seen Assignments 2.0 demoed at InstructureCon and it will address some of the concerns as it broke the assignment into phases so students didn't see the submission part until they had completed the first part (that may change before it gets released).
Like Chris, I do not put instructions in external Word or PDF documents unless it is designed to be a handout. Having the content inside Canvas natively makes it easier and more accessible for students.
You can (now) assign content pages to the to do list. That wasn't always the case and I often forget to do that. One place I have done that is in my calculus courses; I assign the study guide for the exam to be due -- even though it's only a content page -- before the review session in class. You used to have to trick Canvas into putting stuff on the to do list by making it a non-graded assignment and treating it like a content page.
Thank You
