I am looking for a how to guide for creating a course template from scratch

[JenniferKelly1]

We are going to attempt to create our own template package but I can't find any specs or how to do this. Can someone point me in the right direction? I've been searching the community for several hours now.

Thank you for your help!

~Jenn

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

@JenniferKelly1 ...

I think you may find there will be a variety of responses to your question.

Are you asking about the "template" feature that Canvas admins can enable?  Here are a couple Guides for your reference:

• How do I enable a course as a course template? - Instructure Community
• How do I select a course template in an account? - Instructure Community

If you are looking to use a Canvas course shell to design a "template" that can be used for people to sort of "fill in" the missing pieces, I think this is where you'll get a variety of responses...as every school does things differently.  You may find designs floating around in discussion topics here in the Community.  Or, if you have access to Canvas Commons, try doing a search for the word "template".  I tried this and got over 15,000 results.  You could check out some of these shared resources to get ideas of how you migth built your own course templates at your school.

When I was a Canvas admin in higher edu, we had a small Canvas course shell that was essentially our "template" that we designed that had some basic elements of a course we always included in a course build.  So, it was easy to import this content into a new course shell (using the Course Import Tool) and then start to build a course using that "template".  Our template was only a few pages, but it was enough to get me started with what I needed to build out the content for a course for our faculty.

Do you know if your school has purchased the Design Tools product from Cidi Labs?  This add-on has all sorts of tools available to create templates for your courses.  You can design your templates for content pages however you want at an admin level, and then those templates can be brought in at the course level where instructors just have to fill in the missing pieces without needing to touch other areas.  This works really well if you want your courses to have a similar look and feel to them.  You can design as many templates as you want, and you can even design templates that are specific to a sub-account.

Also, I know this isn't really template related, but you might get some ideas from Ashlee Espinosa's Canvas tutorials here:

Canvas LMS Tutorials for Online Teaching - YouTube

Hopefully you'll get some more feedback ... it's a good topic to discuss and share resources/feedback.  Thanks for asking!

[JenniferKelly1]

Hi Chris. Thank you for the reply. Yes, I am asking about how to develop a course shell (I can't find any info on that term either) to use as a template. My company is very big about their branding and we want to make sure our Instance reflects our image. We are a non-profit that supports education, so a little different than and educational institute. 

I looked at Cidi Labs. We do not currently use them, but I have asked for a quote. Hopefully it would be within our budget and would solve several of my most pressing issues trying to brand our courses. Thank you for the lead.

I will continue to search for something that outlines the specs for a course shell while I wait on that quote!

~Jenn

[Chris_Hofer]

Have you seen the Cidi Labs Showcase site?  This is a small list of schools that use their product ... so you can get an idea of the kinds of things you can do within Design Tools.

cidilabs – showcase

[fvansaun]

Hi,

Not to sound like an advertisement but, we just integrated Cidi Labs DesignPlus tool and it's great. Lots to learn to be able to do what we want with it, but it is going to enable us to customize the look of our online courses so much more effectively than what we were developing in-house. They are also really well priced - even for our rather small college.