How To Create Individual Learning Spaces?

[amurray]

My goal is to create a space in Canvas for each student to demonstrate their learning. Every student’s space would begin with a ‘template’ copy of the content and instructions I want them to have. From there, each individual student could edit the content in their own unique way, which I could easily access and provide feedback. Each student would not be able to see each other’s spaces (or at least would not be able to edit each other’s spaces).

So far, my best attempt at achieving this has been creating a Group for each student and filing it with the content I would like them to start with. The problem, however, is that I seem unable to duplicate this Group ‘template’ for other students. Consequently, I would need to copy and paste the content some 72 times into 72 different Groups for each of my individual students. Is there a way to duplicate or copy a Group’s content, which I could then add to another Group?

An alternative could be to create a Page for each student and allow students and teachers to edit it but this allows any student to edit the page, which could be problematic. Is there a way to select which student has access to a particular page?

I am also aware of the Collaboration feature, but our School does not allow Google integration and Etherpad will not be sufficient to handle the images, tables, and content I want to use with the students.

Any ideas on how I could facilitate this type of learning
using Canvas?

Many thanks for your consideration,

Andrew

[awilliams · Accepted solution]

You could try using an ePortfolio​. You won't be able to do the templating for them but you could provide the information they need to follow your template guidelines (although there's a couple feature ideas about this: " modifiedtitle="true" title="ePortfolio Templates​ and ). The main benefits I see with using ePortfolios would be that you do not need to create groups and the content will remain for the student regardless of what happens with the class (some institutions choose to remove students or delete courses after completion).

[amurray]

Hi Adam,

Thank you so much for your response.

I would be very interested in the ePortfolio templates, once this feature becomes available.

I'll admit that my experience with the current Canvas ePortfolios has not been very positive so far. I find the absence of a few of the course features restricts students from having the control to arrange content in their own personal way. For example, the lack of the Auto-open the inline preview for this link, means that viewers need to open numerous files to see students' work rather than just scrolling through content that is displayed on intentionally organized sections and pages. Additionally, I would prefer the students' time to be spent on completing the assigned activities rather than bouncing back and forth from my content to theirs or coping and pasting my content into their ePortfolios. So the ability to reproduce a template would still be ideal to me.

All that being said, Adam, I truly do appreciate your response and I look forward to the ePortfolio's evolution.

Thanks,

Andrew

[awilliams]

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that ePortfolios needs some engineer love. Hopefully it's only a matter of time until all the great things we love in course design makes its way over to ePortfolios as well.

[cgiraud]

These seem like good ideas for the evolution of Portfolio. Have you suggested those things as formal ideas that could eventually be put up for vote?

I see I am reading this late, but I stumbled on your post while looking for a good way to make Clubs pages w/out necessarily making new courses.

I like your ideas for portfolio.

[clong]

Hi Andrew,

I was going to suggest using a Google Doc, sharing it so anyone with link could view but then changing the url ending by adding copy to the end of it like:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yl_8V9CMbTvFMYybeGuEucApHl8QBtTCSrhtfSnVlTI/copy

But Google is blocked or your school is not a Google Apps for Education School? Google Classroom would be excellent for what you'd like to do. In the absence of that I think awilliams​ solution is best.

[amurray]

Hi Chris,

Thank you so much for your response.

At this point, our School is pretty strict on the whole Google thing. I did explore your idea, however. I tested creating a template using my Google account which I could then share to each of my student's School email accounts to edit. Unfortunately viewers need to sign in with Google account to be able to edit the documents, which is a step they cannot go forward with.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Andrew