This scavenger hunt is designed to get you thinking about the challenges that students may face when navigating your Canvas course. For this activity, you can either swap courses with one of your colleagues or try to find someone that is completely unfamiliar with your Canvas (a student that uses a different LMS, a friend, etc.) You may want to add items to this scavenger hunt, remove anything that doesn’t apply to your course, or make the questions more specific to your course.
Scavenger Hunt Instructions
For the person that is completing the scavenger hunt, imagine that you are a new, first year student. This is your first course that has ever used Canvas. You need to find the following pieces of information based solely on what is available in the Canvas course. While you could email the instructor, you’d rather be self-sufficient and find it on your own. Good luck!
- What is the first thing you do when you enter the Canvas course for the first time? As a new student, how do you think you would feel?
- Is there anything that would help you feel better upon entering the course?
- Based on your first impression, what is the first thing you’re supposed to do upon entering Canvas to get started with the course?
- Looking at the area of the course where most content is located (this may be the home page, the modules page, or something else), is it immediately clear from the titles what each item is? Can you tell which things are content vs assignments vs discussion boards vs something else?
- If you do need to contact your instructor, what is their name and email address?
- Is email their preferred contact method?
- When does the instructor have office hours? Are you supposed to sign up or just drop in?
- Where do you go for office hours (a specific location on campus, online, etc.)?
- How can you expect your instructor to contact you? Will they generally use email, Canvas announcements, or something else?
- What materials will you need for this course?
- Is there a textbook? If so, what is it and how do you get it?
- Will there be additional readings or videos posted to Canvas? If so, where will you find them?
- Will you need to use any computer applications outside of Canvas for this course? If so, what are they and how do you access them?
- What are the types of assignments you’ll need to complete?
- How much of the final grade is each assignment worth?
- How are the assignments submitted?
- When is the first assignment due?
- Can you expect all due dates to show up on your Canvas to-do list, or are some only listed on the syllabus?
- Where do you find your current course grade?
- List everything you need to do during the 3rd week of the course (readings, assignments, quizzes, etc.)
Debrief / Reflection Questions
After the scavenger hunt is complete, have a conversation about how things went. Remember that it is very normal for the participant to say something along the lines of ‘I was very overwhelmed and had difficulty finding anything in this course!’ It is very difficult (perhaps impossible) to have a course that is fully intuitive for every single student that will be part of your class. This exercise is designed to help you figure out what the biggest pain points might be for students and how you might start to alleviate them.
- For the participant: What was your emotional state while completing the scavenger hunt?
- For the instructor: If this is how many of your students feel upon entering your course, how might that affect their success in your course?
- For the participant: Which items were easiest to complete? Why?
- For the instructor: Did you intentionally make these items easy to find? Is there something built into your LMS that makes this intuitive for students?
- For the participant: Which items were hardest to complete? Why?
- For the instructor: What was your intention / thought process when setting up these elements? Is there a different way that might work better? Is there something built into your LMS that makes this unintuitive for students?
- For the instructor: Were any of these elements something that you deliberately left off of your LMS - for example, you talk about them in class or send them via email? If so, how might it benefit your students if you posted the information in both places?
- For the participant: Based on what you found during the scavenger hunt, what are your impressions of the instructor? Who do you think they are? What is their teaching persona like? How supportive of student learning do they seem?
- For the instructor: Is this the persona you would like to convey? If not, what changes might you make to change the way you come across to students?
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