Over the course of a full semester, the quantity of course materials students must navigate is significant and students often struggle to find important information, even when it seems obvious to their instructor. In fact, even instructors familiar with their naming and organizing conventions lose track of where things are from time to time.
By being deliberate and making use of commonly employed conventions with a simple and consistent structure, navigation frustration for your students and you can be reduced. Additionally, when students are able to easily find materials, they may be more likely to return to them.
Typically, organizing materials well means placing them in Canvas (assuming that is where you distribute materials to your students) in such a way that students always know where to go to find what they need. This is not as easy as it may seem. If a student needs to find instructions to an assignment, for example, they might find them in Assignments, Modules, Files, or Pages, among other possible locations. Or the same instructions might live in multiple of these places.
Choosing where to place things, how to organize materials within those locations, which areas of the course Canvas site to disable (to limit overwhelm and confusion), and how to label things - these are all necessary for organizing course materials well. There is no single way to do it - you need to choose a system of organization that has a clear logic to it, and you need to communicate that clearly (and early in the semester) to students, and you need to be consistent in your organization system.
- Design a simple navigation panel: Reduce left-hand side navigation components. Hide unnecessary items in Navigation panel.
- Deploy all course components in modules with items placed in sequential/chronological order.
- Use headers within modules to subdivide sections, topics, units.
- Use specific and consistent naming schemes for everything -- for modules, overview pages, files, videos, assignment. You can use a scheme of topic or theme or genre. (Welcome to Week 2: Formalist Criticism for a weekly overview page, for example.)
- Separate components into small, manageable “chunks” with text headers, indenting, etc... Consider making use of style guides used in your discpline such as APA and MLA. The hierarchy of headings, references and footnotes help make content more understandable.
- Use indenting in modules to enhance the visual structure. Assessments can be indented more to draw further attention to them.
- Embed resources within your Canvas course rather than linking outside of Canvas to avoid distractions and keep students in the class.
- Be consistent – In policies, due dates, assignments, design, etc.
- SMART learning objectives create a framework for organizing and aligning all elements of the learning experience. SMART is an acronym that means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Write specific and measurable learning objectives for your units, modules, and lessons. Base your assessments on those module and/or lesson objectives. Finally, include course materials and design activities that enable students to achieve the learning objectives. You might use the analogy of a road trip. Where do we want to go (enduring outcomes, learning objectives)? How will we know if we have arrived (milestones, assessments)? What will we need on the way to help us get there (course materials, activities)?
- Use relevant activities and assignments: Make the learning materials and assessments relatable to your students by showing how they apply to their personal lives – to their majors, everyday lives, future careers and life.
- Explain your pedagogy with What/Why/How prompts: Tell your students what you expect. Explain why you are teaching the way you do. Explain how they will be assessed. You can use this same What/Why/How formula when designing assignments too.
- Less is more! Focus on depth rather than breadth. Design learning activities and assessments related to your course’s most essential concepts and skills -- to those course goals and learning objectives.
Useability Testing for Large Enrollment Courses
The CTT has worked with faculty to do user experience testing on their Canvas courses. The users who do the testing are students. The user experience tests are doing using a screen capture and a "think aloud" protocol. Students are asked to complete a few navigational tasks and to verbalize their thoughts as they attempt to do so. The results are often surprising and in test done so far, we have learned that students, even those with the experience of several courses in Canvas, struggle mightily at times to find materials that would easily be assumed to be obviously placed.
For large courses, useability testing like this could head off a great many points of confusion for students. If you are interested in useability testing, let us help. Contact an instructional designer assigned to your college.
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