Creating Accessible and Navigable Canvas Course Sites with Modules (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Greetings. I'm Lauren Marsh. Along with my colleague Khalid Moussa, I'm going to share with you some design ideas to make your Canvas course site accessible and easy to navigate with modules. Modules let you organize, curate, and sequence your course materials into learning units that contain files, pages, assignments, and other course content. The green icons indicate what course content is linked. For instance, this rocket indicates a quiz. To add content to a module, click on the plus sign in the module itself. All of my course content is available here. You can see that I've named all my course content to identify the learning unit it belongs in. W1 refers to Week 1. This makes building modules easy. I can add different types of content. I have the option to add text headers to my module to help organize content and make it scannable. Keep in mind that modules are just a curated list of links. So if you have changed the date of an assignment or decided that it will go in another learning unit, you need to manually drag that item where you want it to appear and manually edit a title to reflect its new location in a learning unit. The module layout has accessible navigation by default. So your course is easy to navigate by students of all abilities, including those who use screen readers. However, you will need to do some additional organization and planning to make your course more usable. Let's look at some examples. This module contains a Week 1 overview so that students understand the goals for the week and know what is expected of them in this learning unit. The module includes text headers that group the content by readings and assignments and make it scannable. Another feature of modules is that they display point values and dates. So when you create your assignments, be sure to add dates. You can even add a date to a page so that students will see their course readings or video in the to-do list. Let's turn on student view to get a student's perspective. Here in the to-do list is the overview page with an assigned date. These modules are effective and easy to navigate because they are all organized in the same way. Also, they use a clear and consistent naming strategy. Keep in mind that you need to use the same title for an assignment when you refer to it in the syllabus, on an overview page, and in a module. Otherwise, students get frustrated trying to find what they need. Having clear and informative titles for course content is especially important in Canvas. In the modules area, it is easy for you and your students to see how course materials are grouped into learning units. But your students will likely access your course materials through activity streams that appear on the dashboard, in the course homepage, and in the built-in syllabus tool. Because your students will probably navigate to course materials outside the context of modules, good naming conventions are important to make the learning context clear.

Speaker 2: My name is Khaled Moussa. Let's quickly review the five best practices to create a usable and accessible experience for your students. One, begin each module with a page that introduces the students to the topic. Let them know what to expect and provide guidance. Two, create descriptive names for all activities. Students should be able to know what the activity is all about without having to click into it. They should be able to scan the contents of the module and get an overview of the topic just from descriptive names. Three, define and group content within a module using meaningful text headers. Four, use indentation to clearly define the hierarchy of the content. Five, add due dates and point values to each assignment and activity. Canvas automatically displays them in the module overview. Designing your site so that students can easily find and use your course materials will help students succeed.