Canvas Course Template

The Problem

Instructors — often subject-matter experts without prior experience building courses in a learning management system — need a starting point that shows them how to structure content using Canvas Modules. At the same time, students need consistent access to support resources (help documentation, links to student services) regardless of which instructor’s course they’re in, which isn’t guaranteed if each instructor builds independently from scratch.

My Approach

I inherited an existing course template and significantly revised it, focusing on four areas:

• Added more student-facing resources — links to student services and how-to guides, built directly into the template so every course launched from it includes them by default
• Improved accessibility of the template’s materials
• Reformatted content to be more concise, making it faster and easier for instructors to parse and use
• Overhauled the homepage to be simpler for instructors to edit, while also building in space for instructor presence — a known factor in student engagement and retention in online courses

The Result

The revised template is now widely used by