Preparing For Your Students

Being prepared for your learners is key to establishing a successful term.  Course setup and navigation play a critical role in alleviating confusion, setting the tone for the course, and helping to reduce student questions. 

Try This Requesting Your Canvas Section

Every semester you may need to create a new "shell" for your course section that houses the semester's students and class content. Before you can request a course account, you need to ensure that your course is listed in the <Replace -  Institution Name> course schedule and that you are listed as the instructor of record. 

Start Here Establishing a Clear Starting Point

Having a clear starting point helps the user to know what is desirable and the expectations for the course.  It is recommended that your course starts with an established homepage.  This gives the learners a clear landing place and eases uncertainty from the student's perspective.  We recommend including links to the syllabus, modules, and technical support. Review the  Clear Starting Point Links to an external site. video for a quick review of options that faculty can take to address this quality criterion. There are several questions to consider:

  • Will you have a course homepage?
  • What links will be important for the learners to access on the course homepage?

Explore Navigating Your Course

Now that you have an idea of your course content, how do you want students to navigate that learning?

  • What links will be useful for the learners to have access to on the navigation bar?
  • What links will be useful to access from the course homepage?
  • Consider creating a video that walks students through the course navigation and highlights how the course is organized.

The Course Navigation Menu

The course navigation menu on the left side of the screen is another way you can customize your course.  You want to make sure that learners have access to all of the navigation that they may need, but it is also helpful to the learners to keep that navigation bar free from clutter.  If there are any of these tools that learners do not need we recommend hiding them from student view.

Info Implementation tip. 

Consider reorganizing your navigation menu with the most frequently used items towards the top.

Intro Establishing a Presence Prior to Class

  • One-week prior to the start of class, contact your students via an external email to establish swift trust (Coppola, et. Al, 2004) and your instructor presence (Nagel and Kotze, 2010). Notify your students of how to access the course and where to begin working in the course.
    • Send a start-of-semester message to students 
      • Contact your students by email. 
  • You can introduce students to <Replace -  Institution's LMS>.
  • Introduce students to your course by creating a course orientation such as a Getting Started module for students to review the first week of the course. This also gives students the ability to add/drop without having missed important assignments.
  • You can also create an announcement that includes directions for students on where they can find vital course components.