Canvas LMS Tutorial - Using Modules to Build a Course

in this video tutorial we're gonna look at canvas and how we can use canvas modules to start building a course if you're not familiar with canvas what it is is it's an LMS a learning management system so it's a way for teachers to manage their class and to provide content for their students and even for parents you can put assignments on here discussions quizzes things like that and students can also turn in their work using the LMS canvas in this case so let's say you'd like to build a course in canvas there's a couple of different ways you can do this but in this tutorial I want to focus on using modules to create a course and I think it really is the best way to do it so upon signing in to my account this is what I got it said welcome to canvas I don't have any courses I'm just gonna go over here to the right where it says start a new course that seems like a good place to begin so I'll go in and I'll type in the name of my course let's say this is gonna be Spanish to course so I'll just type Spanish to next I get to decide the content of this course is it going to be private copyrighted material or do I want it to be completely public domain anyone can copy it anyone can use it or would I like it to be Creative Commons licensed and there's lots of different options here that you can choose from for Creative Commons so for this one I think I'll just leave it private next there's an option to make the course publicly visible so how is this different from private public how is this different well basically what we did here in the content license this is basically reserving the rights to the course okay I'm reserving the rights to this course to me or to my school or district but this is different this check box determines whether other people outside people will have to login in order to see the content of my course if I want somebody just to be able to click a link or enter a URL and see my course and the content in my course then I would check this box but notice student data will be protected it will remain private if you do this though it makes it kind of difficult I think maybe even impossible to do discussions and things like that in most cases in a school you probably don't want your course to be publicly visible you'll probably leave that unchecked then I'm gonna click create course and it's working to build my course but this is a completely empty course okay so it's time for me to start building and a lot of teachers like to just go in and start building assignments start building discussions and pages and then they kind of stitch it all together after the fact but I don't think that's the best way to build a course in canvas for me I think the best way is just by clicking this button and building modules now before I click this notice that there is a button below it add existing content if you've taught a course in canvas before let's say last year or last semester last quarter or even if you taught something in blackboard or another LMS you might be able to just click here where it says add existing content and you might be able to import from those other LMS is you can see blackboard is here you can also copy a past canvas course that you made or that you taught okay I could type in the course name and it would look to see where that is and and if it's important but in this case no that's not what I want to do I want to build a course from scratch so I'll click create a new module it asks me for the module name and at this point I really need to tell you what a module is basically I like to think of a module as being like a unit of study so whether those units are connected to a textbook or not it doesn't matter so this could be unit 1 or it could be chapter 1 or whatever you're gonna study first with the students so I'll call this unit 1 the family okay let's say that the first thing that we study in this class is family vocabulary and some grammar related to that I type it in I click Add module and that easily that quickly I've got module 1 while I'm at it I think I'll add module 2 and I'll call this unit number to the home add module and then might as well make module number 3 as well and this is gonna be the neighborhood all right this is going great my curriculum is getting set up very quickly and it looks beautiful no I'm teasing of course these are all just completely empty shells really there's nothing inside them but that's ok this is just step one now that I've got these shells or I like to think of them almost as folders I've got three folders these are completely empty folders but I've got three folders now that I've got those I can start to put things into those folders so what is the first thing that I want my students to see in unit one well it could be an assignment first thing or it could be a discussion it could be almost any of the things that you see here at the left page discussion assignment it could be a quiz in my case I would like the first thing that they see to be a page so I'm gonna click here on the plus sign for unit one I click on that and it says okay you want to add something what what is it that you want to add and it's guessing I want to add an assignment but no that's not true I want to add a content page so I'll click that it lists all the content pages that I've made in the past which are none so there's nothing to choose from I'll just click new page I can now name this new page that doesn't really exist yet and I'm gonna call this welcome to La Familia welcome to the family that's kind of some Spanglish for the students there might throw them off a little bit there but that's alright I'm gonna click now on add item and I have a page so this empty folder is empty no longer it's got an empty page inside the empty folder now underneath that why not have an assignment in this unit number one there's gonna be at least one assignment probably more so I click on assignment there in the drop-down there are no existing assignments so I'll click new assignment I'll give it a name and it'll be described your family I click add item so now unit 1 this folder has two items in it and of course I could continue I could add a discussion in there and I could add other things a quiz or whatever I want to add into this module one which is unit one on the family but what I want to do next as I'm sure you're noticing this is all nice but it's all just organization at this point there is nothing of real value here yet other than the names are kind of valuable but there's no real content there so let's start putting some content in I'm gonna click here where it says welcome to la familia it opens up to my blank page and I can now click Edit and this is where now suddenly I can start adding some real content to this page so I could type in a welcome message welcome to unit 1 you're gonna love learning about the family in Spanish so I could of course go on to type all sorts of text-based instructions information for the students I can really do some nice typing here so that the students can read this text and this will help them to prepare to learn the family vocabulary in addition to text I can go in and add some pictures and you'll notice that there is a little icon here that says embed image if you click on that you can pull in an image from a URL if you know a URL you can also pull in an image from inside of canvas if you've uploaded images in the past into your files you could bring those images in so that's a nice feature but in many cases you're not going to be able to do that you're not gonna have the URL that you need you're not gonna have a pre-existing image that you need so instead of clicking that image button I would recommend that you go over here and click on images here in the upper right when you click on it it lets you upload a new image so I can click Choose file and it brings up some images that I could use and I select one and then there's one more step I have to click upload and it will upload that image into my images area here in the upper right I think of this as being a locker ok just like a locker back in the day when I attended high school oh maybe five or six years ago the locker is a place where you store all the things that you'll need and that's what this panel is at the right I can store links there I can store files there and there is a special category there for images and so I'm gonna store a bunch of images in there in addition to adding it to my locker here at the right it also added it to the page that I'm building wherever my cursor was that's where it put the image so it's a good idea to pay attention to where your cursor is when you click upload to upload your photos I could click and drag to move that photo somewhere else if I want to I can also resize it by grabbing the corner so there's some things that you can do to adjust the image that you're given you can also search Flickr so I could type in family here maybe I'll find something that resembles my family a little bit better than the abominable snowman yeah that's a little better so now that I've got that image from Flickr it's from the Creative Commons section of Flickr so it is shareable I can adjust that image as well and move it where I want it to be although it is a little difficult ok so basically I'm just building a page here and I can click Save and let's pretend that that is exactly what I want my students to see I can now go back to modules now how do I get back to modules the way I got here to the welcome to La Familia page I got there from my modules so how do I get back well here at the left I have some buttons and canvas is kind of funny there's lots and lots of menus that we have to deal with here but typically there's at least two we've got a menu here at the left Account dashboard courses and in another video I'd like to show you what some of those things do and then we've got another menu here now this menu is for the course that we're currently in ok and if you want just your account options this is where you go here to the far left and so this is your accounts and this is your current course so in my current course I would like to go to the modules there it is I click on it now it's grayed out a lot of times people see that and they're concerned that it won't work in canvas being grayed out it doesn't necessarily mean it won't work so click on it and you'll get back into the modules area so I have module one with a beautiful name and with a page that actually has some content so this is going well so next I could go in click on describe your family and this will take me to the completely blank assignment that I created earlier and now I can edit that assignment and this is that same editor that we saw before for the pages I can put in text I can put in images if I want to use that same abominable snowman image it's still there in my locker it doesn't make sense to use it here though and then underneath this area where I can type text or put in pictures or links notice that there are some additional options because this is an assignment it's not just a page there's some options there and I plan to make another video in the future that shows you the options for assignments and for discussions so watch for that video in the future but for now I'm just going to say you can develop your assignment here along with due dates and the number of points available and all of that and then just click Save but notice that there is an option for save and publish that actually saves a step but for now I'll just click Save so it saves now I'm gonna go back to my modules and there I have my list of modules and so at this point I think it is a good idea to publish let's say that this assignment and this page are exactly what I want the students to see I want them to be able to see them so I go over here and I click publish and by publishing the module it publishes all of unit 1 the entire module everything inside it and so that's a nice little shortcut but what if you don't want it all published that's ok just unpublish certain things or publish some leave others unpublished whatever you want to do but this symbol here is the publish symbol or the unpublished symbol and so that's how I recommend building a course in canvas I recommend that you start with modules create some empty modules folders is how I think of them and then start to fill up those folders with things and the way you do that is by clicking the plus sign next to the module or unit that you want to start to put things into and then select what it is that you would like to add quiz for example give it a name add the item and then once you've added that blank item just click on the blank item to start developing it now there is one more step that I should take once I have created and developed the course the way I want it to be at least the first part of the school year I need to also make sure that I've published the course itself so I'm going to click here where it says publish it's gonna publish the course not just the individual elements of the course but the course itself and so now if the students log in and they go to the home page this is what they'll see in a future tutorial I'll show you how to set up a home page that looks a little nicer than this and I'll show you some of the many options that you have for setting up a home page also in a future tutorial I would like to show you how to lock and unlock modules so that let's say at the beginning of the school year the students don't see unit one two and three all at once but they have to focus on unit one until they complete it or until the calendar says it's time to go to unit two but basically you can hide or lock these modules until you want them to be released so I will also show that in a future tutorial so I hope you've enjoyed watching this tutorial and that it's been useful to you and if it has been useful please consider connecting with me on my social media web 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Channel: Technology for Teachers and Students

Views: 381,426

Rating: 4.9639726 out of 5

Keywords: canvas lms, canvas tutorial, using modules in canvas, canvas lms tutorial, creating a canvas course, canvas course creation, how to build a canvas course, building a canvas course using modules, instructure for dummies, instructure canvas, instructure canvas for dummies, beginner's guide to instructure canvas, beginner's guide to canvas, the beginner's guide to canvas, how to use canvas, canvas for online learning

Id: SjRufr1AR_o

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2017