Canvas is part of the daily lives of more than 30,000 people teaching and learning at Iowa State. Courses in the learning software are designed differently by professors campus-wide, and the students of those professors must adjust to the design and structure of each professor’s Canvas course.
Although the learning platform is used in some capacity in all Iowa State courses, some students have raised concerns about how proficient their professors are with the software, which has been implemented for six years.
Through CELT (the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching), the university offers training to professors through the Course Design Institute (CDI). The training puts professors in the shoes of their students and enrolls them in a Canvas course, showing a course designed with modules, quizzes and other elements of the platform used to boost knowledge retention among students. The course is optional for most professors and is hosted twice a year, during the summer break and the winter break, but in some instances, provides a $500 professional development stipend for the professor.
“There is a philosophy for how you build a course in Canvas,” Lesya Hassall, senior manager for course design and quality for CELT, said. “Ideally it’s modularized, meaning it’s broken into smaller instructional packages that we call modules so we have students learn in a way where concepts are broken down into smaller chunks.”
Not all professors have been trained through CDI, though, and students have noticed.
When asked if his professors organize Canvas courses well, Reece Dodge, a senior in electrical engineering, said “absolutely not, this is a great potential for a study.”
Josiah Graves, a senior in graphic design, said although most of his professors are “pretty good” with Canvas, he said he has encountered professors who have entered grades wrong. Graves said this skews his grades to be dramatically better or worse than what he has earned, which prevents a real-time ability to check current grades.
Graves also said he has had professors who “put too many tabs on a page” and have too much information “all over the place.” Graves suggested instead, the information could be condensed into four different tabs.
“Keep it simple, you don’t have to be putting a bunch of stuff all over the place,” Graves said. “You can figure out how to condense it down into like four main tab links. Just have modules and assignments and grades. That’s all you need to get the point across and then in the modules just try to keep it small.”
Dodge, who rated his professors’ Canvas proficiency a six out of 10, advocated for better organization of the courses, “The modules page being your hub for all of your different lecture slides and such, it would be nice if assignments were included within those modules, which I think is what it’s supposed to be, but there seems like there’s always a disconnect between the assignments page and the modules page, and I don’t think that’s proper or how Canvas intended.”
Hassall said course design is done best when professors establish course objectives first and create the modules after, “The great design for courses happens when you use backwards course design.”
During the Course Design Institute, instructors are shown how to engage in content in a practice course, and are asked to establish learning objectives to ensure there is no work adding extra coursework outside of the objectives. Asks them to modularize their courses and follow the rubric of the eight general standards of quality course design, according to Quality Matters.
- Course Overview and Introduction
- Learning Objectives (Competencies)
- Assessment and Measurement
- Instructional Materials
- Learning Activities and Learner Interaction
- Course Technology
- Learner Support
- Accessibility and Usability
Ulrike Passe, a professor in architecture, said she has used three learning platforms since starting teaching, and said they “all are kind of the same.”
“I just use the template and put my stuff in,” Passe said.
Passe said she likes the course template provided by the university, but does not recall if she has been trained for Canvas specifically, “I’ve had so many trainings, I’ve don’t know if I have, maybe at the beginning.” Passe said.
Katie Quinn, a senior in chemical engineering, said some professors do not put much effort into training for Canvas or designing courses.
“I feel like they could do it if they really wanted to, I just feel like they don’t really put a whole lot of effort into it usually, just like bare minimum what they need to put on there,” Quinn said before she rated her professors a six out of 10 on their ability to use Canvas in a general sense.
Organization should be a focus, Quinn said.
“A lot of time the modules are pretty unorganized or it’s just all thrown in there, into one giant module rather than broken up very well,” Quinn said. “I would just say, keep everything organized. Keep it by the week, go by the week.”
Bruce Kraft, professor of practice in finance, said he has taken advantage of resources provided by CELT to design his Canvas courses.
“I work pretty closely with CELT, so that, first of all, I understand what functionality is available in Canvas but also they’re very helpful in creating kind of a shell template to use,” Kraft said.
Online accessibility from anywhere is the primary focus for his course design, Kraft said.
“All my content, we’re an in-person course, but honestly if we had to do it like we needed to do during COVID, online or something like that or virtually by video and stuff like that, doesn’t matter, everything would be accessible to them,” Kraft said.
“My expectation is with the course is that students can look through it very easily, understand what the expectations are of them, easy access to assignments,” Kraft said.
Kraft said he took the initiative to understand how to use Canvas to its full potential when he started at Iowa State. That paired with what he called a “solid relationship” between the College of Business and CELT, has led him to utilize technology as much as possible in the classroom.
“I look at [using online as opposed to paper] as a means of trying to meet the students as to where they’re at with technology, everything that they’re using is online,” Kraft said. “If we can make it easy, accessible and relevant, to how they are used to looking at information or accessing information, it just makes it easier for them.”
Emily Kohnke, associate teaching professor in supply chain management, said, “I definitely have a strategy” when it comes to designing the Canvas courses for her classes.
“My strategy is to get as much useful information available to the students in my classes in as organized of a way as possible,” Kohnke said.
“Because people have different learning styles, I think it is important to have lots of resources available to the students such that they’re able to grasp what they need to grasp about the course without having to go to a lot of trouble.”
Kohnke said she uses course design resources and tabbed pages to make larger amounts of information available in one place.
Johnny Diblasi, assistant professor in art and visual culture, said he has not been trained on how to use Canvas, but since he works with technology in his practice, feels “pretty comfortable with it.”
Diblasi said he tries to keep his courses efficient when designing them on Canvas, “In terms of being apathetic to students and sort of how they approach, how they manage their academics lives, I think about that in terms of easy access and sort of keeping things very straightforward and trying to keep things not minimal, but efficient in terms of how things are laid out.”
Diblasi said he tries to keep in mind making sure his courses can be easily accessed on a phone and then on a computer.
Dodge and Andrew Haberkorn, a senior in chemical engineering who said he thought his professors were proficient in Canvas, said professors should avoid using third-party platforms, and instead commit to learning underutilized features Canvas provides.
CDI
Hassall described CDI as translating the learning principles to the design of learning environments.
The idea of the program came when the university first implemented Canvas in 2017.
Hassall said some best practices to increase engagement and knowledge retention is to reduce the hurdles to navigating the course and to make information easily accessible, including naming each item with an appropriate, accurate, consistent name, the same sentiments echoed by many of the students interviewed by the Daily.
The idea is to increase knowledge and capabilities within Canvas, but participating in the CDI will not result in a perfect course, “We don’t really expect an absolutely perfect course, simply because perfect courses don’t exist,” Hassall said.
The majority of professors reported having limited experience with course design before taking the CDI, Hassall said.
