How to Become a Course Design Superhero

So you're here to learn how to become a course design superhero. My name is Kenneth Larson, and, I work for a company called City Labs. And I wanna talk to you for a moment about gaining Superpowers. So as a kid like most kids, I was a huge fan of superheroes. But I was rather practical. I knew my chances of secretly being an alien or being bitten by a radioactive spider were really small.

So I was always a fan of Batman. I mean, he was a guy who had skills and training and lots of toys. Well, when I was working for Utah State University, I started building my own utility belt of tools to help me, in course design processes, and it was a lot of fun. And so, it became so much fun that that we extended it in Utah State created a company called city labs and we started to form our own league of course design superheroes. And we've got a few of ours here to join us today to talk to you about some of their experience but I wanna kind of go through just a quick introduction of city lives.

So what we do as a company is we partner with institutions who used canvas, who have found some, either some limitations or some things they wanted to do with canvas that canvas didn't provide natively, and built add ons to it. And so as a company, what we do is we take that code that they've developed. We host it. We train on it. We support it.

We have a development team to continue to add enhanced enhancements to those functionality. We have four tools. These are what we, have started lovingly refer to referring to as the, infinity stones of of city labs. You can collect one or them all, to get different powers. We're gonna talk about two of them today, the top two Design Plus, which is our flagship product for, designing courses.

You do it as a course accessibility. Tool that we'll talk about a little bit today. Our other two are file cleanup tool that lets you see what files are being used to wear in your course. So you can clean up any remnants and ready go as for like team that's responsible for making sure courses are ready on day one for students. So you can see if they're published and if they have content and if they're students and you can add checklists and stuff to kind of keep track of those.

So those are the different tools. I do want to talk, though I feel like I need to address at least a few of the superpowers that you can gain. Through some of the tools in city labs because these these factor in to all of our products in a variety of ways. One of them is task shrinking. One of our goals with a lot of our tools is to take those tedious time consuming tasks that you are often doing.

And try and make them a lot easier a lot quicker to go through and we'll talk through some of these as we go through today. Barrier blasting. A lot of our tools, do talk about accessibility. I also was an instructional designer with a background in web development who wrote an awful lot of HTML hacks in Canvas and kept getting volunteered to write them for other people. And so I wrote a bunch of tools to just let anybody do it without having to know CSS or HTML and so you can add a whole bunch of fun things there as well.

Course ray vision, allowing you to see through and across courses. So you do what that we'll look at today the total that you scan your whole course, look it for accessibility issues, and then even like the the ready go when seeing across courses, etcetera. Best practice proliferation, trying to make it so that you can make your courses consistent across a program, across a school, having a consistent look and feel a consistent flow, things like that. Student engagement x factor, not just making it nice and easy to build, but making it fun for students and making it fun for you and engaging. The vortex of possibility I can't even tell you.

It would take a lot longer than this to actually go through all the things you can do, as well as it would take, I could probably spend, an hour showing talking about the things that we haven't planned in the future as well. And so those are some of the different superpowers. We're gonna start talking about you do it today. Now as many of you who may have noticed that we're here before, We're gonna try and demo on a conference center wifi. So this could be really exciting.

So this will either be great at letting you see some of these things or we might just have to talk about it and you can come find us at our booth, and we can show off some of these things as well. So you do it. This is a course admin level LTI tool, to scan your course looking for accessibility issues. We have this nice little welcome screen here. Now you do what looks for a couple of different things.

It has errors and it has suggestions. Errors are things you should fix. We're talking things like heading structure, missing alternative text, color contrast issues, all, you know, things like that. And there's a whole bunch of these different things that that'll look for. Suggestions, these usually need a little bit more human input.

The one that I like to point out here, is this lovely little content length should not exceed three thousand words. There is nothing that says that something that is two thousand nine hundred and ninety nine words is an is accessible and something with three thousand one is inaccessible. It's just an indication that you might be getting a little long winded in your content. And then it also does some document scanning, looking for tagged pdfs, older file formats, and and there's some variety of things you can do there. So this is kinda your welcome screen.

You can choose to skip this as a user in the future. And then you come into the opening page of you do it. If you are addressing accessibility for the first time, it can be overwhelming. And so you do it gives you a variety of ways you can start. I can start just with the most common errors.

You know, most common file issues. I can look at the things that are just gonna be the easiest to fix for me to quickly work through. I can look at it, by issue type, like if I wanna just go through all my alternative text issues, another fun one is I can look at it by impact type. So if you have an accommodation request for a student that has a specific need, you can focus on those pieces in your course that are going to have the greatest impact for that student. I'm just gonna go ahead and put all open issues here.

Just kind of take a look. So here we have a list of the that were found in this course. And I just start to review them and go through. So here we can see, alternative text issue. We can see the current alternative text.

If the wifi ever loads the image, it's gonna show up in that little sidebar there. And so this tool, it doesn't give you like a gold star certification that yes your course is accessible. But it's geared to help you understand the mistakes that you commonly make, things you might not be thinking about, and walk you through fixing it. So I could type in correct alternative text or mark this as a decorative image, hit save, and it's gonna go ahead and fix that in my course. If I need a little more context because especially when we're talking about all text context is really important.

I could just click on the link here, link here, to open that assignment in a new tab, look at that image how it's being used to get some more information there. And so you're working your way through. We can check, YouTube videos, Kaltura videos, and Vimeo videos for alternative or not alternative text, closed captions. You guys can read and I can't. So you can go through and do that, links that don't have text.

Canvas. It's really common to end up with little empty links that you may not know are there, but anyone with a screen reader user is gonna find those. You can go ahead and delete those. So there's a lot of different things that you can do there. We can also look at some of the files.

Now if we go ahead and look and review a file, There's a few different things we can do here. We could create, some different formats. We can create an auto tagged PDF that'll give you a little bit better, more accessibility there. But some of my favorites is you can actually turn a PDF into a Canvas page. So it will go through, look at the text, pull it apart, create a brand new page, throw the content in and then you could actually use udoit or Canvas itself to quickly go through and fix that text.

It'll be responsive to different browser sizes. You can review the accessibility, etcetera. So a lot of fun things you can do there. And all the alternative formats that are generated, they just get stored in the course files. So they'll follow that course wherever it goes.

So that is kind of a quick, intro to you do it. I am going to go ahead and hand the the microphone over to Becky. She's gonna share some of her experiences with you do it. Thank you, Kenneth. So my name is Becky Mueller.

Alright. We're doing the thumb trick. Alright. My name is Becky Mulder. I am one of the senior instructional design project leaders the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Val King is our other senior instructional designer just here today. I've had a, crush on city labs for a long time since my very first Instructure Con, and, we finally got access to the tool this past November where you started using Design Plus and you do it, and I'll tell you why, that's important. So as Kenneth showed one of the the really great things is being able to filter, by issue or issue impact. And, so we have an executive MBA program, in our Philadelphia and San Francisco campuses, and we found out in either the end of March or beginning of April that we would have a fully blind student and a student who, has low vision, and their program started in May. So we had virtually no time to look at their courses and and see how we could make them accessible.

We remembered we had, you do it, which recently became you do it advantage. And this gave us some place to start. I'm a certified professional and accessibility core competencies, which means I know a little about a lot of different topics, but we didn't know where to start. This gave us, something that we could do and do quickly to scan these courses and identify the issues specifically for someone with visual difficulties. As Kenneth mentioned, you have the ability now to take a PDF and turn it into a canvas page.

Here's an example of what that looks like. So starting with this, PDF, You see all the different ultimate formats that you can request. And then With any luck, this will load, or it won't load. Yep. This is just a good suspense.

Yes. Yes. It turns into a Canvas page. And that's kind of said, you can then, do some checking. It looks way better than this.

So here's, an example I wanna say of how easily we were able to implement this tool and, share a success story. So, one of my very favorite professors, I'll call him Professor L. He teaches accounting for this executive MBA program. Super great guy. I reached out to him because, one of the students who's blind was going to be taking his class.

And, I did a quick check with you do it and notice that there were with some issues that needed to be fixed. So here is a copy of the email hey, there's over five hundred files and, you know, they need reading order and tagging. There's all these errors to fix and Oh, by the way, I hope you're having a great day. And his his response to that was, hi, Becky. I I was having a great day until I I got your message.

And I felt really bad that he felt bad. And we're all feeling bad. So I'm like, oh, it's not as bad as it looks. I promise, and and here's what you can do. Literally did not have time to do any training with him.

We hadn't trained anyone. We hadn't done a lot of training ourselves. But I'm very happy to report that not not three hours later, but actually just like a day later, he wrote back to me and said, thanks for your message. Well, was dawning it first, a lot of it was easy to deal with. After deleting the files I'm not using, I fixed all the errors and the remaining ones I got flagged.

And there was much celebration after that. So I think that's a real testament of the ease of use for people who aren't developers who aren't familiar with the wave checker, being able to scan your files, scan your course and provide it in a very easy to fix, way that you can do directly in there is, one of the things I really love about you do Okay. Thank you. And, you are all welcome to, catch Beccy later and see if you can see her course or you can come down to the seed labs booth and we can show you some of those examples of what, PDF to a Canvas page, looks like. Next up, we're gonna talk about design plus.

Now, this is the one that is near and dear to my heart because this was, what happened when as a grad student, I was lucky enough to have a boss crazy enough that he let me start hacking canvas. And so a lot of fun things that you can do with design plus. I had this lovely page that, a few of you have actually stopped by the booth and seen. But I don't think it's gonna let me get to all the fun built in pieces. So design plus lets you build really nice looking content inside of canvas.

It's responsive. We can set the colors so they immediately fit your institution level. They're responsive to browser sizes. They work with the Canvas mobile apps. You can copy and share.

And then there's just a lot of additional features. This is really taking in all of my experiences as an instructional designer and web developer. And providing things like we have these action items. This is a way you can add notes or instructions into your editor that are only visible in the editor. So as you share templates or build courses that somebody else might need to come in and make changes to, you can make notes to those people making changes that students don't see.

Just to those who are editing the content. We have the ability to, you know, add fun things like content blocks. This is a way that you can create template pieces you can just easily drop in as you're building out your content. So it can help with that consistency across courses and just rapidly pull together your content. We have well, let me pull up.

It's broken up into different areas. So, you know, you can build template pages that you can easily pull in. You have a variety of themes that you can choose from. You can even define those at the institution level, and, you can even build your own. If you want, I've made a whole bunch of things to kind of help you with that.

You have basic things, adding dividers, working with images and captions, and, tables that are sortable alphanumerically, and, you know, add styling and row hover and all that fun stuff. Among some of my favorites, we also have a variety of progress indicators. This is where this Oh, it worked. Yes. Okay.

Celebration. So these are a way for students to see where they are as they're working their way through a course. Either from start to end. What am I looking at? Some of the variations create, you know, links for the different items so they can navigate it. We can even duplicate what they'd see on the modules page in Canvas and bring it into your other content so they can navigate.

Got a variety of fun different things you can do there. We have, some my personal favorite for like the homepage of a course is we have what we call the module list, which in its basic format is just a quick and easy way to add links to your modules. But you can do things like indicating for students what the current module should be. That can be by date range, that can be by completion requirements, can be manually editing the page and just saying, Hey, this is where you should be. And then once it knows where they should be, it can build out what they'd see on the modules page.

Right there on your homepage so that they can easily navigate to that not module. My personal favorite though is we can actually use that information for all of your modules. So I can create a list of links. And in the browser, it will transform it to tab. So as a student, I could see, oh, I should be on chapter three.

And here's all my information in chapter three. But what if I miss something in chapter two? I can look back and see what I may have missed. I could look ahead at chapter four. This respects all of the if is it locked? Is it, you know, you know, completion requirements based, all of that kind of information is there. And so great.

It's a great way to do that. You can build fun things like tool tips and popovers and modal dialogues. We have these little fun little ungraded multiple choice questions. We call quick checks. That's a way you can just add a quick formative assessment into your content so students can choose an answer and check it to get immediate feedback.

And because it's built in Canvas' editor, almost anything you can do in the editor, you can drop into those images, videos, etcetera. And it's just a way for students to engage with the content. Other fun ones. We have for those of you who might be an admin out there, we have these fun little policy blocks. These are things you set up at the institution level for all your legally stuff cheating sexual harassment with policies, disability states, disability policies.

All those things that you want everybody to put in like their syllabus are maybe required by law to put in there. But nobody can ever remember where to find it. Or it gets put in there just fine when the course is first created, but the next year, that person's changed or that URL's been updated. These are blocks you can build at the institution level that can just easily be dropped into the content, and they're locked in the content. So you don't have to worry about editing it.

But anytime you come edit a page, The tools will scan through and say, oh, here's a policy block. I'll go to where that's defined at the institution level, grab the current state of the policy, and replace what's in the content with that updated policy, So there are a lot of fun things. We also have, a bunch of accessibility tools for reviewing heading structure and writing a screen reader appropriate alternatives to math equations, and, you know, table structure. One of my personal favorites that we've recently added is this external assets tool. I'm sure, how many of you have had the encounter where someone copied content from a course into another course? But the image or the PDF or whatever was still in that original course and so the teacher could see it just fine but the students couldn't see it.

This tool will actually look at your page. Let you know any files or any assets that are stored outside of the course and it will give you a lovely little button that you can click and it'll go grab file from the original course, bring it into the current course and update the link so that they point to that new file. So a lot of fun things there to try and take some of those tedious frustrating things that you often to deal with. We have a bunch of, built in tutorials and you can build your own tutorials and user guides and, all sorts of information there. And If any of you are like myself and perhaps lacking a little bit in sat insanity and may actually enjoy working with things like HTML and CSS and stuff like that.

Have a whole bunch of fun tools to make that easier in Canvas as well. So that's, the the side bar in design plus. Trying to think. Oh, I wanted to show you actually. Let me do a quick.

Did I pull it open? Let me do a quick quick show of kinda how easy this is to do. So I'm editing a page here in Canvas. It came from a gamification score in Canvas comments. Just kinda some basic canvas content here, like you'd build in just native canvas. I'm gonna open the sidebar here and I'm gonna start by adding a theme.

So it's one of the recently used pieces. So there I've got a theme here. I've now got that styling applied, to the content. Let's make that full screen there. I could go ahead and I could look at the the text here for the heading, change the heading level or We also have over two thousand icons that are built into this.

So, we can go ahead and search for an icon to add little decorative pieces there. If I'm working with a list, I could go ahead and drag and drop to rearrange the items in this list. We also have this fun toolbar that does all sorts of things like maybe I want this list a little lower in the content. Or a little higher in the content. I can do that.

I could go ahead and select an image here and I could make sure that it has appropriate alternative text. I could go ahead and we could change the the size of that and I could float it to the left of the content and I could take a look at these would normally give you a preview of that image. Oh, there we go. I can go ahead and choose a style. So just fun things that you can do to just very quickly go from, the bland, kind of vanilla content in Canvas to something with a much more polished look and feel.

And I have a bunch of before and afters that I was gonna show you, but with the wifi, I don't know that I dare go that. Route at the moment. There, do it. Okay. We'll we'll try it.

You you guys said it. We're gonna try it. Okay. Lynn fax, let's just go ahead and I'm gonna go ahead and cancel this, and we'll just go ahead and take a look at the next page. So alright.

Yeah. If it for the fact that it will take a while to get that. So here's a daily agenda page. I'm sure you've all seen something similar to this in Canvas. So I went ahead and had some fun with this one and just know, beefed it up a little bit, gave it appropriate heading structure, etcetera.

Here is that original, you know, page for the course designer. There that one that I kind of showed you. So here's the updated version of this. Much nicer broken up individual chunks. A lot easier for students to digest there.

This was a gameplay library that was in this course, this next page. Oh, nope. That is not the gameplay library that's in the next page. Let's try this one. Okay.

So, they had different modules. Each module had these different playlists, but as you can see, this is a long scrolling page of lots of links. So with this one, I had a little fun with it, and I chose a nice banner image to go across the top of it. I added some callouts to some of the different paragraphs. And then, I broke the playlist into accordions so that a student could very easily just come in and jump to the appropriate accordion.

Here's another page in here. This was a similar one. That was a list of resources for the course once again. A lot of information crammed onto the page. So with this one, I actually took and I broke it down, into tabs as soon as it actually finishes loading, the student could very easily just kinda say, oh, I need the information for module three.

And you can create links that would point to that page and open directly into that panel. So just ways to just have a lot of fun, with the content there. And there's a lot more you can do that. One of the other tools that Tim's gonna talk about, you know, in try and demo here in a little bit is our multi tool. This is a quick tool to help you rapidly build and scaffold your course.

So I'll just kind of skip over that and he's gonna cover it and talk about that. The third tool that's part of design plus is our upload embed image tool. Did I open this? I think I did just in case it wasn't gonna open. This is a rich content editor tool. So, like, you can use these anywhere.

Gonna go ahead and choose a new banner image for this course, so I'm gonna select the existing image. I'm going to go ahead and come in and open up the upload embed image tool. This tool will let you pull an image from your computer. It will let you pull an image you have in your course files or your user files in Canvas. And assuming, Canvas actually loads it.

We also have integration with us unsplash dot com and pexels dot com that are creative common zero licensed image libraries. So I could go ahead and say, alright, I am working on a biology course, so I can search from some if I can type one handed, Yeah. You can search for images that you might want to use. So there's a bunch of images going up. I can go ahead and select that image.

Now, there is no need to upload a two thousand five hundred Pixel plus image into Canvas. They don't display that large and they just make the page load slower for students. So we automatically do some resizing of that image. But where I want this as my banner, I can also go ahead and crop this image. I like this ten by three ratio for it.

I can go ahead and pick the portion of the image that I want to use. Oh, come on one handedness. Let go. Okay. I can go ahead and crop that, get an idea of what it's gonna look like, add appropriate alternative text, change the name, etcetera, send the request for that to be added into canvas.

And that will drop there into the editor. So that those are the tools in design plus, and some of the fun things that you can do there. So now I'm gonna go ahead and turn the time over to Brian to share some of his his experiences. I've never used a microphone with my thumb in front of my mouth before, so this is fun. It is good to be here with you all.

My name is Brian. I work for the Rockwood School District, which is Saint Louis, Missouri, ish, in the surrounding areas. And so as a part of my role other than the curriculum coordination side, I am the main Canvas administrator and digital content designer, for the district. And so, I'm definitely in, in in quite a bit. And, and I will say hands down city labs has saved our lives.

You know, when we look at all those superpowers and when you talk about the the vortex of possibility and and and all of those barrier blastings and things. This would not be possible without city labs. And so I will I will preach this till the day I die. And so Just to give you a little bit of a background, we service over twenty three thousand kiddos. We're a pretty big district.

We're actually one of the largest in Missouri. Over two thousand teachers, we have currently designed over one thousand courses to use at the k twelve and professional learning levels. Thanks to COVID. It really expedited our work in that area. And so we had a lot of hands on deck helping us build the content for the courses, but it was my office and it's just me and one other person that was responsible for designing and and building everything.

And so just so you're a little bit of aware too, we do blueprint. Most of our courses, we do put things in the comments. We also template as well. So if you'd like to talk more about that process. I'd be happy to to address that later, but just to kind of give you the lay of the land.

And so I'm not going to read the slide to you one because you can read on your own. But two, you'll get a copy I'm sure or access to the slide later, but I wanted to point out to you that that we wholeheartedly believe in Rockwood, that whatever we offer online, and we service kiddos that are purely online, as well as in a blended environment, whatever it is we do though, has to mimic what we do in the classroom with our in person students. And so we put in a lot of time and effort to make sure that the activities are engaging that that's it's visually appealing, easy to navigate that it's equitable and accessible and and all of those things that you definitely need to take into account. But, you know, as we design that content, we work in tandem with our teachers. We work with the students.

We get feedback constant even from parents, we're constantly getting that feedback from them in terms of what's working, what's not working, what can we improve on, what's going well. And so just to kind of give you, the lay of the land of what our our philosophy is. We have to be extremely intentional. And and we don't like to limit ourselves based on the same old same old. We're looking for different ways to be innovative and and and creative and pull some some things in.

And so as a part of the work we've done, with city labs, especially the design plus, is is really leverage what it's gonna take to keep the course motivating and inspiring. Because we know that most of our kiddos are visual learners, and if the content isn't visually appealing, it could be potentially a deterrent. And so thinking through what what are some of the the impacts that city labs has had on us? You know, again, we talked about equity and accessibility. But also that that just in time support. I'll I'll show you my template or not mine.

It's our template, that we use, but we built in like user right there on the page anytime there's an assignment or a discussion. That way we have that just in time support. We set up everything with modules, so it's not just haphazardly, go find it what you need. You know, it's all structured. We've got the the graphic design piece, and we've got the student friendly language already set up.

So no matter course they're in no matter the content area, it's they're gonna have the same, experience. And so for us, some of the features that we've really, really relied on with city labs has been the themes. And if you've ever used city labs, we use flat sections to one of the best ones I've ever seen. So thank you, Ken and team for that. We definitely leverage the content blocks.

You know, the the copy existing content feature has been a huge game changer, especially if you're, accidentally make something a page and it should have been an assignment. Or vice versa, you could use the copy existing content feature to really quickly convert it to whatever it is you need it to be or pulling content from another course you're trying to rebuild and and and tweak a bit. It makes it super super easy. And then some of the advanced elements, you know, the HTML snippets have been a godsend. Pop ups, modals, accordions, some of the stuff that you've already seen here, We definitely leverage those as well.

And so what I wanted to do is spend just a couple of minutes, showing you the sample template you can definitely scan the the QR code if you wish. I've also put this course in the comments for you. If you search Rockwood School District course template, you'll actually get a copy of our template. And feel free to take it, tweak it, use it as is, except change the word Rockwood School District to your own, that kind of thing. But, or or not, I mean, that's fine too.

But I wanna show you very briefly what it could look like. And so once you're done scanning, if you're still scanning, I don't wanna take that, joy away from you. Alright. Beautiful. So, I can go back to it too if you need it.

So this is what everybody sees. When they land on our courses. And so the banner image, we actually used to customize those. I lost count after one thousand two hundred hours of time spinning, finding images one summer. Anyway, long story short, we found one that actually mimics what our our district MSIP goals are.

We have what's something called a profile of a learner. So every course now has the profile of a learner. What we expect every kiddo to do no matter what grade level they're in. Right? But going down, one of the things you might notice too is that we leverage the canvas for elementary theme for all of our courses. And, you know, we've definitely differentiated secondary and elementary based on turning on the balsamic sands for the young ones, or the lotto font for the for the secondary kiddos, but every course is set up with canvas for elementary because we found that to be one of the most impactful setups in navigation experiences for our kiddos, but going down the page, the landing page has some of the basic information that they would need.

We customize the pill for every course So where it says course name, we actually type in the name of the course, before we send it out, getting started, the course description, you know, we'll put in some of the course outcomes, expectations, things of that nature. We do ask the the teachers to customize the the teacher information page, our our block, I should say, They can customize that. We've also included some things like Netiquette. Here's some basic behaviors we expect you to do while you're in this course, interacting with each other online. Or here's some tools and resources.

We actually built a virtual locker as well. So if you were to click on that, it's gonna take you to a course where there's district approved resources. You know, image searches and things of that nature. So if a student is working on a project and they wanna go find some of that stuff or get some support with maybe they're working with WeVideo or whatever, they can actually click on the virtual locker and get to that support. Our technology help desk, our academic integrity policy, which has now been updated to include artificial intelligence, and then some of the V Pat information.

So some of the tools that we've that we and a great, we have the VPAD information on the front. And so that's what everybody sees when they land in our courses. We've also pre set up like the the course navigation and things like that. But what I wanna show you in my two minutes ish that I have, is some of the modules. So Other than the content, I would say ninety percent of our courses actually have academic content in it.

Other than that content, we actually push out a module for teachers only on what they can do to get other content into their course, how they can go through and edit that course information page, and then some beginning of the year strategies that they need to complete with students. That's in there for them all the time. Right? And feel free to look at that later on your own if you wish. I'll go through something here in just a second that it kind of expands on that a little bit. We also included some grade book tips and here's how you can give some really good feedback in Canvas and and even social emotional check ins that you can use with the students.

So if you actually get this course and make a copy of it, those are ready to use out of the gate. Those are very quick formative SCL checks and things like that. But What I wanted to show you was down here at the bottom. Every course has a module that we want teachers to leverage if they need to create their own content. And so, there's an, unit information template.

So anytime they wanna start a unit and fingers cross this loads quickly, because I know my time is running out, Wait for it. The the the the unit information has three blocks on it, unit objectives, what the introduction to the unit needs to look like and what the essential questions are. And we've customized those two at the top with the course name already. So all the teachers have to do is duplicate that page and they're rocking and rolling once they can edit those sections. We do the same thing with a page template.

So if a teacher wants to build their own page template, we've done the heavy lifting. Well, city labs has done the heavy lifting. We've actually just made it accessible. And so, for every page template, we've got about seven or eight content blocks pre designed. And the teachers would just delete the ones that they don't need to use.

And so we we've we've customized which icons we want So that way, there's a universal, experience for the kiddos all the way across the board. It's funny. We've done a lot of work and originally we we were in this one course And there were twenty five different icons for the same content block throughout the whole course. I'm just like, wow. That's awesome.

Not really helpful, but awesome. And so we try to streamline that a little bit. So if a student sees, it's a pencil in a box. Oh, that's an activity or something along those lines. It gets ingrained in them the more they use it.

Right? Again, equitable and accessible. The, assignment template looks very similar to the page template except at the very bottom, There's our related canvas guides. We we've actually recreated those canvas guides in a Google doc. And and that might seem like extra work, but what we found is canvas or instructure updates their user guides from time to time. And then rather than touching all thousand some odd course, is, we've got it in a Google doc.

We change it on the Google doc and it's automatically updated in real time for all of our courses that we've got out there. So that's something to consider plus you can run the analytics on it. You know, see how often it's visited, how many people have gone to it, and and I will say this first one. Within a month, we had over nine hundred and fifty visits to it. And so that's nine hundred and fifty fewer calls that our help desk is getting and that we're getting so we can spend our time doing other things.

And so I'm just thinking through if that's something that could work for you, potentially something to consider. Again, it's in real time. And, the last, the last one here is the discussion post. And so it's the same idea. Again, we've got the related canvas guides, in your initial post, address the following prompt we even got Here's what a discussion post can include, just as a reminder.

Right? So we've got one of the city labs features of the modals included. And so Again, just very simple decisions on the design side can make a world of difference when it comes to to the motivation and the the the effect of your course can have on students. So we do have one more with the end of unit reflection. So, that is what I wanted to show you in terms of the templates. And if you can indulge me for two more seconds, every single course also has a Google form, that we've linked to so teachers can give our our feedback in real time about the content that's in canvas because I'm not a content expert in anything, but Spanish and STEM stuff.

And so if it's a science question, or it could be a, a cooking facts question, whatever, they can submit, teachers can submit, hey, the question on this quiz was wrong, or this particular page needs to link to blah, blah, blah, they can tell us and we'll work with the coordinators to change those in real time. So it's really, really awesome. Thank you for your time. I'm happy to answer questions or talk more later, but I'm going to turn it back over. I believe to Ken.

So I'm actually gonna hand it to Tim and give his slide up so he can just start talking. Hi. I'm Tim Vian Norman. I'm an instructional technologist at a California community college. And, That picture was taken literally the weekend before we left on COVID, and I happen to like the picture.

So, I'm gonna talk about what what we just talked about is a lot of, hey, my course I don't have a course yet. How do I build it? Alright? And how do I take care of individual pages and stuff like that? So I'm gonna start with that. Then I'm gonna go to the next step and how to actually use the course itself. Do you want me to be a mic stand? I can do it. Okay.

Because I'll move around. Oh, no. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna type a thing. So what I'm gonna talk about here is the multi tool. Now the multi tool has four different main components.

It happens to be one of my favorite tools. This, is task shrinking as one of the things. I also call it a time suck. Okay? Why would it be both? Because I created a course, seventy five different modules, and it took me about ten minutes worth of time to do. And then I realized that, you know, if I just change this one thing, I could do it in fifty modules instead of seventy five.

I deleted all of them and recreated them. Yes. I spent three hours total. Doing something I should have done in about fifteen minutes, but that's because of this. It allows you to do all kinds of really cool things really fast.

And try stuff out. So the first part is a template builder. You just saw a bunch of templates. Okay. What you do is you take and you create a template for an assignment, a template for a page, a template for, whatever you want, discussions, etcetera.

So a lot of times for me, what I'll create is a template for an overview for a module. Then I'll create a template for the, conclusion of the module. So now I've told people what I'm gonna teach them. I teach them the stuff, and then I have what I taught them, the three things that you're supposed to do, right, when you teach? But also, I'll have resources. So I'll create multiple things in that.

Why? Because then I go into the module builder. And the module builder allows you to now create all of those modules in your class. What do I mean? So here's the module that I'm gonna create. Well, first of all, I probably want an overview page. So I'll create a page.

And I apologize that it's at the bottom, but that's just how canvas works. Then I probably want a header. Why? Because Somebody's gonna look at this, and I wanna organize my module. I wanna make it look right. So a lot of times what I'll do is I'll have an overview page.

I'll have a header that says resources. Then I might create three resource pages. Okay. Oops. I got an extra header in here because I accidentally clicked.

So I'm gonna move that down. Maybe I want to, on purpose, put a discussion in every module. I might not use it, but I'm gonna create a discussion. Then I'm gonna have a header and then I'm gonna have an assignment, and then I'm gonna have a header, and then I'm gonna have a quiz. Okay? So that's what every one of my modules looks like.

I literally just am almost done with a course on how to use AI in classroom. This is exactly what every single module looks like. I can type in what I want all of the things to do I can pick what templates I want to use. Okay? And then at the very top, How many modules do I wanna create? K. I literally type in a number.

Okay. And what module do I want to start with? Now myself, I start with module zero. I like to have the very first module be a course introduction. What is it that you're here for? Alright? So I wanna start with zero, but I want three modules. Zero here.

Three there. Alright. And then I take all of this time to generate the list. Now I can go through, and I can actually name every module I can name every assignment. I can copy and paste.

It hasn't done anything yet. All it's done is get it ready. And then I go all the way down to the bottom when I'm done, and I hit add modules to course. Now, you notice at the bottom in the lower right, it's talking about creating assignments. It's ninety three percent done.

Okay. That's done. Creating pages, creating discussions. All of these things, it's literally doing that. What do I mean? If I go over here and I click on discussions, you will now see three discussions that have been created.

And they all start with module zero module one module two. Now, do I have to use them? No. But Now that it's adding it to the course, right, adding it to the modules right now, and it's, sixty percent done. So it'll take a minute. Once this is done, I can now go in up at the top and use it.

Now, why is this so nice? Because in the template, I can have said created the template such that it says module zero and the name of the page at the top. I have just saved you having to edit every single page to add that header in or that module. I can include some of the stuff that Kenneth was talking about with regard to, oh, where am I in the module? I can have that automatically on every single page, and I don't have to look at it. I don't have to go in and recreate it. I literally will create the pages, the quizzes and everything else with all of the stuff that I want, including points and stuff like that so that that module, it is ready.

So I literally have to, in some cases, type in the name of the quiz in the description, and I'm done. Because I've put the instructions in if they're the same instructions every time and stuff like that. Everything that you're gonna do over and over again, you just put in. Okay. And now you see I've just created all these modules.

Zero one and two. Done. Okay. What's in the module? I can literally click on this. And there, you actually see this is what's in there.

And now if I go to modules, If I can click on it. There you go. There's the module. Everything is done that I just did. It's created it.

Now, how long did it take me to create three modules? Five, ten minutes, if that? Alright. Here's the next part. For those of us who are not brand new teachers. We've already been teaching. We've already got the class and stuff like that.

If it'll do it, there we go. I can go back into this module builder. There we go. It's grab grabbing content. I can now rearrange these modules.

I can click on the module, and I can edit it right in here. I can create new modules at the bottom. I can move stuff around all in this page. And when I hit save, it's done. So your existing class, you can now add to that class.

So I had a class online teaching certificate course, ten modules long. Now I wanted to add a course that's just refresher. So what I did is I created all of the point fives. So module one and then one point five. Module two two point five.

Well, the class already existed. I don't wanna recreate the class. I went through and I had it do ten classes point five. And created those, and it took me no time at all. Why? Because this tool allows you to do that.

Saves you a lot of time. Do be careful. It can suck a lot of time out it as well, but it's a really cool tool for doing this. I haven't touched on two other really neat parts. They are the, the due date modifier.

How many of you copy courses one semester to the next or one term to the next of any kind? And all of a sudden, you gotta go through every single assignment and redo all, you know, touch every assignment, or you could use a due date modifier, and it does assignments, quizzes, discussions, anything that's got a due date. Really nice. Canvas has got something very similar. This is all built into this one package. And then the announcement modifier does the same type of thing.

So it's a really cool tool. It really expands on what we were talking about with regard to templates. And makes your life, I think a lot easier. So Back to you. Okay.

So that is our time. Oh, you alright? We ran out of time for questions. Please hunt us down. Here's some basic some reach out information for Becky, Brian, and and Tim. And you can find me down in the vendor hall anytime that it's open.

I'm happy to show you. Yes. Just one moment before you leave, we wanna give one more round of applause and appreciate it.