Instructure- Design Services Webinar
I'll make sure that it's recorded. Yep. Just give it a minute here to let folks trickle in. Good afternoon, and welcome. I should have queued up some good background music. Alright.
I do wanna give it maybe one more minute before we get started just so that folks have a chance to log in to Zoom. But if folks want to start putting in the chat, where they're tuning in from, your school, your state, I would love to see where everyone is tuning in from. Nice, Ron. Got a lot of Florida folks in here, some Alabama Oh, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Love it.
This is awesome. I myself am in Charleston, South Carolina, and my counterpart Nick here is in Utah. So we've got folks from all over, which is awesome. And I feel like we can go ahead and get started, and I'll just, continuously drop some things in the chat for folks who are joining later, but wanted to give a welcome to everyone for joining us on this afternoon. I'm really excited for all the content that we're gonna cover in today's webinar.
I figured we could start off with some introductions and just helpful links that I'll throw out there before we jump in. But my name is Laura Sheplin. I am an account executive here at instructure. So I work with many of you who are, joining us today essentially, my role is to, assist with any new products, services, things like instructional design, kind of in a in addition to your existing Canvas contracts, and I've pulled in my colleague here, Nicholas Demas, I'll let him introduce himself, but is one of our services solutions engineers. So welcome, Nick.
Yeah. Thank you very much. I am the services solutions engineer. So lofty title. And my job is very similar to Laura's in that.
I'm trying to connect, you with our services And when I talk about services, it's mostly like our technical services and our learning services. So training and structural design, technical consulting hours, etcetera, kinda all fall under my purview. But happens to be that some of some of the my favorite things talk about really our our design services as I think it's a really, our design services are a great way to take your Canvas instance to the next level. Lower with your permission, I'll go ahead and start Yes. By deck, and we can just kinda work through that and then look at our pictures again.
That sounds good. And I am recording today. So anyone who's unable to make it, I'll be sure to send out the webinar recording there. And I am just gonna throw one thing in the chat before you get started, Nick. We have a, we're calling it a parking lot document.
So, anyone who has questions, things they wanna learn more about, feel free to just, throw that in here in this document, and both Nick and myself will be work on this document to, fill it in with all the answers to your questions, links to resources. So this will be a great place to just kind of have one source of truth. And then, of course, any follow-up items that, you all are requesting, like, pricing or more information we can always reach out individually. So wanted to put that in the chat, and we do want this to be interactive as well. I know it's a webinar room, so please feel free to utilize the chat, the Q and A boxes there.
We definitely wanna be able to answer your questions and share as much information as possible. So let's get started. Perfect. And some of those questions, we might just redirect you back to the parking lot as those are maybe great questions to have documented and or, maybe they would require a little bit more of a follow-up. The parking lot's gonna be open through end of day by PM on Monday.
And then, you know, depending on the number of questions, so we should be able to provide an estimate and how long it will take to respond to the question. So you're welcome to ask questions here. You're welcome to ask questions in that space. Or if you would like chime in, if there's a question that you need me to address, please do so, and I'll do so, then I will do that. So I think that kind of accounts for the housekeeping today.
So let's just go a little bit to our our agenda. We're going to talk about templates and consultation. Course review, course enhancements, course building, and then we're going to do a little bit of a bonus with course authoring. But let's start with templates and consultation. Now when you jump into Canvas, you oftentimes as part of your implement implementation package, there is an inclusion of a ready made template or a custom template depends on when you signed on to signed on with the instructor and started your Canvas instance, if not, you know, that's something that we are always welcome.
We always welcome in terms of conversations. So kinda saying the things, ready made templates, custom templates, and consultation hours. For this. So why would we look at templates? Well, we like them because they add a consistent look and feel for the university college department and or system. And I think this has become something that's very important as we start to design in Canvas or if we are have been using Canvas for a while.
We design additional content in Canvas because it does help to provide your students with the consistency as they enter the courses and a little bit of predictability. Now templates can go all the way down to making sure that we have some iconography within the template that students are able to then recognize throughout their duration with the university or college or department, etcetera. And we like it too that templates do provide a foundation for which instructors can build their content. So I came to this role in kind of a convoluted way. I've been with instructor for almost nine years.
And in a segment in there kind of early on was, I was a trainer. And as a trainer, I'd go out to institutions, and we'd talk about the rich content editor. And when we looked at the rich content editor, and we looked at Canvas, there was nothing in it. Towards the end of my time as a trainer, and as I moved into a role that proceeded. This current role that I'm in, it was a design adjacent role.
The one thing that I had wished that had been in place was the custom templates or or and or ready made templates because they help to start establish the vision of what canvas can be and give something, give instructors something from which they can build. And that doesn't extend to just instructors, but also to designers at instructional designers at the various institutions. So that foundation part cannot be understated. And again, I think it would have been lovely to have been able to use it. Oftentimes when our trainers go out now, for our, learning consultants to go out and discuss Canvas, there is a template that people can refer to.
Ready made templates here are just a couple examples of home pages. Now we know in Canvas, we can select one of many, home pages, but Having a nice landing page for the students and the course is is a good thing to be able to do. So you can explain to the students what's happening, provide, access to different components of the course, and kind of direct students where they need to go. I think that direction or having a place that students can refer back to that direction it really helps that enable the students to better engage with the course. So give these are just a couple of our ready made templates Right now, there's a link in the parking lot that will take you to learn dot instructure dot com slash courses five slash five Anyway, there's a link in there.
That if you follow that link and if you go into design services, you'll be able to make your way into the ready made template we to look at different options. And there's a collection there that goes from, k twelve to higher ed to, even professional development. Among others. And then I thought I'd continue with the ready made template to showcase modules. And module organization.
As a trainer, I really focused on module organization because it's outlined for the course or can be the outline for the course, and this is how students are going to engage with the course. So having clean and was spelled out and will determine modules has been important to how we've approached our templates to add a capturing. And then a content page, you'll you can see some of the iconography that I mentioned a little bit earlier within the sample content page from a ready made template. And you'll see the lore Mipsum generator here. That's meant to be replaced with instructor content.
Again, predictability for the students, iconography, And, oh, look, a to do list. I'm a big fan of to do list as somebody who keeps a bullet journal, knowing what I have to do in order to go through the things is going to, I believe, enhance the student's learning experience. Tell them what do you need to tell them. Tell the students what you need to tell them, sort of approach, design approach. Within the ready made templates, there are some how to use instructions and city.
Just this is just to try to cut down on some of the learning curve as it applies to the templates and also to capture different learning styles for our instruct our instructors almost had its structures. That word is forever. Those two words are forever commingled. So we want to make sure that instructors and designers can easily use the templates. We try to provide some good information for everybody to be able to refer to as they go through and design the courses.
So I wanted to showcase a couple custom templates as well. We'll get to the showcase in just a a second. So the appeal for custom templates is that they are customized for institutional branding as somebody who worked at a university prior to working at a structure, it was really important that even when I sent out a newsletter that I was using the right font, that I was using the right colors that was using the right icons, etcetera, as I send out statewide newsletters, for the program that I run Iran at, the university. So making sure that that institutional branding is in place is really one of the backbone for selecting a ready a custom template over a ready made template. And as such, it represents the most common request.
Close to the line, though, is making sure that we are conveying the institutional look and feel through a custom template. And just like ready made templates with the custom templates we're striving to provide some consistency for the end user students in in most cases. So here are just a small samples, a couple examples of custom templates. And so these become a little bit more institution specific. You can see in the upper left hand corner, with permission, we have George Washington University of law school.
We've used some of the content from their, their custom template. On the right hand side, you can see some of the carryover in the branding in to the content within the template. So we're looking at institutional colors that that GW logo in the upper left hand corner is a good example of the specific colors that need to be used, and then On the right hand side where we see overview learning objectives to do list, we see the application of those colors within the template. So some consistency of that look and feel for the institution caring over of the branding. Yeah.
Remind the students where they're going to school. That sort of thing. Also, this is a good example of set, you know, setting up the overview, learning objectives, and to do list is some of that learning strategy that can be employed within course, reminding instructors that they are the ones working on the content that it's good to have that overview. It's good to explain what those learning objectives are, and it's good to set up that to do list. So the students understand what's going on with the content.
Alright. So let's go back to the ready made templates. We have the option. If you can't choose a template for the through the ready made templates and you're not interested in the custom template or if you're an institution where you have many colleges or your universe university system, and so you have multiple universities and finding one specific item of branding, or, maybe you want some flexibility in terms of how you approach templates. There is this thing called the template template library, even if I can't say it, it does exist.
So template library, it is something that you can subscribe to and plug into canvas, and then be able to use for plugging in, multiple templates. There it is. LTI added. Includes ready made templates and the design package templates. You'll see that the the the design packages aren't necessarily a focus of today, but they are a collection of design assets that can be plugged into ready made templates.
Alright. Now we're going to shift gears just a little bit and talk about consultation hours. Often, when we're working with institutions, there's the the question comes up about or about how do we better use canvas as a as a designer or as an instructor or somebody who may be swearing both hats at an institution And so we want to make it make our people available to your people so that we can talk about best design practices within Canvas. So this is separate from training. Training is how do we use Canvas? Why do we use Canvas? We have our solutions consulting where we talk about how to go commit to change strategy and how to drive adoption within an institution or within a system.
But this is kinda focused on the design elements. How do we create effective design in Canvas? How do we collect, how do we better leverage our templates or well, frankly, these hours that we're talking about now can be applied to any of the services from this point forward that we'll be discussing. So why There we go. Design Services are sold as consultation hours. So consultation specifically, in kind of that traditional sense, let's talk about the thing.
We often try to do consultation as one to one or small group discussion. When I say small group discussions, I think it's most effective if we're talking with the department so that there is kind of this common design common design approach within, say, a department, or maybe expand that to, maybe a college But we like to we kinda thrive in these spaces so that we can talk about the design aspects. It's not so much a stand and deliver type training when we talk about this consultation that this is kind of a sharing of ideas. A discussion about best practices and a discussion about needs. And One of the reasons I'm a big fan of these hours is because my hope is that everybody here becomes and the institutions that you represent and the faculty at your institution, everybody.
I hope that people have a good design experience within Canvas. And I hope that that is and efficient experience in Canvas. Let me go back to the days as a trainer. People were often overwhelmed by looking at platform and try to figure out how to design within this platform and how built their content. And my advice was, well, start now and expand as you go along.
And I would stand that that's not always the mindset of an institution, and that's just fine. I also like when people have content to from, and then students can just, or, excuse me, instructors can just go with that content and have something to to pull from. That oftentimes when we're talking about one offs or individual faculty members who are creating their content and their course. I like the idea of building over time. I like the idea of building within a template over time, and I like this design to be efficient.
We want people to be able to work through the platform quickly so that they can focus on the teaching aspect of the platform. Nick, can I just pop in really quick while you're talking about consultation hours? I've worked on a few projects recently with those that have been, you know, really pool use cases and, unique use cases for some of those consultation hours. And, I think it's important to note that, institutions that are purchasing these hours, they all look different. You know, some might have huge teams of instructional designers, and they're still purchasing those hours, or they might not have the bandwidth, internally, and that's where instructure can help you know, some of the heavy lifting there. I've seen, both use cases pretty recently, University of Tampa.
I just worked with them both Nick and I did, on a package of consultation hours. And, you know, their ultimate goal there was to have kind of standing office hours with our design team. That way faculty could come in whenever it's convenient to their schedule and have that kind of face to face consultation time on best practices in Canvas, how they should be setting up their courses, and ultimately the goal there is just that consist feel and look throughout the platform. So I thought that was a really cool way to leverage those hours. And even with an in house design team, you know, having those standing office hours for two days a week for the first, you know, month or two of the semester was just something that they could not do, internally with their bandwidth.
So We were really happy to help out there, and I think that that project's going really well. So just wanted to share that use case with you out here. Yeah. And really, it wasn't that challenging of a project to approach for either of us. It was just, making sure that we had the capacity for the designers based on the day a separate request, and that's something that's just part of my job and part of Laura's job to figure out when we're talking about these types of projects.
And thank you for bringing up that example. That was a that was a fun project to on. So I'm going to move on to course review. So this is pretty straightforward in that we review existing content design in Canvas. I wanna say kinda gonna say content design because The primary approach for course reviews is to make sure that a plot a proper instructional strategies that are applied to the design of the content in Canvas when we talk about course reviews.
It's not necessarily about the authored content within the courses. Although that is something that we can examine and that we can review just need to have a heads up on what that sort of content's going to be to make sure that we have the right subject matter experts in place to do so. A little bit easier to talk about a lower division courses than it is to talk about upper division courses in this capacity, especially in the core area. So we kinda take those as a case by case basis. So reviewing the course content, I've shared a link to the course evaluation checklist in the parking lot, and I think that's a great resource not just for understanding course reviews, but for you to apply at your institution when it comes to designing your content in canvas.
And this can take about one to three hours per module depending. There are some caveats to that. We're looking at about ten items per module when we say one to three hours per module. And the depth is the difference between the one to three hours. There's if there's the volume in place, then we're probably looking at some additional hours for project management.
So if you were to say in structure, we review two hundred courses. We'd probably need to include some project management costs in there as well. So there's that there was those pieces. Up to ten times per module, the course evaluation checklist. So why do we do that? Well, we wanna find those UDL universal design for learning best practices practices and make sure that they're in place.
And we want to be able to assess the course design for accessibility as something that I in that interim position that I mentioned where I work vendors and, with some of the design aspects, accessibility was always a concern when we were talking with higher ed institutions. We wanna make sure that students that rule everything was, complying with the rules. I think at that point, it was with CAG, two point o, double a. Standard, double a and triple a standards that we were striving through for with vendors and, you know, since leveled up. And we want to be able to provide meaningful and actionable feedback on the course design elements, much like consultation hours, in the consultation sense.
This is a way for us to provide feedback to you, to your end, to your people so they know how to better design in the future. This is just a screenshot of the course evaluation checklist. Again, I urge you to take a link at it. Take a look at the link that is in the parking lot and bookmark it. And to restate, we're at three version three point o.
One point o started I think it was about four or five years ago, then two point o was a few years ago. I think two point o went through a peer review. Which we thought was pretty cool that it was something that was reviewed. A gains of attention was, I think it was also subject to a publication, and now we're on the third iteration of it. So course enhancements.
This is an area where I think we can have probably the most profound impact on a larger school on a larger scale at the institutional level. With the course enhancements, we are looking to improve the look and feel of existing canvas courses, whether through the application of a template or, application stylings that have been determined between the institution and in structure. This is a good way to modernize the look and feel of an existing canvas course. I know we're seeing improvement in one sentence and modernize in the next bullet point. Well, modernize kinda make sense here because some of the design strategies change a little bit over time.
And so we're we've been known to take content that was created ten years ago, and then set it through a course enhancement to then uplift that content so that it fits a little bit more modern modalities, in the classroom. Again, we want to apply, UDL principles to the to the course design. We want to make sure that the content is accessible. And now this one becomes redundant. Update a refresh Canvas course.
Well, and the why behind it is courses do become kinda stale over time, or maybe they were never enhanced in the first place. It what we're what we might be looking at is a course that was created at the very beginning of the pandemic. We decided that as an institution, we wanted it to stick around, and we want it to become the exemplary course of this subject for the institution. And let's just take that course and go run it through and show design hours in order to enhance the content. And we run across this, and that kinda blends into that first scenario where oftentimes courses created by instructors without an instructional design background, being able to apply those design principles to the content offered by the subject matter experts, I think, is a really good tandem approach to uplifting content and enhancing the student experience.
And then reapplying UDL and accessibility as well. And in institutional consistency is part of what we are after with that, they keep on saying students' end users. Yes. We want the student experience to be good in canvas. And this also follows into what Laura was pointing out to before and in the application of these hours throughout, there is kind of staff augmentation approach that can happen here.
Understand the staff augmentation might not be words that that resonate really well because if we say staff augmentation somebody might not really appreciate that word seemingly encroaching out that territory. I don't view it as such. I think it gives us an opportunity to work a long time. Your team's to deliver hours in order to achieve a shared end goal. And where we see this really applied to is on project with tight deadlines.
If we're talking at, if we're looking at an institution with two designers and they need to overhaul the entire history, all the history courses at the institution and they have a month to do it. Two designers, bunch of map history courses, how do we make this happen? An approach might be to bring us in to help out with some of those, to supply some of those hours. In the process to the goal of what our goals would be to make sure that those designers on your side work with our designers in order to better understand and apply those best practices for designing canvas. So I wanted to share some examples of, but this is for, Bowling Green. Bowling Green, we had a few years ago, We had a really big design project with them that failed within an incredibly tight timeline.
There was something like nineties odd courses. I don't wanna give exact numbers, but about ninety courses, and about a three month window to overhaul ninety eight courses. And there was a specific budget in mind for this. So that came to us at instructure as a challenge to make sure that we have the people in place to be able to carry over the project and be able to do something meaningful with the hours per course that were provided. And so we devised a plan.
We, stuck to a fairly rigid project management approach to the content in or When I say rigid, we're talking about using x amount of hours with course instructor consultation, x amount of hours for design, x amount of hours for follow-up. So this pretty rigid approach that was communicated and that we subs we provided a single point of contact to carry forward on the project. That became kind of the owners for this this project. So we went from something that look like this is a homepage to something that looked like what we're looking at on the right hand side where I would argue when more inviting the than the other. I'd I'd leave it to you all to determine which one is more inviting the than the other.
But really trying to take this content that had been in campus for years and refresh it to a place that provided a more inviting classroom for the students. That was a big project. This is another example from it too. You know, I mentioned earlier we can use multiple home pages. We have we have options to select home pages, modules being one of the options for selecting the home page.
And that's great as a way to approach the classroom, and I'm I'm certainly not somebody who would begrudge it as students are going to be able to decide. But we also wanted to, in the absence of the home page, at least provide another home page that students can then select or like not to use anymore as they set modules as their home page, and to give them a chance to jump into something that would be a little bit more informative. So here is an example of the content that also at before and after, left hand before, right hand after some changes that were made to the module itself in the form of headers, etcetera, to better break out the content or to better call out the content. Alright. So here's an example of lecture notes.
This one looks to me like we needed to get something in Canvas. So here we go. And then just a mild enhancement to make it pop a little bit more and break out some of the components of what is trying to be discussed. So we can draw the students to the instruction note that's using the instructions, and then we can have the students focus on some of the content that follows. Just try to provide a clear pathway to the students, as they engage with the content.
Alright. So course enhancements, we're operating from existing Canvas content. The next level up would be the course build. And this is where we convert content from an electronic format to Canvas. Electronic formats pretty nebulous here.
So what we're talking about amongst other things are PDFs, Google slides, PowerPoint, and so, hopefully the pdfs are the ones that are copyable instead of the images. So, yeah, this is something that happens, and it makes sense. You have it. You have a professor who's been using that PowerPoint for multiple years, and it's a reasonable PowerPoint for conveying the message of the classroom. Now it needs to be converted to a Canvas course for whatever reason.
The pandemic was kind of a huge reason for for converting from PDFs into Canvas content. But we don't want it just to add that PDF or or that PowerPoint as something that's embedded in the content page. We want it to become content pages. So that becomes kind of how we approach course building. And there it is, build courses in canvas, it's also allows us to update content to be learning management system viable.
And that means let's take it back to that prior point example. This experience interacting with native Canvas content on a mobile device. So we know our students are using the phones. They're phones for learning being able to access native content that was built from a PowerPoint rather than that PowerPoint point itself is going to be a better experience for the students. They're going to be able to have better access to the content.
So and one thing I didn't state on the previous one here with the course building too, this could also include in structure, working with your subject matter experts in order to bring content into canvas. So we're talking brain to the content page in a in a sense. We've really honed this one incredibly well largely because of some of the demands from k twelve over the last few years. More so than higher ed. And we've built a pretty good system where we go from subject matter expert into a mutually agreed upon format, electronic format, oftentimes template that we've devised at instructure, and then we plug that into canvas, or we go directly from that subject matter expert into canvas and apply stylings.
It depends kind of on work what that subject matter expert is gonna be after. Maybe they want to learn how to keep use Canvas more effectively. We're not gonna begrudge them for doing so. And so we what we found is this is a good way and a kind of a quick way to put together courses that can be used institution wide Our limitation, oftentimes, with courses like this, is going to be overall hours and access to the subject matter expert. But, you know, really a viable way to get a lot of content into place.
So why, much beyond this, add flavor to or context to pdfs. We largely not always, but it's kinda nice to be able to move away from those pieces so that we can have content that's more engaging to the learner. And, gosh, move into the digital sphere for learning. I've been bringing in authoring here, working with a subject matter expert at your institution, something that you've designated is going to be more cost effective versus authoring courses. I did add a little bonus about authoring callers at the end, so we could at least highlight it.
But when we think about authoring, it's us finding the subject matter expert to then build the content for you. And for these course building for course building specifically, I think it's a great option for frequently taught courses or courses. And amongst those frequently taught courses, I would argue that your courses that are going to be graduate student led would probably benefit from having a those students would definitely benefit from having a course to work through. As a grad student, I remember on on a lecture spending ten hours just to put together, one hour lecture fifty five minute lecture at the institution. So I if we're talking about time spent doing the thing, Yeah.
That was a that was a lot of time. It's because I wanted to make sure that I was going to do it right. Yes. I learned quite a bit in the process. Had I had something to refer to? I probably could've probably would've spent some time making sure that I have the right delivery for the content, but at least I would've had a good backbone to work from for developing the lectures.
And if we wanna be bold, maybe we can consider for going to textbook for these courses. Just apply that at the upper division level. If you have somebody who literally wrote the book on the thing, I I have a specific professor in mind whenever I think about this, a history professor who taught about Colombian history. I I would rather read his stuff than read a textbook on the subject. Not that he would ever use a textbook, but maybe his his stuff becomes the backbone for the course as it say an upper division course in addition to whatever reading would be included.
So here's a little example of course building. This is a CTE technology class, that look like this with links to things. And then what happened was we took that and turned it into a Canvas module. And the content they're in supported, you know, some of those links within the different components may be incorporating videos within the content pages. And or within the discussions that are included in the classroom.
In terms of interaction, though, on one side, you click links that being the left hand side. I hope that was I hope that was inferred. I hope so hope it was captured. On the right hand side, you're moving through a course and engaging things, sequentially. But argue that the content in Canvas is gonna be easier for a student to to digest, and I think it's probably going to work better for instructors too as they work through the content.
Here's an example of a beginning of the pandemic. We gotta do something quickly course. Build. In this case, there was a telehealth course that was delivered via PowerPoint in person. And then it needed to move over into something that was going to be taught online.
And so well, we kinda skipped one here. We took some of these components. And then turn it into a Canvas course. Now I would say that this is higher ed by extension in that. It was delivered by higher ed, and kind of by a higher institution in a bit of a corporate model.
But we try to trace, Lauren and I were tracing the the provenance of this story ahead of this this meeting, and it's pretty convoluted. Let's just say we went from PowerPoint to a Canvas course and at early in the early in the pandemic. And a course that has had over two thousand enrollment since it was launched a few years ago, about three years ago. And this one is really interesting too because it started out with a rough sketch in a sense or knowing what we needed to do. And it came about in a way that we often see with some of our design projects where An institution will purchase twenty hours.
They will kind of want to go dip their toes in the design world, and they maybe want a proof of concepts in order to launch the project, or they would just buy an hours on their own and and didn't know how many hours to estimate on this project, on the project. Those hours turned into more hours and more hours and more hours and eventually led to this fully fledged course that again comes from a that came from a a PowerPoint. It's a pretty cool project. I talked to the designer about this one last week. Earlier this week, excuse me, and she's incredibly proud of the project and the amount of engagement this this course has had.
So bonus course authoring. Yeah. So we are capable, and we can offer providing some course authoring where we source the subject matter expert in order to write the content for the courses. And it does happen. It's not the most common request in higher ed or k twelve, but it is something that we are capable of doing.
So I showed some examples here where we often see course authoring in higher ed, although we welcome it in that, history ten ten course. Sorry. I'm going to pick on history, but that where we welcome it on the hist at the history ten ten course, where we often see it is with some leadership type courses or professional development type courses where maybe it's not within the purview of your subject matter experts at the institution. I'm not saying that's the case specifically with the suit of state, but maybe, you don't have somebody who can do it. So you're going to work with us in order to build the content.
And here are some examples of design content. You'll also notice here that, or maybe not, that we've applied a custom template to this content, and we see that that look and feel and institutional branding in large forms of the colors used carries over from content page to the content page or from that homepage to the following content pages. It's a good example of course authoring that we see. And like in other areas, sorry about the fuzzy image, but in like other areas, yes, we do pay attention to what's going to be placed into the module as part of the build in order to make the content digestible at even at this level for the students. Here's a little bit more.
I wanna point out on the lower right hand side that I've included a screenshot of the rubric Can not understate the importance of a rubric in a course and rubric can be part of course authoring. They can be part of really any level. It's just a matter of hours devoting hours to these things, but here we do have a rubric that can be used. You also notice to the incorporation of videos. Now oftentimes, instructure itself will not create videos we look to the institutions in many cases to provide videos, and to bring in the content via video.
I say that with a little bit of hesitancy because there are some cap video capabilities. I think from the budgeting perspective, we oftentimes see that videos can hit the costs pretty hard. Overall for a project, I also wanna add to with videos too. We do we can and do work with vendors if there are institutions that require videos as part of the content. Think oftentimes one of the better approaches is to have that subject matter expert at the institution, add the video, or have us source videos from wherever let's say that kinda tongue in chief, but there are great video resources out there that are our subject matter experts should we bring in somebody for the curriculum build? We have people that can find good videos that would help to enhance the course content So wherever is a bit of a a bold statement and not quite accurate, we are very diligent in making sure that we have the right content in place.
For videos and for the other pieces of content. Alright. So why course authoring, there are multiple needs that we're trying to fit. When it comes to course authoring. I'll just leave these here for a second.
I forgot how many levels I added to this to the slides. Sorry about that, everybody. So, really, who needs design services? I think institutions seeking uniformity and content, new to Canvas institutions, through the use of a template in order to learn design best practices. Institutions with tighter timelines to accomplish a project, institutions without ID capacity. Those two bullet points can kind of work together.
And institutions requiring a substantial content uplift or enhancement. So I would also just add to that. Just spending ten hours, twenty hours with the designer can help your designers become more comfortable with designing in Canvas. So cost well, I lost a slide. There we go.
So cost for the design services. I I kinda wanted to give you some rough ballpark ideas around some of the pricings. Should you decide to engage? I also wanna say too that that two hundred dollars per hour is the pricing, but there are also some pricing breaks at the moment. I don't know when they exactly expire, so I didn't want to put them on this on the screen as such, but there are some pricing breaks depending on the number of hours purchased. So extra small.
And that's something below ten thousand dollars. For a fifteen module course with up to ten items per module. Now that is it being kind of a good range for those those course enhancements? You know, I'm going to be very careful in saying, you know, fifteen modules up to ten items per module. That's where we might see those course reviews. I said think I said to Hasmitz, but course reviews.
Because we're looking at that two, three, one to three hours per course, etcetera, as part of it. For some of the course enhancements, depending on the level of enhancement and add and structure, reapproach it at three levels, we could be in, again, fifteen modules. So fifteen weeks of contents, assuming a module per week, up to ten items per module, we would probably be looking in the extra small to small range for an enhancement, again, depending on the level. Course build. Single course, we're probably in the small to medium territory for a single course, fifteen modules, ten items per module.
And we can share additional limitations if you'd like in the parking lot, and then kind of up from there. So that that's about where we operate in terms of, you know, just rough budget guidelines if you're thinking about pursuing any sort of course enhancements, etcetera. And for us, we try to take a budget based approach to your projects. I just provided ballparks, figures for a single course within the specific parameters. We understand too that maybe you need a course that's enhanced amps, you have maybe you have an extras as a low end of the extra small budget.
Well, part of what we might do is, or part of the the approach could be to say, let's let's work on let's focus on one module, and let's add a little bit of design time to that module. And then let's make sure that this becomes an exemplary piece of content in the course, and then your designers can work from from that. So It becomes kind of a transfer of knowledge that is again based a little bit on the budget that you are able to provide to us. For talking about multiple courses, And let's say you've looked at that list and you're like, I, you know, I need to overhaul a hundred courses. I need to do a course enhancement on a hundred courses, but doing a medium budget per course probably isn't within our purview.
Well, we can we can scale back from that, and we can talk about maybe set that program like we did with Bowling Green University, not Bowling Green, not saying that that's exactly what their approach is. I don't wanna get into too many of the specifics there. But we could try to take that budget based approach in order to say, alright. Well, whereas we can't deliver two hundred hours per month, two hundred hours per course, which is not the estimate here. Let's scale it back to a hundred hours per course and then design from that that aspect and do as much as we can and make sure that we're giving this much to each course.
So that's you know, that's how we try to engage with these projects. Alright. So that actually brings us to the end of the slide deck. Haven't had a much of a chance to to to check out chat. So I'm gonna stop my screen share and see what we have inside chat.
Yep. And I've been tracking some questions here on the parking lot doc as well. So Happy to read those aloud for the recording for anyone watching back. The first question is, what edits can you make to ready made templates? Sure. They're quite editable.
I mean, some of the stuff some of the banner's pace to stay with HTML so you can go in and and adjust some of the things that the banner will say. Sometimes there will be some image swaps with banners whether you purchase a design package to go along with a ready made template or add your own advantage to the content, but, you know, a lot of the pieces kind of can be interchangeable. It's often times the question is, it becomes to what degree do you want to make changes in them. And sometimes it becomes a matter of how do we depending on the types of changes that are being made, maybe it makes more sense to move over into the custom template territory. So it's a big answer to say things are editable.
Yep. And that kind of ties along with the next question of what are the main differences between ready made templates and customized ones and which scenario would warrant each template being a best option? That's a good question. And I think I ought to think about a deeper answer to that. I would start with this. Regardless, I'm a if you haven't been able to tell, I'm a fan templates as approaching consistency for to for an institution to use to to approach creating consistent content.
In terms of the differences too, if if I were making the decision between ready made template and a custom template, I'd be looking at volume Am I supporting multiple colleges and do does each college at the institution? This is just an example. Not knowing the background specifically here, but Maybe if I'm looking at the the cost to need ratio, maybe I'm looking at multiple ready made templates because I have to support multiple colleges. On the on the custom template front, the main thing is the identity of the content or setting up the content so that the design assets employ the specific colors of the institution, something that If you if we're creating an icon or using an icon and being able to set the specific color, that all those icons take quite a bit of time to work through, and that's why we're looking at a cost that goes from two thousand for a ready made template to four thousand five hundred for for a custom template because that customization changing the the color code. The name is escaping me, everybody. I'm sorry about that.
But changing the color code in order to match the institution, that's where, you know, some of those design differences come into play. So I think just looking at the level of work in the broadcast, that's where I think the decisions, that's where the decision space is. Yeah. I would say too, just in speaking with different institutions who are weighing both options, the custom template is going to give you a level of that face to face consultation with one of our designers. And so if you want a hands off kind of experience where we're giving you the template, we're giving you instructions on how to modify, and you all feel confident that, you know, you can handle that internally.
And have an end product that you're proud of and that works for your needs, the ready made template is a great option. If you feel like you're needing something kind of a step above that. The custom template is gonna be the better piece. Now, of course, if you wanted to do a combination of like a ready made template with consultation hours, that would give you more of that hands on approach, but just as is the ready made template is just going to be, you know, loaded into your instance and then you'll have kind of all the tools you need in your toolbox there to make any changes. And the next question actually is kind of in line with that is how are templates loaded into pages? Luff times, it becomes that module copy as a as the option for specifically having the, components of the templates dispersed.
A level of of that is we often see people ship them out as as blueprints. Across the institution or across the people who are going to be using a ready made template level above that is at some point, often within the implementation or after an event is triggered and structure. So designers notify somebody will plug that ready made template into the Canvas instance of the institution. So at the per classroom level, yeah, of course, co copying the items specifically within module ends up being the way to do it. The way I see it happen quite a bit is what module becomes kind of this, the Sacrosync template module that we don't touch, and we just copy from then do the good old drag and drop.
Have to say that carefully, but we drag and drop content from one place to the module where it's going to reside. Alright. Next question. Can we keep our templates forever? I would, I'd rather not answer that as a recording because I think we have some official language, on that. So we'll throw that one into the parking lot.
Right. But they are yours to keep. It's not a recurring cost, to upkeep or have access to these templates. It's a one time fee that you have access to. I think on our order form, there are some specific language around, you know, not sharing the content of those templates with outside institutions, anything like that.
But my understanding of the templates is that Once you purchase them, you know, there's no maintenance fees or anything that you pay year over year to have access to them, they're yours to do with what you will inside of your of Canvas outside, is break in rules, of course, in the the order form language there. I'll put some some better language on that in the parking lot here. And then, final question here is, does the instructor team check for accessibility. So I'm assuming that is related to, you know, some of the enhancement type projects. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Accessibility is important. You can see yes. It's important to how they operate.
Absolutely. So universal for design learning principles and accessibility are part of what instructors and structural designers tough sentence to spit out. Sorry, but that's something that they bring to the projects that they work on. Absolutely. And to that to extend on that too.
Those discussions in consultation or through consultation can include discussions about universal for design learning and, you know, yes, UDL and accessibility. Feels like the end of the week at the end of a quarter. As I apologize for tripping over my words. I know. I feel that too.
Awesome. Well, those are all the questions that I logged throughout our session. If anyone has anything else that they want to throw in the chat or throw in the Q and A, let us know. But it seems like we are wrapping up here. And thank you, Nicholas, for sharing all of that information super valuable.
I would say even a majority of schools that I work with who are all existing Canvas customers, you know, schools that have been on Canvas for so long, they're not always aware of the services that we offer. We, of course, you know, promote our products so often and, you know, do demos of all these amazing products that we offer, but it's really nice and refreshing to kind of talk through some of the service offerings that we have. That way, you know, you might have an not have a need right at this moment, but if the time ever comes, at least you're aware that, we offer these services that we're able to help in these ways. So, you know, we surely hope that you'll come to us with projects and ideas, and we're happy to kind of sort through all of that with you one on one. Absolutely.
Awesome. Well, I'm not seeing any other questions. So I will go ahead and wrap up here. We'll get porting sent out, following the webinar today, and we'll put that in the parking lot as well. And, we have our parking lot document open and till October second at five PM eastern.
So if you'll just give us some some time to organize everything in here, get answers to all of your questions, and then feel free to, you know, make copies of this document, keep it for your records. It's a great kind of source of truth for everything that we talked about today. And will be a great reference point, you know, like I said, as projects come up in the future. So it was great to have everyone here today. I appreciate your time and such a busy time of year.
So let us know if there's anything we can help with, and we'll get your questions answered. Thank you. And thanks everybody.
I do wanna give it maybe one more minute before we get started just so that folks have a chance to log in to Zoom. But if folks want to start putting in the chat, where they're tuning in from, your school, your state, I would love to see where everyone is tuning in from. Nice, Ron. Got a lot of Florida folks in here, some Alabama Oh, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Love it.
This is awesome. I myself am in Charleston, South Carolina, and my counterpart Nick here is in Utah. So we've got folks from all over, which is awesome. And I feel like we can go ahead and get started, and I'll just, continuously drop some things in the chat for folks who are joining later, but wanted to give a welcome to everyone for joining us on this afternoon. I'm really excited for all the content that we're gonna cover in today's webinar.
I figured we could start off with some introductions and just helpful links that I'll throw out there before we jump in. But my name is Laura Sheplin. I am an account executive here at instructure. So I work with many of you who are, joining us today essentially, my role is to, assist with any new products, services, things like instructional design, kind of in a in addition to your existing Canvas contracts, and I've pulled in my colleague here, Nicholas Demas, I'll let him introduce himself, but is one of our services solutions engineers. So welcome, Nick.
Yeah. Thank you very much. I am the services solutions engineer. So lofty title. And my job is very similar to Laura's in that.
I'm trying to connect, you with our services And when I talk about services, it's mostly like our technical services and our learning services. So training and structural design, technical consulting hours, etcetera, kinda all fall under my purview. But happens to be that some of some of the my favorite things talk about really our our design services as I think it's a really, our design services are a great way to take your Canvas instance to the next level. Lower with your permission, I'll go ahead and start Yes. By deck, and we can just kinda work through that and then look at our pictures again.
That sounds good. And I am recording today. So anyone who's unable to make it, I'll be sure to send out the webinar recording there. And I am just gonna throw one thing in the chat before you get started, Nick. We have a, we're calling it a parking lot document.
So, anyone who has questions, things they wanna learn more about, feel free to just, throw that in here in this document, and both Nick and myself will be work on this document to, fill it in with all the answers to your questions, links to resources. So this will be a great place to just kind of have one source of truth. And then, of course, any follow-up items that, you all are requesting, like, pricing or more information we can always reach out individually. So wanted to put that in the chat, and we do want this to be interactive as well. I know it's a webinar room, so please feel free to utilize the chat, the Q and A boxes there.
We definitely wanna be able to answer your questions and share as much information as possible. So let's get started. Perfect. And some of those questions, we might just redirect you back to the parking lot as those are maybe great questions to have documented and or, maybe they would require a little bit more of a follow-up. The parking lot's gonna be open through end of day by PM on Monday.
And then, you know, depending on the number of questions, so we should be able to provide an estimate and how long it will take to respond to the question. So you're welcome to ask questions here. You're welcome to ask questions in that space. Or if you would like chime in, if there's a question that you need me to address, please do so, and I'll do so, then I will do that. So I think that kind of accounts for the housekeeping today.
So let's just go a little bit to our our agenda. We're going to talk about templates and consultation. Course review, course enhancements, course building, and then we're going to do a little bit of a bonus with course authoring. But let's start with templates and consultation. Now when you jump into Canvas, you oftentimes as part of your implement implementation package, there is an inclusion of a ready made template or a custom template depends on when you signed on to signed on with the instructor and started your Canvas instance, if not, you know, that's something that we are always welcome.
We always welcome in terms of conversations. So kinda saying the things, ready made templates, custom templates, and consultation hours. For this. So why would we look at templates? Well, we like them because they add a consistent look and feel for the university college department and or system. And I think this has become something that's very important as we start to design in Canvas or if we are have been using Canvas for a while.
We design additional content in Canvas because it does help to provide your students with the consistency as they enter the courses and a little bit of predictability. Now templates can go all the way down to making sure that we have some iconography within the template that students are able to then recognize throughout their duration with the university or college or department, etcetera. And we like it too that templates do provide a foundation for which instructors can build their content. So I came to this role in kind of a convoluted way. I've been with instructor for almost nine years.
And in a segment in there kind of early on was, I was a trainer. And as a trainer, I'd go out to institutions, and we'd talk about the rich content editor. And when we looked at the rich content editor, and we looked at Canvas, there was nothing in it. Towards the end of my time as a trainer, and as I moved into a role that proceeded. This current role that I'm in, it was a design adjacent role.
The one thing that I had wished that had been in place was the custom templates or or and or ready made templates because they help to start establish the vision of what canvas can be and give something, give instructors something from which they can build. And that doesn't extend to just instructors, but also to designers at instructional designers at the various institutions. So that foundation part cannot be understated. And again, I think it would have been lovely to have been able to use it. Oftentimes when our trainers go out now, for our, learning consultants to go out and discuss Canvas, there is a template that people can refer to.
Ready made templates here are just a couple examples of home pages. Now we know in Canvas, we can select one of many, home pages, but Having a nice landing page for the students and the course is is a good thing to be able to do. So you can explain to the students what's happening, provide, access to different components of the course, and kind of direct students where they need to go. I think that direction or having a place that students can refer back to that direction it really helps that enable the students to better engage with the course. So give these are just a couple of our ready made templates Right now, there's a link in the parking lot that will take you to learn dot instructure dot com slash courses five slash five Anyway, there's a link in there.
That if you follow that link and if you go into design services, you'll be able to make your way into the ready made template we to look at different options. And there's a collection there that goes from, k twelve to higher ed to, even professional development. Among others. And then I thought I'd continue with the ready made template to showcase modules. And module organization.
As a trainer, I really focused on module organization because it's outlined for the course or can be the outline for the course, and this is how students are going to engage with the course. So having clean and was spelled out and will determine modules has been important to how we've approached our templates to add a capturing. And then a content page, you'll you can see some of the iconography that I mentioned a little bit earlier within the sample content page from a ready made template. And you'll see the lore Mipsum generator here. That's meant to be replaced with instructor content.
Again, predictability for the students, iconography, And, oh, look, a to do list. I'm a big fan of to do list as somebody who keeps a bullet journal, knowing what I have to do in order to go through the things is going to, I believe, enhance the student's learning experience. Tell them what do you need to tell them. Tell the students what you need to tell them, sort of approach, design approach. Within the ready made templates, there are some how to use instructions and city.
Just this is just to try to cut down on some of the learning curve as it applies to the templates and also to capture different learning styles for our instruct our instructors almost had its structures. That word is forever. Those two words are forever commingled. So we want to make sure that instructors and designers can easily use the templates. We try to provide some good information for everybody to be able to refer to as they go through and design the courses.
So I wanted to showcase a couple custom templates as well. We'll get to the showcase in just a a second. So the appeal for custom templates is that they are customized for institutional branding as somebody who worked at a university prior to working at a structure, it was really important that even when I sent out a newsletter that I was using the right font, that I was using the right colors that was using the right icons, etcetera, as I send out statewide newsletters, for the program that I run Iran at, the university. So making sure that that institutional branding is in place is really one of the backbone for selecting a ready a custom template over a ready made template. And as such, it represents the most common request.
Close to the line, though, is making sure that we are conveying the institutional look and feel through a custom template. And just like ready made templates with the custom templates we're striving to provide some consistency for the end user students in in most cases. So here are just a small samples, a couple examples of custom templates. And so these become a little bit more institution specific. You can see in the upper left hand corner, with permission, we have George Washington University of law school.
We've used some of the content from their, their custom template. On the right hand side, you can see some of the carryover in the branding in to the content within the template. So we're looking at institutional colors that that GW logo in the upper left hand corner is a good example of the specific colors that need to be used, and then On the right hand side where we see overview learning objectives to do list, we see the application of those colors within the template. So some consistency of that look and feel for the institution caring over of the branding. Yeah.
Remind the students where they're going to school. That sort of thing. Also, this is a good example of set, you know, setting up the overview, learning objectives, and to do list is some of that learning strategy that can be employed within course, reminding instructors that they are the ones working on the content that it's good to have that overview. It's good to explain what those learning objectives are, and it's good to set up that to do list. So the students understand what's going on with the content.
Alright. So let's go back to the ready made templates. We have the option. If you can't choose a template for the through the ready made templates and you're not interested in the custom template or if you're an institution where you have many colleges or your universe university system, and so you have multiple universities and finding one specific item of branding, or, maybe you want some flexibility in terms of how you approach templates. There is this thing called the template template library, even if I can't say it, it does exist.
So template library, it is something that you can subscribe to and plug into canvas, and then be able to use for plugging in, multiple templates. There it is. LTI added. Includes ready made templates and the design package templates. You'll see that the the the design packages aren't necessarily a focus of today, but they are a collection of design assets that can be plugged into ready made templates.
Alright. Now we're going to shift gears just a little bit and talk about consultation hours. Often, when we're working with institutions, there's the the question comes up about or about how do we better use canvas as a as a designer or as an instructor or somebody who may be swearing both hats at an institution And so we want to make it make our people available to your people so that we can talk about best design practices within Canvas. So this is separate from training. Training is how do we use Canvas? Why do we use Canvas? We have our solutions consulting where we talk about how to go commit to change strategy and how to drive adoption within an institution or within a system.
But this is kinda focused on the design elements. How do we create effective design in Canvas? How do we collect, how do we better leverage our templates or well, frankly, these hours that we're talking about now can be applied to any of the services from this point forward that we'll be discussing. So why There we go. Design Services are sold as consultation hours. So consultation specifically, in kind of that traditional sense, let's talk about the thing.
We often try to do consultation as one to one or small group discussion. When I say small group discussions, I think it's most effective if we're talking with the department so that there is kind of this common design common design approach within, say, a department, or maybe expand that to, maybe a college But we like to we kinda thrive in these spaces so that we can talk about the design aspects. It's not so much a stand and deliver type training when we talk about this consultation that this is kind of a sharing of ideas. A discussion about best practices and a discussion about needs. And One of the reasons I'm a big fan of these hours is because my hope is that everybody here becomes and the institutions that you represent and the faculty at your institution, everybody.
I hope that people have a good design experience within Canvas. And I hope that that is and efficient experience in Canvas. Let me go back to the days as a trainer. People were often overwhelmed by looking at platform and try to figure out how to design within this platform and how built their content. And my advice was, well, start now and expand as you go along.
And I would stand that that's not always the mindset of an institution, and that's just fine. I also like when people have content to from, and then students can just, or, excuse me, instructors can just go with that content and have something to to pull from. That oftentimes when we're talking about one offs or individual faculty members who are creating their content and their course. I like the idea of building over time. I like the idea of building within a template over time, and I like this design to be efficient.
We want people to be able to work through the platform quickly so that they can focus on the teaching aspect of the platform. Nick, can I just pop in really quick while you're talking about consultation hours? I've worked on a few projects recently with those that have been, you know, really pool use cases and, unique use cases for some of those consultation hours. And, I think it's important to note that, institutions that are purchasing these hours, they all look different. You know, some might have huge teams of instructional designers, and they're still purchasing those hours, or they might not have the bandwidth, internally, and that's where instructure can help you know, some of the heavy lifting there. I've seen, both use cases pretty recently, University of Tampa.
I just worked with them both Nick and I did, on a package of consultation hours. And, you know, their ultimate goal there was to have kind of standing office hours with our design team. That way faculty could come in whenever it's convenient to their schedule and have that kind of face to face consultation time on best practices in Canvas, how they should be setting up their courses, and ultimately the goal there is just that consist feel and look throughout the platform. So I thought that was a really cool way to leverage those hours. And even with an in house design team, you know, having those standing office hours for two days a week for the first, you know, month or two of the semester was just something that they could not do, internally with their bandwidth.
So We were really happy to help out there, and I think that that project's going really well. So just wanted to share that use case with you out here. Yeah. And really, it wasn't that challenging of a project to approach for either of us. It was just, making sure that we had the capacity for the designers based on the day a separate request, and that's something that's just part of my job and part of Laura's job to figure out when we're talking about these types of projects.
And thank you for bringing up that example. That was a that was a fun project to on. So I'm going to move on to course review. So this is pretty straightforward in that we review existing content design in Canvas. I wanna say kinda gonna say content design because The primary approach for course reviews is to make sure that a plot a proper instructional strategies that are applied to the design of the content in Canvas when we talk about course reviews.
It's not necessarily about the authored content within the courses. Although that is something that we can examine and that we can review just need to have a heads up on what that sort of content's going to be to make sure that we have the right subject matter experts in place to do so. A little bit easier to talk about a lower division courses than it is to talk about upper division courses in this capacity, especially in the core area. So we kinda take those as a case by case basis. So reviewing the course content, I've shared a link to the course evaluation checklist in the parking lot, and I think that's a great resource not just for understanding course reviews, but for you to apply at your institution when it comes to designing your content in canvas.
And this can take about one to three hours per module depending. There are some caveats to that. We're looking at about ten items per module when we say one to three hours per module. And the depth is the difference between the one to three hours. There's if there's the volume in place, then we're probably looking at some additional hours for project management.
So if you were to say in structure, we review two hundred courses. We'd probably need to include some project management costs in there as well. So there's that there was those pieces. Up to ten times per module, the course evaluation checklist. So why do we do that? Well, we wanna find those UDL universal design for learning best practices practices and make sure that they're in place.
And we want to be able to assess the course design for accessibility as something that I in that interim position that I mentioned where I work vendors and, with some of the design aspects, accessibility was always a concern when we were talking with higher ed institutions. We wanna make sure that students that rule everything was, complying with the rules. I think at that point, it was with CAG, two point o, double a. Standard, double a and triple a standards that we were striving through for with vendors and, you know, since leveled up. And we want to be able to provide meaningful and actionable feedback on the course design elements, much like consultation hours, in the consultation sense.
This is a way for us to provide feedback to you, to your end, to your people so they know how to better design in the future. This is just a screenshot of the course evaluation checklist. Again, I urge you to take a link at it. Take a look at the link that is in the parking lot and bookmark it. And to restate, we're at three version three point o.
One point o started I think it was about four or five years ago, then two point o was a few years ago. I think two point o went through a peer review. Which we thought was pretty cool that it was something that was reviewed. A gains of attention was, I think it was also subject to a publication, and now we're on the third iteration of it. So course enhancements.
This is an area where I think we can have probably the most profound impact on a larger school on a larger scale at the institutional level. With the course enhancements, we are looking to improve the look and feel of existing canvas courses, whether through the application of a template or, application stylings that have been determined between the institution and in structure. This is a good way to modernize the look and feel of an existing canvas course. I know we're seeing improvement in one sentence and modernize in the next bullet point. Well, modernize kinda make sense here because some of the design strategies change a little bit over time.
And so we're we've been known to take content that was created ten years ago, and then set it through a course enhancement to then uplift that content so that it fits a little bit more modern modalities, in the classroom. Again, we want to apply, UDL principles to the to the course design. We want to make sure that the content is accessible. And now this one becomes redundant. Update a refresh Canvas course.
Well, and the why behind it is courses do become kinda stale over time, or maybe they were never enhanced in the first place. It what we're what we might be looking at is a course that was created at the very beginning of the pandemic. We decided that as an institution, we wanted it to stick around, and we want it to become the exemplary course of this subject for the institution. And let's just take that course and go run it through and show design hours in order to enhance the content. And we run across this, and that kinda blends into that first scenario where oftentimes courses created by instructors without an instructional design background, being able to apply those design principles to the content offered by the subject matter experts, I think, is a really good tandem approach to uplifting content and enhancing the student experience.
And then reapplying UDL and accessibility as well. And in institutional consistency is part of what we are after with that, they keep on saying students' end users. Yes. We want the student experience to be good in canvas. And this also follows into what Laura was pointing out to before and in the application of these hours throughout, there is kind of staff augmentation approach that can happen here.
Understand the staff augmentation might not be words that that resonate really well because if we say staff augmentation somebody might not really appreciate that word seemingly encroaching out that territory. I don't view it as such. I think it gives us an opportunity to work a long time. Your team's to deliver hours in order to achieve a shared end goal. And where we see this really applied to is on project with tight deadlines.
If we're talking at, if we're looking at an institution with two designers and they need to overhaul the entire history, all the history courses at the institution and they have a month to do it. Two designers, bunch of map history courses, how do we make this happen? An approach might be to bring us in to help out with some of those, to supply some of those hours. In the process to the goal of what our goals would be to make sure that those designers on your side work with our designers in order to better understand and apply those best practices for designing canvas. So I wanted to share some examples of, but this is for, Bowling Green. Bowling Green, we had a few years ago, We had a really big design project with them that failed within an incredibly tight timeline.
There was something like nineties odd courses. I don't wanna give exact numbers, but about ninety courses, and about a three month window to overhaul ninety eight courses. And there was a specific budget in mind for this. So that came to us at instructure as a challenge to make sure that we have the people in place to be able to carry over the project and be able to do something meaningful with the hours per course that were provided. And so we devised a plan.
We, stuck to a fairly rigid project management approach to the content in or When I say rigid, we're talking about using x amount of hours with course instructor consultation, x amount of hours for design, x amount of hours for follow-up. So this pretty rigid approach that was communicated and that we subs we provided a single point of contact to carry forward on the project. That became kind of the owners for this this project. So we went from something that look like this is a homepage to something that looked like what we're looking at on the right hand side where I would argue when more inviting the than the other. I'd I'd leave it to you all to determine which one is more inviting the than the other.
But really trying to take this content that had been in campus for years and refresh it to a place that provided a more inviting classroom for the students. That was a big project. This is another example from it too. You know, I mentioned earlier we can use multiple home pages. We have we have options to select home pages, modules being one of the options for selecting the home page.
And that's great as a way to approach the classroom, and I'm I'm certainly not somebody who would begrudge it as students are going to be able to decide. But we also wanted to, in the absence of the home page, at least provide another home page that students can then select or like not to use anymore as they set modules as their home page, and to give them a chance to jump into something that would be a little bit more informative. So here is an example of the content that also at before and after, left hand before, right hand after some changes that were made to the module itself in the form of headers, etcetera, to better break out the content or to better call out the content. Alright. So here's an example of lecture notes.
This one looks to me like we needed to get something in Canvas. So here we go. And then just a mild enhancement to make it pop a little bit more and break out some of the components of what is trying to be discussed. So we can draw the students to the instruction note that's using the instructions, and then we can have the students focus on some of the content that follows. Just try to provide a clear pathway to the students, as they engage with the content.
Alright. So course enhancements, we're operating from existing Canvas content. The next level up would be the course build. And this is where we convert content from an electronic format to Canvas. Electronic formats pretty nebulous here.
So what we're talking about amongst other things are PDFs, Google slides, PowerPoint, and so, hopefully the pdfs are the ones that are copyable instead of the images. So, yeah, this is something that happens, and it makes sense. You have it. You have a professor who's been using that PowerPoint for multiple years, and it's a reasonable PowerPoint for conveying the message of the classroom. Now it needs to be converted to a Canvas course for whatever reason.
The pandemic was kind of a huge reason for for converting from PDFs into Canvas content. But we don't want it just to add that PDF or or that PowerPoint as something that's embedded in the content page. We want it to become content pages. So that becomes kind of how we approach course building. And there it is, build courses in canvas, it's also allows us to update content to be learning management system viable.
And that means let's take it back to that prior point example. This experience interacting with native Canvas content on a mobile device. So we know our students are using the phones. They're phones for learning being able to access native content that was built from a PowerPoint rather than that PowerPoint point itself is going to be a better experience for the students. They're going to be able to have better access to the content.
So and one thing I didn't state on the previous one here with the course building too, this could also include in structure, working with your subject matter experts in order to bring content into canvas. So we're talking brain to the content page in a in a sense. We've really honed this one incredibly well largely because of some of the demands from k twelve over the last few years. More so than higher ed. And we've built a pretty good system where we go from subject matter expert into a mutually agreed upon format, electronic format, oftentimes template that we've devised at instructure, and then we plug that into canvas, or we go directly from that subject matter expert into canvas and apply stylings.
It depends kind of on work what that subject matter expert is gonna be after. Maybe they want to learn how to keep use Canvas more effectively. We're not gonna begrudge them for doing so. And so we what we found is this is a good way and a kind of a quick way to put together courses that can be used institution wide Our limitation, oftentimes, with courses like this, is going to be overall hours and access to the subject matter expert. But, you know, really a viable way to get a lot of content into place.
So why, much beyond this, add flavor to or context to pdfs. We largely not always, but it's kinda nice to be able to move away from those pieces so that we can have content that's more engaging to the learner. And, gosh, move into the digital sphere for learning. I've been bringing in authoring here, working with a subject matter expert at your institution, something that you've designated is going to be more cost effective versus authoring courses. I did add a little bonus about authoring callers at the end, so we could at least highlight it.
But when we think about authoring, it's us finding the subject matter expert to then build the content for you. And for these course building for course building specifically, I think it's a great option for frequently taught courses or courses. And amongst those frequently taught courses, I would argue that your courses that are going to be graduate student led would probably benefit from having a those students would definitely benefit from having a course to work through. As a grad student, I remember on on a lecture spending ten hours just to put together, one hour lecture fifty five minute lecture at the institution. So I if we're talking about time spent doing the thing, Yeah.
That was a that was a lot of time. It's because I wanted to make sure that I was going to do it right. Yes. I learned quite a bit in the process. Had I had something to refer to? I probably could've probably would've spent some time making sure that I have the right delivery for the content, but at least I would've had a good backbone to work from for developing the lectures.
And if we wanna be bold, maybe we can consider for going to textbook for these courses. Just apply that at the upper division level. If you have somebody who literally wrote the book on the thing, I I have a specific professor in mind whenever I think about this, a history professor who taught about Colombian history. I I would rather read his stuff than read a textbook on the subject. Not that he would ever use a textbook, but maybe his his stuff becomes the backbone for the course as it say an upper division course in addition to whatever reading would be included.
So here's a little example of course building. This is a CTE technology class, that look like this with links to things. And then what happened was we took that and turned it into a Canvas module. And the content they're in supported, you know, some of those links within the different components may be incorporating videos within the content pages. And or within the discussions that are included in the classroom.
In terms of interaction, though, on one side, you click links that being the left hand side. I hope that was I hope that was inferred. I hope so hope it was captured. On the right hand side, you're moving through a course and engaging things, sequentially. But argue that the content in Canvas is gonna be easier for a student to to digest, and I think it's probably going to work better for instructors too as they work through the content.
Here's an example of a beginning of the pandemic. We gotta do something quickly course. Build. In this case, there was a telehealth course that was delivered via PowerPoint in person. And then it needed to move over into something that was going to be taught online.
And so well, we kinda skipped one here. We took some of these components. And then turn it into a Canvas course. Now I would say that this is higher ed by extension in that. It was delivered by higher ed, and kind of by a higher institution in a bit of a corporate model.
But we try to trace, Lauren and I were tracing the the provenance of this story ahead of this this meeting, and it's pretty convoluted. Let's just say we went from PowerPoint to a Canvas course and at early in the early in the pandemic. And a course that has had over two thousand enrollment since it was launched a few years ago, about three years ago. And this one is really interesting too because it started out with a rough sketch in a sense or knowing what we needed to do. And it came about in a way that we often see with some of our design projects where An institution will purchase twenty hours.
They will kind of want to go dip their toes in the design world, and they maybe want a proof of concepts in order to launch the project, or they would just buy an hours on their own and and didn't know how many hours to estimate on this project, on the project. Those hours turned into more hours and more hours and more hours and eventually led to this fully fledged course that again comes from a that came from a a PowerPoint. It's a pretty cool project. I talked to the designer about this one last week. Earlier this week, excuse me, and she's incredibly proud of the project and the amount of engagement this this course has had.
So bonus course authoring. Yeah. So we are capable, and we can offer providing some course authoring where we source the subject matter expert in order to write the content for the courses. And it does happen. It's not the most common request in higher ed or k twelve, but it is something that we are capable of doing.
So I showed some examples here where we often see course authoring in higher ed, although we welcome it in that, history ten ten course. Sorry. I'm going to pick on history, but that where we welcome it on the hist at the history ten ten course, where we often see it is with some leadership type courses or professional development type courses where maybe it's not within the purview of your subject matter experts at the institution. I'm not saying that's the case specifically with the suit of state, but maybe, you don't have somebody who can do it. So you're going to work with us in order to build the content.
And here are some examples of design content. You'll also notice here that, or maybe not, that we've applied a custom template to this content, and we see that that look and feel and institutional branding in large forms of the colors used carries over from content page to the content page or from that homepage to the following content pages. It's a good example of course authoring that we see. And like in other areas, sorry about the fuzzy image, but in like other areas, yes, we do pay attention to what's going to be placed into the module as part of the build in order to make the content digestible at even at this level for the students. Here's a little bit more.
I wanna point out on the lower right hand side that I've included a screenshot of the rubric Can not understate the importance of a rubric in a course and rubric can be part of course authoring. They can be part of really any level. It's just a matter of hours devoting hours to these things, but here we do have a rubric that can be used. You also notice to the incorporation of videos. Now oftentimes, instructure itself will not create videos we look to the institutions in many cases to provide videos, and to bring in the content via video.
I say that with a little bit of hesitancy because there are some cap video capabilities. I think from the budgeting perspective, we oftentimes see that videos can hit the costs pretty hard. Overall for a project, I also wanna add to with videos too. We do we can and do work with vendors if there are institutions that require videos as part of the content. Think oftentimes one of the better approaches is to have that subject matter expert at the institution, add the video, or have us source videos from wherever let's say that kinda tongue in chief, but there are great video resources out there that are our subject matter experts should we bring in somebody for the curriculum build? We have people that can find good videos that would help to enhance the course content So wherever is a bit of a a bold statement and not quite accurate, we are very diligent in making sure that we have the right content in place.
For videos and for the other pieces of content. Alright. So why course authoring, there are multiple needs that we're trying to fit. When it comes to course authoring. I'll just leave these here for a second.
I forgot how many levels I added to this to the slides. Sorry about that, everybody. So, really, who needs design services? I think institutions seeking uniformity and content, new to Canvas institutions, through the use of a template in order to learn design best practices. Institutions with tighter timelines to accomplish a project, institutions without ID capacity. Those two bullet points can kind of work together.
And institutions requiring a substantial content uplift or enhancement. So I would also just add to that. Just spending ten hours, twenty hours with the designer can help your designers become more comfortable with designing in Canvas. So cost well, I lost a slide. There we go.
So cost for the design services. I I kinda wanted to give you some rough ballpark ideas around some of the pricings. Should you decide to engage? I also wanna say too that that two hundred dollars per hour is the pricing, but there are also some pricing breaks at the moment. I don't know when they exactly expire, so I didn't want to put them on this on the screen as such, but there are some pricing breaks depending on the number of hours purchased. So extra small.
And that's something below ten thousand dollars. For a fifteen module course with up to ten items per module. Now that is it being kind of a good range for those those course enhancements? You know, I'm going to be very careful in saying, you know, fifteen modules up to ten items per module. That's where we might see those course reviews. I said think I said to Hasmitz, but course reviews.
Because we're looking at that two, three, one to three hours per course, etcetera, as part of it. For some of the course enhancements, depending on the level of enhancement and add and structure, reapproach it at three levels, we could be in, again, fifteen modules. So fifteen weeks of contents, assuming a module per week, up to ten items per module, we would probably be looking in the extra small to small range for an enhancement, again, depending on the level. Course build. Single course, we're probably in the small to medium territory for a single course, fifteen modules, ten items per module.
And we can share additional limitations if you'd like in the parking lot, and then kind of up from there. So that that's about where we operate in terms of, you know, just rough budget guidelines if you're thinking about pursuing any sort of course enhancements, etcetera. And for us, we try to take a budget based approach to your projects. I just provided ballparks, figures for a single course within the specific parameters. We understand too that maybe you need a course that's enhanced amps, you have maybe you have an extras as a low end of the extra small budget.
Well, part of what we might do is, or part of the the approach could be to say, let's let's work on let's focus on one module, and let's add a little bit of design time to that module. And then let's make sure that this becomes an exemplary piece of content in the course, and then your designers can work from from that. So It becomes kind of a transfer of knowledge that is again based a little bit on the budget that you are able to provide to us. For talking about multiple courses, And let's say you've looked at that list and you're like, I, you know, I need to overhaul a hundred courses. I need to do a course enhancement on a hundred courses, but doing a medium budget per course probably isn't within our purview.
Well, we can we can scale back from that, and we can talk about maybe set that program like we did with Bowling Green University, not Bowling Green, not saying that that's exactly what their approach is. I don't wanna get into too many of the specifics there. But we could try to take that budget based approach in order to say, alright. Well, whereas we can't deliver two hundred hours per month, two hundred hours per course, which is not the estimate here. Let's scale it back to a hundred hours per course and then design from that that aspect and do as much as we can and make sure that we're giving this much to each course.
So that's you know, that's how we try to engage with these projects. Alright. So that actually brings us to the end of the slide deck. Haven't had a much of a chance to to to check out chat. So I'm gonna stop my screen share and see what we have inside chat.
Yep. And I've been tracking some questions here on the parking lot doc as well. So Happy to read those aloud for the recording for anyone watching back. The first question is, what edits can you make to ready made templates? Sure. They're quite editable.
I mean, some of the stuff some of the banner's pace to stay with HTML so you can go in and and adjust some of the things that the banner will say. Sometimes there will be some image swaps with banners whether you purchase a design package to go along with a ready made template or add your own advantage to the content, but, you know, a lot of the pieces kind of can be interchangeable. It's often times the question is, it becomes to what degree do you want to make changes in them. And sometimes it becomes a matter of how do we depending on the types of changes that are being made, maybe it makes more sense to move over into the custom template territory. So it's a big answer to say things are editable.
Yep. And that kind of ties along with the next question of what are the main differences between ready made templates and customized ones and which scenario would warrant each template being a best option? That's a good question. And I think I ought to think about a deeper answer to that. I would start with this. Regardless, I'm a if you haven't been able to tell, I'm a fan templates as approaching consistency for to for an institution to use to to approach creating consistent content.
In terms of the differences too, if if I were making the decision between ready made template and a custom template, I'd be looking at volume Am I supporting multiple colleges and do does each college at the institution? This is just an example. Not knowing the background specifically here, but Maybe if I'm looking at the the cost to need ratio, maybe I'm looking at multiple ready made templates because I have to support multiple colleges. On the on the custom template front, the main thing is the identity of the content or setting up the content so that the design assets employ the specific colors of the institution, something that If you if we're creating an icon or using an icon and being able to set the specific color, that all those icons take quite a bit of time to work through, and that's why we're looking at a cost that goes from two thousand for a ready made template to four thousand five hundred for for a custom template because that customization changing the the color code. The name is escaping me, everybody. I'm sorry about that.
But changing the color code in order to match the institution, that's where, you know, some of those design differences come into play. So I think just looking at the level of work in the broadcast, that's where I think the decisions, that's where the decision space is. Yeah. I would say too, just in speaking with different institutions who are weighing both options, the custom template is going to give you a level of that face to face consultation with one of our designers. And so if you want a hands off kind of experience where we're giving you the template, we're giving you instructions on how to modify, and you all feel confident that, you know, you can handle that internally.
And have an end product that you're proud of and that works for your needs, the ready made template is a great option. If you feel like you're needing something kind of a step above that. The custom template is gonna be the better piece. Now, of course, if you wanted to do a combination of like a ready made template with consultation hours, that would give you more of that hands on approach, but just as is the ready made template is just going to be, you know, loaded into your instance and then you'll have kind of all the tools you need in your toolbox there to make any changes. And the next question actually is kind of in line with that is how are templates loaded into pages? Luff times, it becomes that module copy as a as the option for specifically having the, components of the templates dispersed.
A level of of that is we often see people ship them out as as blueprints. Across the institution or across the people who are going to be using a ready made template level above that is at some point, often within the implementation or after an event is triggered and structure. So designers notify somebody will plug that ready made template into the Canvas instance of the institution. So at the per classroom level, yeah, of course, co copying the items specifically within module ends up being the way to do it. The way I see it happen quite a bit is what module becomes kind of this, the Sacrosync template module that we don't touch, and we just copy from then do the good old drag and drop.
Have to say that carefully, but we drag and drop content from one place to the module where it's going to reside. Alright. Next question. Can we keep our templates forever? I would, I'd rather not answer that as a recording because I think we have some official language, on that. So we'll throw that one into the parking lot.
Right. But they are yours to keep. It's not a recurring cost, to upkeep or have access to these templates. It's a one time fee that you have access to. I think on our order form, there are some specific language around, you know, not sharing the content of those templates with outside institutions, anything like that.
But my understanding of the templates is that Once you purchase them, you know, there's no maintenance fees or anything that you pay year over year to have access to them, they're yours to do with what you will inside of your of Canvas outside, is break in rules, of course, in the the order form language there. I'll put some some better language on that in the parking lot here. And then, final question here is, does the instructor team check for accessibility. So I'm assuming that is related to, you know, some of the enhancement type projects. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Accessibility is important. You can see yes. It's important to how they operate.
Absolutely. So universal for design learning principles and accessibility are part of what instructors and structural designers tough sentence to spit out. Sorry, but that's something that they bring to the projects that they work on. Absolutely. And to that to extend on that too.
Those discussions in consultation or through consultation can include discussions about universal for design learning and, you know, yes, UDL and accessibility. Feels like the end of the week at the end of a quarter. As I apologize for tripping over my words. I know. I feel that too.
Awesome. Well, those are all the questions that I logged throughout our session. If anyone has anything else that they want to throw in the chat or throw in the Q and A, let us know. But it seems like we are wrapping up here. And thank you, Nicholas, for sharing all of that information super valuable.
I would say even a majority of schools that I work with who are all existing Canvas customers, you know, schools that have been on Canvas for so long, they're not always aware of the services that we offer. We, of course, you know, promote our products so often and, you know, do demos of all these amazing products that we offer, but it's really nice and refreshing to kind of talk through some of the service offerings that we have. That way, you know, you might have an not have a need right at this moment, but if the time ever comes, at least you're aware that, we offer these services that we're able to help in these ways. So, you know, we surely hope that you'll come to us with projects and ideas, and we're happy to kind of sort through all of that with you one on one. Absolutely.
Awesome. Well, I'm not seeing any other questions. So I will go ahead and wrap up here. We'll get porting sent out, following the webinar today, and we'll put that in the parking lot as well. And, we have our parking lot document open and till October second at five PM eastern.
So if you'll just give us some some time to organize everything in here, get answers to all of your questions, and then feel free to, you know, make copies of this document, keep it for your records. It's a great kind of source of truth for everything that we talked about today. And will be a great reference point, you know, like I said, as projects come up in the future. So it was great to have everyone here today. I appreciate your time and such a busy time of year.
So let us know if there's anything we can help with, and we'll get your questions answered. Thank you. And thanks everybody.