Sunday, October 4, 2015

Reflection on Developing a Course in the Canvas Learning Management System

So far, I have been pleasantly surprised by the intuitiveness of how to build a course in Canvas. Before you begin creating your course, it is important to map out how you want to organize your instructional materials, assignments, discussions, pages, syllabus, and modules. I plowed right in to the program and quickly discovered that it would be worth my time to map out the overall navigation of the course. Once I decided on organizing the materials into weekly modules and accessing the modules from a home page or landing page, the organization of the course began to flow.

One item that has been rather challenging is the use of the rubric feature. I am a firm believer in the use of rubrics to establish assignment expectations. And the rubrics are fairly easy to build within Canvas. The only problem is that it drives me crazy that I have three areas in each criteria of the rubric, however, the lines will not align. In addition, the rubrics are managed under the outcome section. I would suggest to Canvas that rubrics have a section of their own. Furthermore, you can’t clone a rubric and make minor adjustments to it for a similar assignment. Instead, you must completely re-type it. Last, the student must select the gear button in the upper right hand corner to view the rubric, or you must hyperlink it to its URL, which seems much more difficult than it should be.

I have just about completed 25% of my course and have received feedback from a peer. The feedback was helpful, and I always welcome input from a second opinion. In addition, I did glance through his course and found them to be very similar in structure, so I must be on to something. I have created my own graphics and discovered that the main graphic on the landing page displays a little too dark for some monitors compared to how it appears on mine. Another note is to always check your work on various computers, browsers, and on a variety of settings. And I don’t want to forget to check it on a mobile device. Although, I think I read that Canvas doesn’t fully support the iPad application just yet.

Finally, I provided feedback to another classmate today. The best advice that I could give her was to consider how the participant would navigate through the course and what the most logical manor is without missing any important instructions or assignments. Along with this, is ensuring that you are also considering how the students will learn. For example, what are the pedagogical principles being used in the LMS, so students are successful learners (Suddaby & Milne, 2008). I feel these are truly the first big obstacles that the course designer must tackle after a strong instructional design document has been created.

What have I learned from the process of developing instruction in an LMS? I can conclude that it is very time consuming although once it is completed may look very simple to accomplish.  Perhaps that is what a good instructional designer does for the learner? They make everything very easy to navigate and provide explicit instructions, so the learner has a clear understanding of the course expectations.

Reference

Suddaby, G., & Milne, J. (2008). Coordinated, collaborative and coherent. Campus - Wide Information Systems, 25(2), 114-122. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/1065074081086660

No comments:

Post a Comment