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Announcements are for making announcements to learners, such as news and reminders
Assignments are for learner submissions
Discussions are for peer-to-peer communication
Pages are for presenting pages of content - these are the most freeform elements of Canvas, as you can put whatever you want on a page (for example, if you wanted you could build a sequence of pages linked together, if you really wantedbut it would be challenging and clunky to do so)
Quizzes hold collections of questions for learners to answer
Modules hold collections of files for learners to work through, such as PDFs and images
This essentially means the platform functions in the opposite conceptual direction to platforms like Open edX or Moodle:
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Essentially, while most LMSes operate from the top-down perspective of constructing a structure that is filled with content, Canvas goes bottom-up - teachers create content and then the structure is created for them based on dates. The syllabus is automatically populated with due dates, and staff aren’t actually mostly responsible for the way that learners access content, only the content itself.
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