Canvas Structuring and Scheduling Content

Shaping and Structuring Content

Combining both headings here, because it’s complex and interwoven.

Canvas’ structure appears to be intended to essentially take the majority of the work of structuring content away from teachers, leaving them to entirely focus on providing materials. Teachers create content of different types, and provide the system with dates, and then the outline, syllabus, and other views are automatically generated for learners. 

Each type of content has a specific place and purpose, strictly defined and deliberately designed:

• 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, but 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:

Open

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.

This in turn means running self-paced courses on Canvas is inherently awkward, which leads to threads like this community discussion, where self-paced courses involve doing things like using Mastery Paths to do functionality backflips to make the concept work. It means the experience of Canvas courses is extremely difficult to customise and do any differently to every other Canvas course, but the default experience requires very little from classroom teachers, who are typically too busy to design user experiences, and means that the learner experience is generally very consistent.

Scheduling and Releasing Content

Canvas courses can be tied to either course dates, or term dates as defined by the account administrator, taking course scheduling responsibilities somewhat out of the hands of teachers so that they don’t have to deal with it (and can’t make mistakes).

When set to course dates, start and end dates are set for the course, but interestingly, section dates can override this. Worth remembering is that sections in Canvas don’t refer to content, they refer to user groups. So section dates in this context means if a specific group of learners are enrolled with a different start or end date, these will take precedence over the course default dates.

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Pages can be scheduled to be published on a specific date, at which point they become visible to learners:

The same options also contain options for whether to add the page to the Student to-do list, which collects the content.

At the point of creating a Module, the creator is immediately presented with the option to lock the module until a certain date:

It’s interesting that this is so prominent in their UI, as it adds extra steps to simply creating a module, but makes sense in the classroom context, as everything is very strictly instructor-led and time-bound.

Important Lessons from Canvas

Canvas sections, while confusingly named, do provide some extra enrollment flexibility that has to be useful. CCXs were created to serve a similar need that exists in Open edX, but they’re just not good. Being able to have those sections override course default dates means that courses can be hugely flexible for handling multiple cohorts within the same run (to convert the terminology). We’d just need to not call it sections, which is a shame given our goal to exist alongside Canvas, but using “section” in that way is K-12 school terminology, which is baffling to anyone outside of that use-case.

Canvas’ structure is inherently unsuited for the range of purposes that Open edX serves, so we should be cautious what we draw from Canvas directly when it comes to content structure. Being able to automatically generate things like the syllabus works really well for instructor-led use cases, but is more annoying than useful in a self-paced course. It is worth considering, however, how automated structure tools can relieve the burden of structuring a course. It’s also pretty ideal for classroom training, so it’s definitely worth considering how automation can provide tools like these to serve instructor-led courses, beyond simply providing the ability to have dates and due dates (which is the only defining feature of our different course paces right now).