Designing a Course

Request a Canvas course shell

Before you begin planning your course, the first step is to request a Canvas course shell. This is essential for building and organizing your course content within the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS), which you, your teaching assistants, and your students will use throughout the semester.

Each course in Canvas is assigned a unique Course ID and Section Line Number (SLN), which identifies each class section. Canvas offers several types of course shells to meet different needs:

Regular “Live” Courses: These are the standard courses with assigned SLNs that you will use to teach your students. These courses are not automatically created; instructors must request them to customize the course setup.
Developmental (DEV) Shells: These are ideal for developing course content before the semester begins or for collaborating with colleagues. DEV shells do not include student rosters, allowing you to experiment with course design in a flexible environment.
Training Courses (TRN): These are used for practice or training purposes, offering a space to test out new tools or strategies.
Organizational Courses (ORG): These are designed for departmental use, facilitating internal communication and resource sharing.

Note: When requesting a course, you can make a copy of another course or start from scratch.

When setting up your course, remember that live courses must be requested by instructors and serve as your main platform for uploading materials, managing assignments, and communicating with students. Since live courses are not permanently stored on Canvas, it’s important to request a copy in a DEV shell if you wish to retain your course content. Additionally, grades and submissions must be downloaded manually if you need to archive them beyond two years. Be sure to consult your department for specific policies.

To avoid delays, request your live (SLN-based) course well in advance to ensure everything is ready for the start of the semester.

For assistance, contact the 24/7 ASU Experience Center (Helpdesk) via:

MyASU > Service tab: Access live chats, tickets, FAQs, and more.
Phone: 1-855-278-5080.

Tip: Before requesting a Canvas course shell, consult with your department’s instructional designer(s) to ensure your course development aligns with departmental guidelines and best practices.

Resources for Canvas Course Enrollment System (CES)

Get to know your students

Before you start designing your course, it’s important to understand who your students are. Consider your situational factors by reflecting on the following questions:

Is the course lower division, upper division, or graduate level?
How many students will be in your class?
How long and frequent are your class meetings?
What curricular goals does the institution or department have that affect your course or program?
What prior knowledge, skills, and attitudes do the students bring to your course?

Understanding your students will help you tailor your course content, assessments, and instructional strategies to meet their needs. If you don’t know much about your students, how might you find out? Consider reaching out to colleagues who have taught similar courses, reviewing student demographics through your institution's data services, or even conducting a brief survey at the beginning of the course to gather insights into your students' backgrounds, prior knowledge, and learning preferences.

Implement Learning Design Models

Incorporating effective learning design models is crucial to creating a course that is structured, engaging, and aligned with educational best practices. Here’s how you can integrate these models into your course design, including some resources to explore further if desired:

What is a Learning Design Model?

A learning design model offers a structured approach to organizing course content, selecting instructional strategies, and aligning assessments with learning objectives, using frameworks like ADDIE, SAM, Backward Design, and Assure.

Common models include:

Backward Design: Start by identifying the desired learning outcomes, then determine the assessments that will demonstrate those outcomes, and finally plan the instructional activities to help students achieve them.
ADDIE Model (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate): A systematic approach to course design that involves analyzing your students’ needs, designing the course structure, developing the content, implementing the course, and then evaluating its effectiveness.

How to Implement Learning Design Models

Identify Learning Objectives: Clearly define what you want students to achieve or demonstrate by the end of the course. Use these objectives to guide all other aspects of your course design.
Align Assessments: Ensure that your assessments are accurately testing students' knowledge, skills, and attitudes, as well as measuring the learning objectives. This alignment is critical for confirming that students are achieving the desired outcomes you identified.
Choose Instructional Strategies: Select teaching methods that will effectively engage students and support their learning journey. Consider incorporating a mix of approaches, such as discussions, group work, and hands-on activities.
Plan Course Content: Organize and sequence your course content in a way that builds progressively towards the learning objectives. Use a structured approach like Backward Design to ensure coherence. Review the following resources on ASU Accessibility Guides to help you build accessible content that welcomes all students and ensures everyone can fully participate in the learning experience.

Resources for Learning Design

The Office of the President Teaching and Learning Realms describes five types of teaching and learning modalities.
The Enterprise Technology Learning Experience Resources related to teaching and learning.
Fulton Schools of Engineering What is Learning Design? provides basic information for planning your face-to-face, hybrid, and online course.
EdPlus Teach Online assists with all aspects of developing and delivering a quality online course and includes extensive resources.
Teach Online Guided Design Process provides a step by step process for designing your online course.

Decide on your course structure

The course structure refers to how you organize and sequence your course content. The choice of topics and their organization should support the learning objectives you’ve identified.

Topics

Focus on essential content that aligns with the course’s learning objectives. Avoid overloading the course with too many topics, which can hinder deep learning and become overwhelming for your students. Instead, ensure there are opportunities for students to engage with the material through application and practice.

Organization and Sequencing

There are many ways to organize your course. For example:

Chronologically
From concrete to abstract (or vice versa)
From theory to application (or vice versa)
Around a set of questions or practical problems

Choose a structure that builds towards greater complexity, helping students integrate new ideas with previously learned concepts. As Fink (2005) suggests, sequence the topics so they build on one another, creating a coherent narrative throughout the course.

Write your syllabus

Your syllabus serves as a roadmap and living agreement between you and your students. To create an effective syllabus, align the main components of your course—learning objectives, assessments, and instructional strategies. Faculty should check with their academic unit, as many have school or program-specific templates for syllabi. Here’s how you might approach building your syllabus.

Learning Objectives, Assessments, & Course Description

Ensure that your syllabus clearly defines your learning objectives and assessments, and provides a concise course description. These elements are crucial for guiding students, aligning their expectations with learning outcomes, and offering a clear structure for evaluating their progress.

Course Policies and Statements

Clearly explain your course policies on grading, attendance, academic integrity, and the use of technology. Provide examples to illustrate how these policies will be applied. Additionally, include your expectations on the use of AI in your course, specifying how it can or cannot be used in assignments and assessments. Consider incorporating statements on student wellness and support services to foster an inclusive learning environment.

Course Materials

List all required and optional materials, including books, articles, software, and other resources. Provide information on where these materials can be obtained (e.g., bookstore, library, course LMS).

Course Schedule

Create a detailed course schedule that includes weekly topics, assignment due dates, and, if possible, the learning objectives for each session to clarify the focus of each class.

Other Details to Consider

Include logistical information such as:

Class Meeting Details: Where and when the class meets, including any lab or studio sessions.
Office Hours: Your office location, office hours, and preferred methods of contact. Specify how quickly students can expect a response to emails or other accepted forms of contact.
Prerequisites: List any prerequisites to ensure students are prepared for the course material.
Teaching Methods: Briefly describe the teaching methods you plan to use (e.g., flipped learning, discussions, group work).

These general suggestions are a good starting point, but always refer to your specific school, unit, or department for detailed guidance on your syllabus and course policies.

Syllabus Resources

The Office of the University Provost (OUP) and University Registrar Services (URS) have several resources to inform your syllabus:

Syllabus Guidelines
Definitions and Glossary related to courses and curriculum
Grading Policies
Semester Schedule
Academic Integrity
Final Exam Schedule

Build your Canvas course

Once your syllabus and course structure are in place, start building and placing your content in your Canvas course. Here are some resources to help you get started:

Intro to Canvas: A self-paced modular course designed to help instructors request, construct, and deploy Canvas courses.
Academic Technologies Knowledge Base: Comprehensive list of resources for using Canvas.

Accessibility Checks

Running accessibility checks is a crucial final step in the course design process to ensure that all students, regardless of their abilities, can access and benefit from the content. Arizona State University offers tools like Ally and the Canvas Accessibility Checker to support this effort.

Ally

Ally is an integrated tool in many learning management systems that automatically checks for accessibility issues within course content. It provides feedback not just on what issues may exist, but also gives detailed guidance on how to fix them. For instance, it can identify images that lack alternative text, documents that are not screen reader friendly, or multimedia content without captions. Ally then offers step-by-step instructions to rectify these issues, helping to ensure that all learning materials meet accessibility standards.

Canvas Accessibility Checker

Canvas also includes a built-in accessibility checker that is particularly useful for reviewing content directly within the rich content editor. This tool scans the course materials that you edit or create in Canvas, such as pages, assignment instructions, and discussion posts. It highlights issues like poor color contrast, missing headers for structured content, and lack of descriptive links. The Canvas checker is user-friendly, providing real-time feedback and suggestions for corrections to enhance accessibility.

Comprehensive Accessibility Review

It’s important to conduct a thorough accessibility check using both tools:

In the Rich Content Editor: As you finalize each piece of content in Canvas, use the Canvas accessibility checker to ensure that any text, images, tables, or other elements you’ve added or modified are compliant.
Across the Course: Ally should be used to scan the entire course to capture a broader range of accessibility issues, including those in uploaded files like PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, and other resources.

These tools highlight necessary improvements and explain their importance, deepening your understanding of accessibility principles. Implementing these changes enhances course usability, ensuring inclusivity and accessibility for all students. This proactive approach goes beyond compliance, enriching the learning experience for everyone.

Choose Digital Tools to Enhance Your Students’ Experience

Enhance the student experience by selecting digital tools that foster connection and engagement. Below are just a few enterprise-wide tools available to you—when selecting your tools, check that they are in alignment with your teaching approach and plan. For a full list of tools, visit the LX website and explore all available resources.

Multimedia and Zoom Technology to Enhance Learning

Using multimedia, like recorded instructional videos and interactive Zoom educational sessions, can greatly improve student learning by offering flexible opportunities to review and engage with materials and activities. These digital tools allow students to revisit complex concepts and learn at their own pace.

Zoom at ASU: Leverage Zoom for live sessions, virtual office hours, or recorded lectures. Zoom’s features, such as screen sharing and breakout rooms, can facilitate interactive and collaborative learning experiences.
- Access the ASU Guide for Teaching with Zoom
Record and Edit Instructional Videos with ScreenPal: Utilize the ScreenPal (Previously Screencast-O-Matic) tool to create high-quality instructional videos. This platform allows you to record, edit, and publish videos for your course content.
- Access the Toolkit: Get Started with ScreenPal
Enhance Learning with Interactive Video Lessons Using PlayPosit: PlayPosit is an online platform that enables instructors to create interactive video lessons by adding questions, images, text, and other media to videos from sources like YouTube, Khan Academy, and Panopto. These enhanced videos can be integrated into lessons, courses, and curricula, allowing students to engage with the content individually or in groups online.
- Integrate PlayPosit with your Canvas course
Upload Videos to MediaPlus: After creating your videos, upload them to MediaPlus, ASU’s platform for storing and sharing multimedia content. Use MediaPlus to create collections and playlists, making it easy for students to find and access the videos they need.
- Access the Toolkit: Using Media Plus in Your Classroom

These optional toolkits will help you get started with MediaPlus. For more resources, visit the ASU MediaPlus resource website.

Utilize Library Resources

Make the most of the library resources available to you:

Faculty and Staff Library Page: Access essential library services and resources tailored for faculty and staff.
Course Resource Organizer (CRO): Utilize the Course Resource Organizer (CRO) tool in Canvas to gather, organize, and share course materials with students, including articles, e-books, streaming media, web content, and personal files.

Additional Library Services and Resources

Library Instruction Information & Request Form: Request tailored library instruction sessions to enhance your students' research skills.
ASU Library Collections: Explore a vast array of academic resources and collections available through the ASU Library.
ASU Library Makerspace: Engage in hands-on learning and innovation with tools and technology at the ASU Library Makerspace.
Ask a Librarian: Get quick help via chat, email, or text with our Ask a Librarian service.

Review and Revise

Once your course is set up the way you want, it's time for a final check to ensure it’s accessible, easy to navigate, and matches your intended design. Canvas provides a "Student View" feature that lets you experience your course exactly as your students will. Use Student View to navigate through the course, test pages, submit assignments, participate in discussions, and take quizzes. This allows you to verify that everything functions correctly from a student’s perspective. After completing this final check and confirming everything looks as planned, you’re ready to start teaching.

Remember, course design is an iterative process. Be prepared to revisit and revise your learning objectives, assessments, and instructional strategies as needed. Use the schedule and syllabus as living documents that can adapt to the needs of your students and the flow of the course.