Content presentation addresses how content is organized and accessed in the course management system. Key elements include course navigation, learning objectives, and access to student support information.
Course Navigation
Navigation refers to how your homepage, course navigation menu, and content are designed for your students. Think about your course from a student's perspective (someone who may know nothing about Canvas or about your subject matter).
How will they know where to begin?
How will they know the order in which to move through content?
How will they know how to find help?
What might confuse them about moving around the course and finding content?
Learning Objectives
The learning objective is how students will demonstrate their learning. Students benefit from a set of clearly written objectives associated with each course unit or module that they will be expected to achieve before they begin working through the content. Students are more likely to be successful when they know what they are expected to learn and what they are responsible for. They should not have to exert any effort to find these objectives.
Following the OEI Course Design rubric, learning objectives should be included in each individual learning unit or module.
Student Support Information
Help students out by including campus and course policies in easy-to-find locations. Your syllabus and orientation module are good places; you might even consider adding specific policies to relevant places in the course. For example, adding your policy on late work to your directions for the first couple of assignments.
Considerations When Integrating Materials
When considering materials for a course, it is important to understand there are some issues that may outweigh the benefits. Before integrating new online materials into a course, it is necessary to make certain that the following criteria are met for best practices in online education and compliance:
In addition to tuition fees, students may incur additional class costs for publisher materials and access codes, third-party services, and/or software licenses.
How and where to purchase publisher or third-party tools is not always clear (online, bookstore, or bundled with the textbook).
Purchasing access codes or licenses online may be a violation of student privacy rights because it requires students to log in and use a credit card on a third party website.
Students who buy a used textbook may still have to pay full price to access the online homework manager or other online resources.
Often these costs are not refundable, creating an additional financial burden for students who drop the class.
Accessibility
There is no guarantee that the materials will be accessible to students with disabilities.
For some students, assistive technology and support may be available, but it may require students to log on to third party websites, which can violate student privacy laws.
All materials must be evaluated for accessibility prior to adoption. Please contact Bryan BesnyiLinks to an external site., our District Web Accessibility Programmer, for additional information.
For more information and resources, please refer to the page on Accessibility.
Copyright
Take note of copyrighted materials and creative commons licensing.
Publisher materials are copyrighted. It is best to check with the individual publisher to ensure that this is their policy.
Creative Commons has a variety of license types. Be sure to check the license to see how the creator wants the work to be distributed, remixed, tweaked, or built upon.
All instructional materials must follow federal guidelines for student privacy, otherwise known as FERPA compliance.
Publisher and third-party websites are not always FERPA compliant. Some are hosted on third-party websites, meaning that students have to leave the Canvas order to access information or contribute to the course. If there is a chance that student educational record data – grade, comments, roster information – is stored on a website outside of Canvas, this could violate FERPA guidelines. Students cannot be required to use a site that requires them to reveal any information other than directory data.
While third-party materials are customizable, there is not as much flexibility about how the content is presented than there is in instructor-developed courses.
Differences between the third-party material (tone, type of content, organization) and what the instructor creates may be confusing for students.
Presentation of third-party material and assessments often do not encourage collaborative, student-centered or critical thinking activities.
It is not always clear to students how to access and use content, particularly if they have to register at third party websites, which adds to the student's cognitive load leaving less room to process important course content.
Students may be so overwhelmed by dealing with different content delivery systems that the course quality suffers.
Technical
Faculty and student technical support for publisher and third-party tools must be provided by the vendor.
This shifts the focus of instructor from content delivery to tech support.