Quotes from the students' nominations
Dr. Haines' Canvas page was very easy to navigate. He organized everything into different tabs so that you could easily find what you are looking for. He provided resources on his Canvas page that helped me succeed in this course. This class (both lecture and labs) was very engaging. Dr. Haines did a good job of making lectures enjoyable.
Recipient Q&A
What are you most proud of in your Canvas course site?
I am very happy that my students find my Canvas site easy to use, that they can rely on it to keep up to date with the course, and that it helps them succeed in my class.
What is one lesson you learned while building or using your course site that might help other instructors who want to improve their use of Canvas?
Checking to see how your Canvas site looks and works on a phone (by using the Canvas Teacher app) is a great idea since many students will use phones regularly to access it.
How have you noticed your Canvas site supporting student success? What does student success look like in your course?
One aspect of student success that my Canvas site helps with is reducing confusion about what is going on in the class and where to get the information they need. In previous years I got a lot more questions about these things than I currently do, and I attribute this mostly to using Canvas designs that are more intuitive to students.
When building this course site, what was your process?
I conducted a lot of prototyping while building my site. I would make one or more changes in formatting, which I would save as a new page version, and I would look at the Student View to see how it would appear to students. This iterative process helped me build the site efficiently.
Is there anyone you would like to acknowledge that you collaborated with or who helped you on your course site?
I did not collaborate with anyone on the course site, but I learned about the tabbed interface (and some tricks for using it) from Jessica Savage, so I have her to thank for vastly improving my Canvas sites.
What were some of the benefits (or challenges) of using DesignPlus to build your Canvas course? What suggestions do you have for others to get started?
I found the DesignPlus User Guide very helpful in learning how to use it. It is an improvement over the previous iteration (which is a benefit), but I occasionally "broke" the whole page I was working on accidentally without an easy way to fix it. This probably related to using a tabbed interface and not fully understanding how certain actions within the page can disable or mess up the tabbed formatting. I recommend making a new page version each time you plan on more major changes within the page - that way if you mess things up, you can just use your older version as a starting point.