How is Canvas Designed

7/29/2019 How is Canvas Designed

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How is Canvas designed? - 1

How is Canvas designed?

These Five Core Principles help define the Canvas user experience.

"Keeping the conversation alive": Canvas as Communication Hub

We recognize that meaningful learning can occur in the

conversations that we have with others, both formal

and informal, and Canvas is designed to facilitate that,

whether thats student-to-student communication or

student-to-instructor communication.

We believe that communication should be an

automated function of the LMS. You create your courseand Canvas takes it from there. This means no more

manual emails to individual students to tell them that

you've changed a due date, finished grading, or

created a new assignment. When a change is made

within a course, notifications are automatically triggered

and sent to the appropriate users. Once messages are

sent, the students and teachers can receive them in the

manner they choose. We offer multiple channels for

communication, including SMS messages, Facebook

notifications, and email notifications.

Not only do we let users dictate how Canvas should

contact them, as illustrated above, but we also allow

them to select the frequency with which we send

notifications. In their Notification Preferences, users can

customize each notification type with a frequency

setting of 'immediately,' 'weekly,' 'daily,' or 'never.'

This communication methodology is interwoven into the

fabric of Canvas and constitutes a significant industry

shift in the LMS space.


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"Leveraging multimedia content": Canvas as Extension of the Web

Canvas is designed to make it easy to integrate

multimedia from the Internet, the greatest contentrepository in the world. And Canvas courses

themselves are designed to be a part of the web. With

one check, for example, you can make your Canvas

course public and contribute your carefully-designed

course to the huge repository of open educational

resources already out there on the internet. Any

changes you make will be immediately reflected online.

Guests will have read-only access to your information

from anywhere in the world.

The Rich Content Editor in Canvas makes it very easy tomix text, images, math equations, or video all together

in a single page. Pasting a YouTube link has never

been easier. Once you paste the link, Canvas

automatically embeds the video. And when you link to a

PowerPoint presentation or Word document, Canvas

talks to Scribd to create an embedded preview that you

can browse without having to download it to your

computer.

The Rich Content Editor also makes it easy to record

and embed audio or video comments almost anywherein a course. If you have a video that you created in

iMovie, for example, or an mp3 fromGarageBand

project, you can easily upload that file to a Discussion,

Announcement, or Page. You can even leave audio

recordings inside of SpeedGrader or Conversations,

our messaging tool. Canvas automatically transcodes

media files in the background using its Kaltura

integration, so that readers can consume the media on

any computing device.

We realize that the "atom" of data for Instructure

Canvas is HTML. What that means is that its very easy

to create links to any other page or resource that you

have in your course. And those links never break.

Finally, special attention has been paid to making

Canvas screen-readable. The Rich Content Editor also

encourages users to create accessible content pages


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(i.e. text formatting is accomplished using styles). We've

spent a lot of time making sure that the user

experience for Canvas is easy, simple, and intuitive, and

we don't want to leave anyone out. In fact, Canvasreceived the "Gold" certification from the National

Federation of the Blind, becoming the fastest LMS ever

to do so. For this reason, we allow limited customization

of colors and schemes. Canvas conforms with the

W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative Web Content

Accessibility Guidelines (WAI WCAG) 2.0 AA and

Section 508 guidelines.

"Customized just for you": Canvas as Unobtrusive, User-Centric Interface

Our Co-Founders, Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley,

made a very conscious choice to ensure that the user

interface looked the same for everyone: students,

teachers, and LMS admins. The data that you see

within that interface changes depending on who you

are, but the basic interface does not.

This aspect of Canvas makes it very easy to train new

users because you can refer to the same user

interface. A Canvas course can be broken down into six

parts:

the Global Navigation menu across the top, which

shows you all of the courses and groups you

belong to, the assignments you have to turn in or

to grade, your grades for all classes, and your

calendar for all classes,

the Course Navigation on the left, which links you

to different areas in the course,

the Breadcrumb Navigation at the top of the Main

Body of the page, which helps you to how to move

up and down in the course hierarchy,

the Sidebar on the right, which gives you all the

links and buttons you need to get stuff done in the

Main Body of the page, and

the Help Corner in the top right, where you can

ask for support, check your inbox, or modify your

profile.

Throughout Canvas, you will experience a simple and


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unobtrusive design which leverages the idea of

progressive enhancement. In other words, we try really

hard to design an interface that doesnt get in your

way. You can use advanced features when you needthem but you dont have to trip over them when youre

just beginning to explore the system.

"One course, many perspectives": Canvas as Content Kaleidoscope

If youve ever used a Kaleidoscope before, you know

that the little colored chips in a Kaleidoscope are the

same but as you adjust the exterior tube, the mirrors

inside change, resulting in a different image. Canvas

works much the same way. The content you build

inside your course is the same, but there are many

different ways of viewing that data. You can view your

course data through the calendar, the syllabus, the

assignment page, or the gradebook. Its all the same

data, just viewed differently.

There are four screenshots in this image: the Calendar

[1], the Syllabus [2], the Assignments page [3], and the

gradebook [4].

1. The Calendar is a LENS that looks at the course

and only shows you the things that have a date

associated with them

2. The Syllabus is another LENS that looks at all the

course material and shows items that are dated

3. The Assignments page is a LENS that reflects the

internal model of the course

4. The gradebook is a LENS that looks at the course

and only shows the graded items and what the

assignment is worth

What does this mean for you?

It means if you create an new assignment shell on

the calendar, a new column will automatically

appear in the gradebook.

If you change the date of an assignment on the

Assignments page, that assignment will

automatically move in the Calendar.


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If you change an assignment title anywhere in

Canvas, the updated version will show up in the

Gradebook and on the Syllabus page.

"Import Magic": Canvas as Course Curator

We like to think of Canvas as a kind of curator that can

cherry pick from existing instructional resources, not

just at the beginning of a term, but at any point while

you are facilitating the course.

We make it extremely easy for you to pull in resources

and assemble courses, whether those resources come

from a previous class you taught, a course that

somebody else taught in Canvas, a course from your

preexisting LMS, an ePack of quizzes from a textbook

publisher, or some other package of content you found

online.

Our developers are working hard to build bridges to as

many different content formats as they can via the

Course Import Tool.

When it comes time to build a new course or copy your

course materials from one semester to the next, you

can save yourself a lot of time by selecting only the

content you need and building from there. In this way,

every single Canvas course becomes a "template" you

can copy, in whole or in part.

How is Canvas Designed

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