KTH's course room template in Canvas
As an aid for teachers to get started to create their courses in Canvas, there is a ready-made course room template. The template contains many recommended settings for course rooms and contains instructions in a README page. You can download the template in Swedish from Canvas Commons, where you also will find the latest version of the template. Some editing of the template is required before you fill it with course material.
Easy to do right with the course room template
The KTH template is designed to simplify for teachers and students, to make it easy to do the right thing. We want to simplify the use of Canvas and encourage the use of Canvas' more pedagogically oriented parts.
The template also contains recommendations for how the course room can be structured and information on where you as a teacher can find tips and support about Canvas, as well as several recommended settings that are missing in the empty course rooms.
All course rooms in Canvas have the KTH's course room template as a basis.
Canvas Commons has the latest version and a Swedish version
The latest version of the course room template can be downloaded from Canvas Commons, where you can also find a Swedish version of the template. The Swedish version of the template is called “KTH Template Course room sv.” If you give a course in Swedish and do not use the Swedish course room template, you should go to settings in the canvas room and change the language to Swedish.
The English template in Canvas Commons will be standard in all course rooms about 6 months after it has been updated. This is because the course rooms are created automatically in advance with the template that is available at that time. But if you download the template from Canvas Commons, you will avoid the waiting time.
Read more about downloading from Canvas Commons on the page Download a template from Canvas Commons .
Note! If your course room already has a Home page, it will not automatically be replaced when you import the material from Commons. You need to manually change to the new Home page.
Read more about how you change Home page on the page Home in Canvas .
Content of the course room template
The template contains the following settings and created content:
- Course navigation is limited to the most important functions for students. The rest are hidden from students to simplify the course navigation.. The features shown are:
- “Home”, to welcome your students to the course.
- “Syllabus”, to link to the course PM.
- “Modules”, to give the course a structure that is easy to navigate.
- “Announcements”, to let you as a teacher communicate information to everyone in the course at the same time.
- “People”, to give students access to the group functions.
- “Assignments”, for students to be able to find their course assignments (should be hidden if you link the assignments in modules instead).
- “Grades”, for students to see their grades for every assignment in the course.
- The Home page contains a short explanation of the template and a suggestion for the appearance of the Home page.
- Syllabus has the search window for "Course and programme directory" embedded (can be edited to "About course" for your course).
- Modules contain
- A README page with a brief explanation of the template and links to useful resources.
- Suggestions for a course information module.
- Example of how you can structure a module.
- An announcement is created to show how they are presented if they are chosen to be shown on the “Home” page. The announcement includes information on how to activate and deactivate the function.
- Settings for course and the grade overview
- “Manually Post Grades” is chosen so that grades for students are posted at the same time, when you as a teacher chooses to do so.
- Course grading scheme is activated and set to the standard of KTH.
Manage the course room template before constructing the course
Before you can start building your course, you should first go through the following steps:
- Read the “Home” page and the README page
- Edit the “Home” page
- Manage “Announcements”
- Manage “Syllabus”
- Manage the course grading scheme
- Go through the checklist
1.Read the “Home” page and the README page
The home page that comes with the template has short instructions which are then explained more in the README page. We recommend that you read the instructions before you start editing the course room.
2. Edit the “Home” page
To be able to use the Home page it is strongly recommended that you delete all cursive text on the page after you have finished reading it, and change all information inside brackets so it matches up with your course. Alternatively, you can write your own Home page.
To edit the “Home” page, press the “Edit” button when you are on the page, edit the page to your liking and save your changes.
Read more about Home in Canvas .
Read more about the Rich Content Editor in Canvas (community.canvaslms.com) .
3. Manage “Announcements”
On the Home page in the template you will find an announcement. The announcement contains information to you as a teacher about how you can activate or deactivate that announcements are shown on the Home page. Go to “Announcements” in the course navigation menu to read it. The information in the template announcement is of no use for the students, and can therefore be deleted after you have read it.
To delete an announcement, check the check box next to it and press the trash bin icon next to the button for adding new announcements. Alternatively you can press the three dots to the right of the announcement and choose “Delete”.
Read more about Announcements .
4. Manage “Syllabus”
The Syllabus contains a short text that you should read and edit or delete, as well as having the search window for the "Course and programme directory" embedded.
If you leave the embedded page as it is, students can search using the course code to find the "About course" page. In that case, we recommend that you include what they shuold search for in the instructions.
If you as a teacher or course coordinator want to edit the embedded page so that it goes directly to "About course" for your course you can do it without understanding HTML:
- Press “Edit” to start editing the Syllabus.
- Below the text box, next to the word count, you will find the button to open the HTML editor. The button has the symbol “</>”.
- Once you have opened the HTML editor you will find the row starting with “<p><iframe” at the bottom. On that row you should see an URL. Change the end of the URL to “/kurser/kurs/XXYYYY” instead of “/kurser/sokkurs?l=en”, where XXYYYY in the course code for your course.
- Press the “Update syllabus” button.
5. Manage the course grading scheme
The course room template comes with KTH's standardized grading scheme to facilitate the transfer of grades to Ladok through the “Transfer to Ladok” function.
If you want to create your own grading scheme, change the course grading scheme or deactivate the function, continue reading on “ The Gradebook ” page, under the heading “Grading Schemes simplifies the transfer to Ladok”.
6. Go through the checklist
Before you start adding material to your course room, we at E-learning recommend you to read through the checklists we have created to ensure that you don’t miss an important step, especially the checklist Create course room in Canvas .
When nearing the start of the course, we also recommend you to look through the checklist Before the start of the course .