One-Stop Shop for Canvas Templates and Teaching Resources
Prior to the most recent change in Ohio State's learning management system, faculty who wanted to share resources between Carmen courses had few ways of doing so. Further, if departments wanted to create branded pages or standard assignments across a general education course, the processes for doing so involved crafting workaround processes. With the new Canvas LMS came the Canvas Commons.
What is the Commons?
Imagine a library of ready-to-use resources in CarmenCanvas that you can import directly into your course, created by your peers at Ohio State or other university departments like yours. Add in the ability to publish your own content—a page, module, test or entire course—into that library for your colleagues or graduate assistants to use in their courses. The Commons in CarmenCanvas serves just this function.
Who uses it?
- Do you teach a general education course? You and your colleagues are likely covering many of the same key concepts each semester. You can share your modules, quizzes, videos, handouts, or other resources in the Commons. Attach a unique tag (ex: #biointro2211) and you can easily browse all of the resources you group publishes with that tag.
- Interested in collaborative teaching? Search any term or subject area (ex: genome assignment, plagiarism) to see what's already been created. Import it into your course, edit it to your liking, and use however you like. Share your own resources as desired.
- Would your program like all of the area courses to have the same look and feel for students? A custom homepage can easily be published to the Commons and available for each instructor to import and edit to include their specific course information. Take this a step further by creating an entire program or department course template that includes resource information. This could then be imported into each course with a few clicks.
- Have teaching assistants with their own course sections? Build your course, house it in the Commons, and they can all import it into their sections.
Ohio State Resources Ready to Use
- Log in to CarmenCanvas.
- Enter a Canvas-based course or the Canvas dashboard.
- Click the Commons icon, located on the far left navigation bar that is dark grey. The icon looks like a C with an arrow and is second from the bottom, just above "Help."
- Locate the search bar and type "ODEE" to see all of our resources, or enter the specific name to find a specific page or asset.
- Select the course you wish to import to from the scrolling menu on the right. You can import to multiple courses at once. Click import.
- Navigate to the course to ensure the item imported. You may need to look in the specific "place." Ex: if you imported a page, look in pages.
Take a look at these examples of resources created by ODEE, all of which are available in the Commons for you to use in your courses:
Overview: List of resources that students on the Columbus campus may need access to at some point. Faculty can incorporate this page into their course in order to direct students to academic and other support services as needed.
Overview: Flexible space for information to be edited, added or removed. The color-blocked background should adjust as you change the wording or add content. Use the homepage to put key pieces of information or shortcuts to specific course content front and center when students first log in.
Overview: The Distance Education Shell is a starter template equipped with well-designed pages, modules and carefully selected course settings. It was designed to comply with web accessibility guidelines and quality assurance considerations while still allowing for an appealing user experience and visual design. Import this course shell to get started customizing your own modules with our templates.
