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How Can You Integrate Inclusive Course Design Principles Into Your Canvas Course?

If you're interested in how you can leverage principles of transparency, sense of belonging, and accessibility to enhance your course in Canvas, check out the resources in this collection! We provide definitions for these concepts and include suggestions for small, incremental changes as well as larger, structural changes.

Updated May 2025
Melissa Ellegood headshot
Assistant Director of Learning Technology Initiatives
Center for Teaching Excellence
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Lindsay Wheeler headshot
Senior Associate Director & Associate Professor
Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost
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01

Aligning Inclusive Course Design Principles with Your Canvas Site

UVA Center for Teaching Excellence

Use this resource to learn more about inclusive course design principles—transparency, belonging, and accessibility—and how you can integrate these principles into your Canvas course structure and communication.

Headshot of Melissa EllegoodHeadshot of Lindsay Wheeler
Melissa Ellegood, Lindsay Wheeler

This resource provides you with clear definitions of transparency, belonging, and accessibility as well as suggestions for enacting these principles in your course and Canvas site. It also provides additional web resources and peer-reviewed articles for further exploration.

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Transparency helps students understand how and why they are learning course content in particular ways (tilthighered.com).​ Transparency can also be characterized by "the act of reciprocal communication, in the interactions among instructors and students who are sharing their understanding, plans and expectations with each other" (Winkelmes, M., 2023).

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02

Canvas Templates that Integrate Inclusive Course Design Principles

UVA Center for Teaching Excellence

This resource provides an overview of a set of templated courses available in Canvas Commons, what they are, and how an instructor might choose one of these templates.

Headshot of Melissa EllegoodHeadshot of Lindsay Wheeler
Melissa Ellegood, Lindsay Wheeler

If you’re interested in making some bigger changes to your Canvas course to align with the course design principles of transparency, belonging, and accessibility, this resource provides you a nice overview of a set of templated Canvas courses to get you started.

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There are two types of templates available - weekly overview templates and specific class schedule templates - each using Canvas pages as their foundation. Each template includes a formatted homepage and 14 weekly pages. These templates align with principles of inclusive course design in the following ways:

  • Each template promotes transparency by using the Canvas homepage as a central landing page where students can navigate through the rest of the course. Each of the 14 weekly pages are consistently formatted to aid students’ understanding of course expectations.
  • Each template includes places for instructors to support students’ sense of belonging such as ‘tips for success’ section and a place to share more about yourself as an instructor.
  • Each template attends to accessibility, including alt image text, descriptive hyperlinks, and use of headers.
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03

Exploring and Importing Canvas Templates: A Step-by-Step Guide

UVA Learning Tech

Discover how to access and import CTE-created Canvas course templates from Canvas Commons into your UVACanvas course, and follow step-by-step instructions to locate the imported content.

Headshot of Melissa EllegoodHeadshot of Lindsay Wheeler
Melissa Ellegood, Lindsay Wheeler

If you aren’t familiar with Canvas Commons or course templates, this step-by-step guide provides screenshots to help you explore and import a template of your choice into your course.

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