Article: Learning Technologies

Canvas Templates that Integrate Inclusive Course Design Principles

UVA Center for Teaching Excellence

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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.

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.