What Does a Course Look Like?
Welcome to Canvas! If this is your first time using canvas, this survival guide will walk you through the ins and outs of building courses, but to do that, we need to know what Canvas looks like! This page will be the foundation for later materials and is meant to support your ability to better navigate this new system.
This page explains:
- How to log in to the Canvas webpage
- How to access your courses and important features in Canvas
- How to create a practice course
Let's explore further!
Introduction to Canvas
Canvas is a learning management system (LMS) that is used to structure a course digitally. It can be used to enhance an on-ground course through posting lecture recordings or homework assignments, to containing all learning content and activities for an all online course, and everything in between! Since Canvas has so many features we are going to start at the beginning so you the instructor can feel confident moving around in that space. The video below will be your quick tour of how Canvas looks and feels here at the Community Colleges of Spokane.
Survival Tip: Creating a Practice Course
We recommend that you create a practice course so that you can explore and experiment with the Canvas tools and begin building and compiling your content in a space that only you will be able to access. Anything you create in your practice course can be easily copied into your real course shells without the risk of affecting your students!
- From your Canvas Dashboard, click Start a New Course, which is located within the left-side navigation options.
- You will be asked "Which account will this course be associated with?". Select Community Colleges of Spokane.
- Name your course (for example, "Rory's Practice Course")
- Click Create. The new course shell that you just created should be visible on your Dashboard under Unpublished Courses.
Not finding what you need? Still have questions, a comment, or suggestion?
All done? Click next to learn about how we organize our courses using Modules