Canvas Rebuild

All middle and upper school courses at MICDS use Instructure Canvas. As a result, the development of templates were developed and used to give courses a common look and feel, to standardize the course navigation menu, settings, and to serve as a starting point for further development by the instructor.

• Audience: Middle and Upper School Students and Teachers (huge age gaps)

• Responsibilities: Instructional Design, eLearning Development

• Tools Used: Canvas

PROBLEM AND SOLUTION

To utilize my skillset and increase productivity, I introduced new templates to be used for different learning targets and tasks.

The original design was not built beyond a mid-fidelity product and did not take into account the psychology of design or user experience. Both students and teachers often found it difficult to locate information and as a result, students were not aware of due dates or where important documents were located. Teachers became overwhelmed by the students lack of attention and the onslaught of questions about what to do next.

To create an easier way for students to find information and not overwhelm teachers with unnecessary tasks, I designed and developed new templates.

PROCESS

I closely examined how the previous structure was setup for

1. white space

2. color

3. font

4. clickability

5. finding information

6. navigation from one task to another

7. what was missing

8. what was not important

9. user error both student and teacher

I then polled students from all age groups and restructured the information by themes and topics. Then I selected the essential knowledge that should be included for each template. To avoid cognitive overload, I

1. tailored some areas to include drop down menus

2. short header description per header

3. short example introduction text per section

4. included resource links that most teachers used for each lesson plan

I used a Google Doc to organize the text-based storyboard, then I designed a low-fidelity prototype with Figma and developed the project with Canvas.