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Teaching Commons Conference 2024

Join us for the Teaching Commons Conference 2024 – Cultivating Connection. Friday, May 10.

Registration and more information

Leverage Canvas for Blended and Hybrid Teaching

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Canvas is Stanford’s main Learning Management System (LMS) and a foundational tool for blended and online learning at the university.

An LMS is a platform for building a digital learning environment that students and instructors use to facilitate and organize learning. A Canvas course typically contains course elements such as course materials, learning activities, assessments, student roster, communications, and so on. 

A prime advantage of Canvas is that it enables you to present the course to students in a clear, centralized, and organized manner. This helps you and the students focus on teaching and learning.

Use Canvas files, pages, and modules to organize content

Canvas can bring together many aspects of your course, such as schedules, assignments, forum discussions, recorded lectures, and even collaboration tools like Google Docs, in one digital space. It is important to organize these different aspects in a consistent and accessible way. Canvas pages and modules are useful for keeping your course organized.

  1. Upload existing course files (documents, videos, etc.) to Canvas using the Files tool. This creates a repository for the files related to the course.
  2. Create context around a file with the Pages tool. In Canvas, pages are content pages like any web page; they can include a combination of text, images, and files. 
  3. Organize multiple pages into a module. A module contains a table of contents that links several pages or other activities into one sequence, like a book. Course modules are typically organized by topic or chronologically by week. A series of modules can provide a user-friendly path for students to access the course materials and activities.

Learn more

Read more about organizing content in Canvas, or visit Stanford's GoCanvas site for more comprehensive resources.