Course Menu

Organizing the course menu in a consistent sequence helps the students quickly know where to access content within their Canvas courses. Creating an overall consistent interface (with items located in the same place, and the same terminology used) helps to reduce extraneous cognitive load and allows students to focus on the course content. 

While there are a number of navigation menu organizing principles, ranging from alphabetical to more meaningful organizing schemas, from a cognitive approach, it's important to consider that people have a tendency to group information into categories based on related functions or meaning. The recommended organization principle for the best student experience prioritizes the most frequently accessed course areas and the items within those areas that you want to emphasize for students. In online learning, for example, a student's most frequent interaction type may be student ⇠⇢ content depending on the course design, so standardized menu items and sequence for the Course Menu can be structured as follows:

  • Home (using a Canvas page)
  • Syllabus (built-in Canvas syllabus page)
  • Content (includes the use of the following Canvas tools):
    • Modules & Pages
    • Quizzes
    • Assignments
  • Communications
    • Announcements
    • Discussions (if used)
    • Chat (if used)
    • Grades
  • Resources
    • Program level Hub site links (if used)
    • any other external site resources (if used)

 

The ETS Starter Template and other program templates created by ETS have the Course Menu links set in sequence already. If students take multiple courses in a program/faculty, this will help make their learning experience cohesive when the course environment is familiar and easier to navigate. Students will require less cognitive load used to learn Canvas environment and can focus on the learning content. 

 

References

  • Top 3 IA Questions about Navigation Menus Links to an external site.
  • Linda B. Nilson, Ludwika A. Goodson, T.  (2017) Teaching at Its Best: A Merger of Instructional Design with Teaching and Learning Research  John Wiley & Sons, Nov. 8, 2017 
  • Pittsley, K. A., & Memmott, S. (2012). Improving independent student navigation of complex educational websites: An analysis of two navigation design changes in LibGuides.  Information Technology and Libraries,  31 (3), 52-64. doi:10.6017/ital.v31i3.1880