In an online course, students must navigate through a substantial amount of content, activities and assessments. A structured, well-organized course with a consistent structure in every module helps students navigate the course and locate information effectively. The first step in structuring your online course is to consider how you will group your instructional materials, assignments/assessments and course interactions. This process is sometimes referred to as “chunking” because you divide your course into logical and manageable “chunks” for students. Some faculty find it easiest to group these by weeks, since many in-person courses are taught this way. Others prefer to group around chapters in their textbook, key topics, units, or learning outcomes. These groupings will provide the high-level structure of your course. Generally, each group will become its own module in Canvas.

Once you have the high-level structure of your course, the next step is to plan what will go into each module. For each module, you will want to determine:

What are module-level learning objectives?
What activities do students need to engage in to practice their learning?
What assessments will be used to have students demonstrate the mastery of the learning objectives?

Canvas Modules allow you to organize course materials, activities and assessments in a way that makes the intended sequencing of these materials evident to students.

The best way to start developing a module structure is to pick one module to work with and to think about how you’d like to sequence activities. You may find a Course Planning Tool [doc] helpful for this step. While there is no prescribed structure for online course modules, most course modules include the following in some way:

Module Overview/Introduction - A brief overview of the module topics and learning objectives. Some faculty include a brief video of themselves talking about the module topic(s).
Content materials - Readings, links to synchronous lectures/class meetings, lecture videos, lecture notes, presentation files, external links, etc.
Activities and Assessments - Discussions, assignments, and/or quizzes.
Summary - You may also list additional (optional) reading for students who would like to learn more about the topic.

Here is an example of what a module might look like:

screenshot of the contents of a Canvas module, showing the name of the module, some headings and pages under those headings.

Note: As a general rule, the first module tends to include topics related to logistics (like the “Start Here” content mentioned above) and typically follows a very different structure than the later modules in a course.