When you first enter your Canvas course its empty, like an actual blank canvas waiting for paint. And an empty course can be just as intimidating as a blank canvas. Everyone will have a different way to fill their course that works for them, but consider the strategies on this page and the next as starting points for developing your own work flow.

Modules page in Canvas showing two modules with pages labelled "Overview," "Materials," and "Discussion."

Top-Down Design

Perhaps you have a broad idea of what your course will look like. For example, you might know you want to organize the semester into 4 modules, end each module with a quiz, and have at least 1 assignment for per module. You may not know what questions are in the quizzes, or what you want to put on each page, but you have a general vision for your course. Go ahead and create that structure using Modules. Consider the example Modules page to the left.

All of these elements are currently empty. The Overviews don't have text, and there are no slide decks or lectures on the Materials pages. The discussion boards don't have instructions. But we do have a Grades area we can work with, and we know where to put our content once we've made our final decisions about it.

Used this way, the Modules page becomes a skeleton for the course. Remember — assignments, quizzes, discussions, and pretty much anything else you can think of can be created from the Modules page.

Create place holders for what you know you need, and then change the names and add details later as you refine your design.

Bottom-up Design

Sometimes you won't have a "big-picture" understanding of your course yet. It may be a new course that you're developing for the first time. Canvas allows you to start small and build up. On the left side of your course is your course navigation. It contains several tools that Canvas calls "Index Pages." Think of them like a bunch of buckets for the different kinds of items or activities you want to include in your course. The list of "index pages" won't surprise you:

Assignments
Discussions
Files
Modules
Pages
Quizzes

Basically, every page that has a plus button for creating content is an index page. The Assignments page will collect (or index) every assignment in your course, regardless of how you created it or imported it. The Discussions page will show every discussion. What this means for our design process is that we can fill each of these buckets with the types of things we know we want to use, even if we aren't quite sure yet how all of them will connect together. If you already know that you are going to have 8 chapter tests, 8 practice quizzes, and 20 worksheet assignments, fill your Assignments bucket with the 20 worksheets, and your Quizzes bucket with the 16 practice quizzes and tests you expect to use.