One of the main differences between Canvas and Moodle is that where Moodle places all of your course content on one (often VERY) long page, Canvas allows you to select how students navigate through your course. This may sound a bit complicated, but in practice it is actually much simpler than it sounds, and students report having no issues navigating the vast majority of Canvas courses. This freedom allows instructors to choose their home page. The home page is the first page students see when they enter your course, and there are five home page options available to instructors: Course Activity Stream (think Facebook timeline scroll), Pages Front Page, Couse Modules, Assignments List, and Syllabus. The vast majority of Canvas users choose between Pages Front Page and Course Modules. Here’s a synopsis on both:

Pages Front Page: This option is best for instructors who want to use graphics, pictures, buttons, course introduction, and more as their landing page. Good examples of effective Front Pages can be found in NMC’s Canvas training courses, Passport to Canvas and Growing with Canvas. You’ll notice in each that there is a colorful header, images, course descriptions, and buttons with hyperlinks to different elements of the course. Most instructors who use a front page includes links to their syllabus, the modules page, and assignments/quizzes. If you wish to have a colorful, graphically pleasing course landing page, this is the home page for you.

Course Modules: Selecting course modules as your landing page is akin to starting your course with the table of contents. This is by far the most “organized” option for your home page. The modules page is where you build out the order in which your course progresses through creating sections and then adding pages, assignments, quizzes, discussions, and more into the module sections in the order that makes sense to you and (hopefully!) your students. The drawback to selecting course modules as your home page is that you cannot add images, graphics, or text to the modules page. Like a table of contents, it can only include the links and descriptions of course activities.

Next week we’ll talk about creating a Pages Front Page that includes images, course description, vibrant links, and more. For those of you interested in creating a splashy course home page, don’t miss that Canvas Corner! For those of you happy to simply be organized and present materials in an ordered fashion, go ahead and choose “Course Modules” as your home page today and start building out course content.