Canvas Early Bird

How you approach the rebuilding of your course units in Canvas will depend on many personal factors; the size and scale of your unit, who else is involved in the delivery, how the unit is delivered, the range and format of the materials within your course and your familiarity with Canvas and technology in general. With these issues in mind we are trying not to be overly prescriptive with how you approach the rebuild process, to help colleagues we’re hoping to provide a series of short case studies to illustrate how you may want to approach the task at hand.

Below is an example from Theodor Heath a Lecturer in Power and Energy in the Department of Electrical and Electric Engineering who is the first person in Faculty to tell us of his approach to building a Canvas unit – and therefore qualifies for an exciting prize – see below!

A couple of interesting things to flag about Theo’s approach;

• Theo has gotten ahead of the planned Blackboard content migrations by building his Semester 2 and Full Year units from scratch. He will now await the content migration in June for these units and then copy into these spaces items like quizzes and anything else too laborious to build from scratch.
• The Unit EEEN60402 uses a non-linear structure – in that students are in groups and each group focus’ on a different task each week, a common approach for many of our practical and/or lab based units. Rather than align the Modules to weeks, the modules have been assigned Blocks and then a separate and clear Timetable document tells students which Block they will be studying each week. The ‘Prerequisite’ functionality to ensure students have worked through the core information to ‘unlock’ the unit content.

Theo was kind enough to answer some questions on his experiences of building units in Canvas.

You’ve built the majority of a few units, the big question everyone will want to know is ‘how long did it take?’

The EEEN40330 site took 4 hours, but this has no video/course content, it is purely resources, files, assessment submission pages and peer-review links.

The EEEN60402 site has taken 10 hours so far, but this still needs the quizzes to be migrated – If the quiz migration is smooth, I would expect no more than 1-2 hours is required for me to finalise that page. Then it will be synchronous material release as the course is taught in February 2026. Ultimately the EEEN60402 module is structured by video content, so it was just re-embedding everything in the right order, I suspect modules with lots of written content, and written notes, might find it more onerous to do it properly (i.e. if they were to transcribe teaching notes into Canvas to make best use of the flow – I will be doing this for EEEN20212 probably on Thursday or next week – so I’ll let you know how long that one takes me).

I also have EEEN60341 to build from scratch for Semester 1, but that will develop alongside the content. EEEN10492 also needs to be developed, but I also need to redevelop some material for that, so it’s probably going to be my last build.

How did you learn to how to use canvas?

I have used this system as a student (for a Level 1 Award in Beer – considerably more exciting than my units), so I suppose I was a bit more familiar with the flow because of that experience. Otherwise a bit of trial and error… but also Google. I swapped back and forward between student mode a few times to understand the implications of setting choices. The Teaching College resources were useful for getting started (and to understand the ‘rules’ we were to follow in keeping things consistent).

How easy was it to use the template and figure out course unit information went where?

Very easy. This was actually very helpful indeed (though it needed a bit of adaptation for the EEEN40330 page, because of the nature of that course).

Any general first impressions on Canvas?

It was very easy to navigate as a student, and it is very easy to navigate as a teacher too. It might be a bit overwhelming for a student to be presented with so much information in non-linear courses like EEEN60402 (where we enable access to virtually all content at the same time), but otherwise I think it is more accessible than Blackboard (less hidden things).

Any other feedback you might have?

For now, no, it honestly took me less time than I was expecting, which was a pleasant surprise. But I do have 5 pages to build, so averaging 8 hours per build, it’s a full working week – ouch.

A big thank you to Theo for sharing his experiences and as the first person in the School of Engineering to build a significant part of his units and share he is experiences he was rewarded with some of our excellent Canvas merchandise!!