Overview

Canvas, like many learning management systems, offers a great deal of versatility when it comes to organizing your course content. When designing your course having a purposeful structure and logical consistent content segments to your course allows students to find essential course information and to navigate to class sessions.

Canvas has multiple means of organizing course content, predominantly, Canvas courses can be grouped into two general schemas: Modules or Pages.

Canvas courses have a built-in feature to organize your course content and activities. Modules could be created to structure the sequence of activities for each week or to organize resources. Modules can include text headers, assignments, quizzes, files, pages, discussions, and external links. With prerequisites and requirements you can structure how students progress through the course.
A Canvas course can be created using a combination of modules and pages to create a course site that looks and behaves more like a web site. Using this approach can take more time and require a different skill set than using modules alone. Pages can be created using text, images, and embedded video. Links on these pages can direct students to other resources and activities. When these pages are organized using modules navigation from page to page is automatically created. A page can be designated as both the front page and the home page of the Canvas course. In this way it is possible for students to progress through a course without using the module view. As this approach is time intensive, DEI highly recommends using Modules for overall structure with pages utilized within Modules as appropriate.

Each course, regardless of module or page use, has a home page that can be customized by the instructor. The default for this page is something called the Course Activity Stream but other options are probably better for your students, for instance, the homepage could lead your students directly to your syllabus. DEI highly recommends using Course Modules as your front page. As an example, this course uses modules as its homepage.

For more information also see the following guide - What layout options are available in the Course Home Page? (Links to an external site).

Finally, in addition to using modules or pages in a course, instructors can adjust the navigation within a course's navigation bar. Doing so will allow students to either strictly follow the instructional path laid out or select content as they see fit.

In the Resources that follow, Modules, Pages and Navigation Customization are addressed in greater detail.

Explore these Canvas Features

What are Modules?

What are Pages?

How can you adjust navigation options?