A fully customised and robust Canvas template for Auckland University of Technology
Posted byMatthew Hall
Auckland University of Technology (AUT) recently migrated to Canvas LMS. LMS migrations are a sizeable undertaking, involving many technical challenges. However, they present universities with a unique opportunity to go beyond a straight ‘lift and shift’ of course content to add further value for learners in terms of user experience and design. Curio worked closely with the AUT Learning Transformation LAB (altLab) to design a robust, user-friendly Canvas template to roll out during the LMS migration to improve the user experience.
Together, we developed a detailed brief of requirements for the template and identified common elements that would be used across faculties and departments. The aim of the template was to provide a consistent look and feel across all courses with sufficient flexibility to cater for the wide range of courses offered by AUT.
The Curio team designed a series of templated pages including course homepages, module, contact, assessment, activity and timetable pages. Our component-based approach to design and build means the template pages can be extended in future, as university and faculty needs require, to factor in further page types.
After extensive testing and feedback on the wireframes, Curio built the templates with custom interactive components that included inline knowledge check text, multiple-choice questions and answers, flip cards and accordions and tabs.
When building the LMS templates, we added our course builder tool, Scaffold. Scaffold is a component-based templating system for building Canvas courses and pages. With Scaffold educators can quickly build content pages from predefined components, aligned to brand guidelines with a consistent visual identity.
The result is a fully customised template complete with a wide range of components to offer full flexibility in course builds. Educators can now build consistent experiences, confident that they follow brand guidelines and offer a high-quality user experience.