New Pages
To create a new page, you can click into “Pages” or “Modules”. “Modules” is the preferred site as you can control where the new page will appear. To create an item, click the “+” icon in a module and select the type of page you’d like to add, such as an assignment or discussion.
Sometimes, a course project overview will be saved as a Page in Canvas instead of an assignment. This may happen if students are submitting sections or “deliverables” of their course project throughout the course and are not submitting everything at once at the end.
Editing a Page
Editing a page usually takes place in one of two ways: rich text editing or html. To access these, click the “edit” button at the top right of the page you want to edit. The default editing space is the rich text editor (RTE). This is typically sufficient for the types of edits we would like to make because the course development template has the preloaded html formats for assignments, discussions, etc.
Best practices for editing a page are to copy and paste the desired text from the Google doc where the course build is and then to paste the text in between the first and last character of the Canvas page. This preserves the formatting already on the page and matches the new text as we want it to appear. After copy/pasting, be sure to delete the leftover characters.
If any html editing is required, you can often borrow the code needed from other areas of canvas pages. When in doubt, ask the team for html guidance. The html editor appears under the RTE and can be accessed by clicking the “< / >” button.
Some formatting issues may arise when copy/pasting bulleted lists over from Google docs to Canvas, so be on the lookout for indentation or non-standardized bullets that need to be reformatted. Occasionally there is an issue copy/pasting a list of links from Google Doc to Canvas, to address this, delete the bulleted list and try to paste again without that canvas formatting and it should work.
In some cases, the easiest way to add a new page is to simply duplicate a pre-existing page (such as an assignment or discussion). This will allow you to create a new page with the formatting already set up as you want it. Each week has one assignment and one discussion by default, so there is typically one addition of one of these per week.
Hanging Indent
When adding APA citations to a page in Canvas, proper APA formatting requires a hanging indent. Below is the HTML code to do this since the RTE will not allow for tabs/indents.
Hanging indent in HTML for references page
Use this code with citation as your citation:
Note: You must insert this code for each citation.
Headings in Text (Hey we’re using those here!)
When writing assignments, discussions, Course Project overviews, or other pages in Canvas that are very text heavy, we should work to incorporate Headings into the text to visually divide the information and make it more readable, digestible, and comprehensible. Headings can show major concepts or themes quickly and easily by separating them visually from the rest of the text. From an accessibility standpoint, Headings also serve to signal to screen readers when there is a section break in the text and help guide navigation of a page. It is difficult to create a strict rule on the paragraph number or word count that necessitate Headings, so use your best judgment to ensure organized and clear dissemination of information. It’s also important to not skip Headings levels. For example, you shouldn’t jump from Heading 4 to Heading 2; they need to be sequential.