5. Focus on the Student Experience

Canvas is a learning management system that heavily relies on you to determine usability and functionality.

Functional 

A beautiful course means nothing if it doesn’t have an effective student experience. When designing your course, you should always keep the student in mind and cater to their needs. Think of your course like a house. No matter how beautiful it is on the outside, you don’t want to live somewhere with shoddy construction or a confusing layout.

Students want to be able to access information and learn in the quickest way possible. 

Consider leverage Canvas' built-in navigation: organize content into modules, and leverage the "Next" learning flow to guide students through content. 

Gather Feedback

The best way to ensure your student experience is where it needs to be is to have others test out your course or implement an anonymous survey. Sometimes, as a developer, you can become blind to minor issues students may encounter when visiting your course. For example, when designing the self-paced accessibility courses, I received a tremendous amount of feedback that learners did not understand how to navigate a tabbed page or had skipped it completely.