Canvas is a versatile learning management system that can be completely customized for your class and students. Start here for some ideas on how to design your course.
On this page:
Organizing Course Content
Choosing how to organize your Canvas site is crucial when getting started and is closely related to what you have on your homepage.
Assignments
Assignments are a way to organize your course by date based on what activities you want students to do for each class. Assignments can allow students to submit work or interact on a discussion board, but they can also describe what students need to read for that day and link to course materials.
Assignments automatically appear on the Syllabus tool, the course calendar, and the grade book.
Pages
Pages in Canvas are basic webpages that can be edited using the Rich Content Editor (the RCE). You can add formatted text, link to documents, images, websites, and other content in your course, and embed videos and multimedia content.
Modules
Modules can be useful in courses that involve organizing a lot of content in thematic units. You can use modules to organize course files, lectures, assignments, discussions, quizzes, and other course content all in one place.
You can choose the make modules the homepage for your site or link modules on your homepage.
Learn more about Designing Learning Modules.
Setup a Homepage
The homepage of your course site provides students with both an overview of the course and guidance about what is most important in the course. Your choice of a homepage is closely related to how you choose to organize your site content.
You can change your Course Home Page to reflect one of five layout options:
- Recent Activity Dashboard
- Pages Front Page
- Course Modules
- Assignment List
- Syllabus.
Link to Course Files
Using Pages in Canvas allows you to link to various areas and elements of your course via hyperlinks added to your text content.
Create External and Course Links
You can insert a link into the page by navigating to the Insert dropdown menu and selecting Link [1]. 
Or by selecting the chain icon on the toolbar [2].
You will be prompted to insert External Links or Course Links.
- External Links allow you to link out to other websites and online resources.
- Course Links brings up the insert menu and allows you to select the location in your Canvas course (the page, assignment, or module, etc.) that you would like to link to.
Create Document Links
If you need to create a link to a document, you can do so by navigating to the “Document” option in the “Insert” dropdown menu [1] or the document icon [2]. From either of those locations, you can select:
- Upload Document if the document is not yet saved in Canvas (Note: When uploading files directly in the RCE, you cannot select the folder where you would like the file to upload. If you want to organize your files, you must first go to the Files area of Canvas to upload the document to the correct place.)
- Course Documents to choose a file that has already been uploaded to the course Files
- User Documents to choose a file that you have uploaded to your personal Files area in Canvas
Link to Office 365 OneDrive Files
You can embed or link a copy of a OneDrive document anywhere you can use the Rich Content Editor, or upload files from OneDrive intor your Canvas course anywhere you can use the Rich Content Editor.
You can create collaborations with an existing Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file from your OneDrive, so learners can work together on shared documents in real-time. This is great for group project collaborations.