Cast a Spell on Your Canvas Course - Meet the Wizard!

Posted by on

A wizard-themed setup with a plush toy, potion bottle, crystal ball, and black cat. Text reads "Cast a Spell on Your Canvas Course - Meet the Wizard!"

Cast a Spell on your Canvas Course - Meet the Wizard!

Have you ever wished you could wave a magic wand and instantly create beautiful, engaging, and accessible Canvas courses? Your wish has been granted! Introducing the DesignPLUS QuickStart Wizard—your trusty spellbook for crafting visually appealing, student-friendly courses in a flash.

What is the DesignPlus QuickStart Wizard? 

The DesignPLUS QuickStart Wizard is a feature providing a powerful set of templates to streamline and enhance your course-building experience. It provides instructors with accessible templates, time-saving automation, and easy-to-use design components.

The Wizard is available whenever creating a new page, discussion, assignment or syllabus in your course, allowing you to quickly add templates and other pre-styled content to the page, saving you time, starting with accessibility, and sparking inspiration!

Note: The Wizard is currently available only for newly created pages, not when editing a page with pre-existing content. Contact your Digital Learning Designer about making similar updates to pre-existing pages.

Conjure content quickly and easily with the Wizard

Let the Wizard lead the way! Reduce the manual work involved in building each course page from scratch. The Wizard appears when you create a new page.

Offering a treasure trove of pre-designed templates that instantly transform your course into a work of magic, the Wizard empowers you to create sleek, professional, and engaging content. With templates, intended for full page designs, you can select a page layout that best suits your needs and customize from there on. The tool also offers customized content blocks, smaller elements to add to a page, including a variety of designs for ungraded quick checks of understanding, videos, and other inspiring ways to achieve magical layouts. With a flick of your wand, the Wizard will wipe away the cobwebs of old design habits and empower you to create sparkling Canvas page gems.

Ready to summon the Wizard?

Start today! 

  1. Create a new page and open the DesignPLUS QuickStart WizardCanvas new page view showing the Design Plus Quick Start Wizard button.
  2. Click on Templates or Blocks and view the options within each by hovering over them. View of the Quick Start Wizard menu of options for Template and Blocks.
  3. Click to select your content and it will be added to the Content Preview area. If you’d like to add multiple blocks to your page, select your choices and rearrange their order, as needed, in the Content Preview page. 
  4. Click Add to Editor when you’re ready to load all content onto your Canvas page. 

A sample block showing a scenario with a quick check in the Content Preview window. Circle around the Add to Editor button indicates where to click to add content to the page.



That’s it! Your course will be glowing with enchantment and good fortune!

Stay tuned for future Quick Bytes showing how to use the scrolls of stunning design (a.k.a. templates and blocks) to demystify your course design process while bedazzling your learners.

Still Feeling Like Sorcerer's Apprentice? 

No problem! Reach out to your Digital Learning Designer or email exttech@umn.edu if you’d like support with the Wizard or other Canvas features - or if you have ideas for additional customized content you’d like to see in the Wizard. We can help you!


Article by Shona Burke, Extension Learning Technologies, sfburke@umn.edu

Comments

Post a Comment