Canvas - Selective Modules Release

Enabling Personalized Learning with Selective Modules Release

Role
Senior Designer

Team
1 Product
1 Designer
6 Engineers

Responsibility
Design, Research, Workshops

SUMMARY


  • We discovered instructors avoided using Canvas to cater their course materials to meet student needs.

  • It takes 15 clicks to assign one material.

  • Our solution was to enable bulk assigning - reduce the number of clicks to assign one material to only 6 clicks. And it can be done in bulk.

SUMMARY


  • We discovered instructors avoided using Canvas to cater their course materials to meet student needs.

  • It takes 15 clicks to assign one material.

  • Our solution was to enable bulk assigning - reduce the number of clicks to assign one material to only 6 clicks. And it can be done in bulk.

Instructors seek a way to provide tailored content for students' needs. Advanced students need more challenging assignments, but currently, there is no efficient method for this.

Instructors manually assign materials, which is time-consuming and visible to all, causing potential confusion. There are many cases where instructors wish to hide content, such as when it might negatively affect some students or when they want to customize content for different groups.

Essentially, instructors want to display course content exclusively to the right group of students.

TYPICAL USE CASE


Consider Melissa, a top student in her Computer Science class, who could benefit from advanced practice materials to further challenge her knowledge and skills.

TYPICAL USE CASE


Consider Melissa, a top student in her Computer Science class, who could benefit from advanced practice materials to further challenge her knowledge and skills.

It would be great if I could give Modules unique gating rules specific to individual students or groups or sections within the course, similar to how I can create unique assignment due dates for different students and sections.

A teacher can assign each material individually to the specific student, it works that way, however, it's not plausible to do this when there are over 20+ materials that need customized assigning.

  • The overall effort to "personalize learning" is way too high, it takes on average 15 clicks to complete assigning one material. Multiply that by 10 materials - 150 clicks to complete assigning 10 materials.

Teachers need a way to quickly group materials together and assign the whole package in one go.

It's also ungodly cumbersome to assign a material. It takes navigating through 3 separate pages to arrive at the Assign To widget responsible for person-assigning. After saving, you have to click Back twice to return to the Modules page, rinse and repeat for the next item.

ISSUES TO SOLVE


  • How can we allow instructors to assign materials in bulk, in a fast and easy manner?

  • How can we reduce the friction for instructors to navigate from one material to another?

ISSUES TO SOLVE


  • How can we allow instructors to assign materials in bulk, in a fast and easy manner?

  • How can we reduce the friction for instructors to navigate from one material to another?

ASSIGN IN BULK

To help instructors achieve their goals, we opted to expand the existing "Assign To" function to support Modules, hence the Assignable Modules.

Currently, instructors use Modules to organize their course content. Each module contains a set of materials (assignments, quizzes, pages, media…).

The solution is to make Modules assignable to students and sections and every "child" object within the module will inherit the rule.

There are 3 parameters to assigning a material:

  • Students, Sections

  • Due date (date and time)

  • Availability (start and end)

Each material has a unique customization of due date and availability for each student. For example, Melissa's quiz assignment is due Tuesday at 3:00pm and Gordon's assignment is due at 4:00pm instead.

We decided it would be overly complex to support the Due Date and Availability Dates at the Modules level. Due Date and Availability Dates will be kept at the material level. We've also validated with instructors that they do not need that capability.

QUICK ACCESS TO SET ASSIGNMENT

Additionally, we updated the navigation to access the Assign-To to make assigning materials a breeze by adding a quick dropdown menu option to access Assign To from the Modules page, and the Summary page.

The UI portion of this project is intentionally minimal to avoid requiring instructors to learn an entirely new system.

The main focus of the design work is on the logic and flows, as there are many complex implications at the sub-levels for each action the instructor takes. For example, when an instructor assigns an assignment to a section, will it override an individual student’s previously set settings?

We often don’t have all the answers, but we do our best to make educated guesses based on intuition.

RESULTS

We have reduced the number of clicks required to complete assigning 10 materials from 150 clicks to only just 6 clicks! Imagine the time it saved the instructors!

REFLECTION

  • I had alternate designs for the Modules page (ie. more visibility on who is assigned to what), but they were out of scope for this particular initiative.

  • Many edge cases naturally come from supporting a parent/child relationship between objects. It was difficult to capture all scenarios. I am certain we have missed a few.

I am excited for the feature to be released! I feel that this will solve a lot of problems in cross listing some of our courses. Teachers will love being able to assign a different module to sections in their course. I love to deliver exciting news to our teachers!

I can't wait to see this feature enabled! I have been hoping for a feature like this since I started using Canvas back in 2020.