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Building or Editing a Dynamic Canvas Homepage

Markette Pierce Updated by Markette Pierce

Building a Dynamic Canvas Homepage

Generate the home page

  1. On the Home Page, switch to HTML view and delete all the code in the page to make it blank. Switch back to RCE mode.
  2. Click on the house icon

Hero image

  1. Replace the link to the existing hero (AKA banner) image with the link to the image provided by CSG. You can request the image in Wrike.
  2. The banner can be adjusted, if needed. Click on the banner icon next to the house icon. This will enable an interface to let you adjust the banner image for legibility. 
    1. Use the up/down/sideways arrows to adjust the banner in the image area. Do not use the scrollbar unless you need to adjust the text. The scrollbar also reduces/expands the vertical banner size and should not be touched unless the title is too large. 
  3. Edit the course name in the banner image to remove the course number from the course name. For example, if the course is “CALS164: Plant Selection”, you will remove “CALS164: ” from the course name so it reads “Plant Selection” only.

Add course information text

Note: On the dynamic home page, italicized text represents placeholder text, which is not viewable by learners.

Course Overview
  1. Open the “Welcome to Your Course” page in a new tab or window. You will use a condensed version of this course overview text for the home page.
  2. Condense the course overview text into 1–2 sentences. Generative AI can help you with this. If the course description contains a special disclaimer or important note, that should also be included in the “Course Overview” on the home page.
  3. Paste your condensed text into the field with the placeholder text “describe the course in general terms.”
Learning Outcomes
  1. Copy the learning outcome for each module into its respective module overview on the home page, in the cell “describe outcome”.
  2. Use sentence case, and add a period at the end of the learning outcome.

Edit the “Final Project: Complete and Submit” module

Note: If the course does not contain a “Final Project: Complete and Submit” module, you may skip this step.

  1. Change “Module # Overview” to “Final Project:” and delete “Final Project:” on the next line. It should now read:
  2. Delete any assets under “This Module Includes:” (e.g., One project part). Click on the cell, then use the “x” in the contextual menu to delete it.
  3. Delete the “Learning Outcome” and “This Module Includes:” text. The text will change to placeholder text, indicated by italics.
  4. Add “Submit the final part of your course project.” as the learning outcome (in the cell “describe outcome”).

Module Assets

  1. Double-check that the asset counts for each module overview are correct (e.g., videos, quizzes, tools, activities). The home page automation code counts the number of page types in a module. Be sure to check watch pages, activity, and tool pages for instances of multiple assets (multi-vid watch pages, multiple downloadables on a tool page, etc.).
Note that the assets are brought in for each module in the order they first appear. They do not need to match from module to module, and you do not need to reorder them to appear in any specific order.
  1. Add any assets that didn’t get counted. You can add an asset by clicking on the table under “This module includes”. A contextual menu will appear where you can add a table row. Add the asset and choose the best icon to match it. Click on the icon to choose one. Watch a video tutorial for how to do this (30 seconds).
    1. Do not include gatekeeping quizzes, such as Hold Harmless or Data Disclaimer quizzes
  2. Make the following manual corrections, if needed:
    1. “ask the expert” should be “Ask the Expert Interview”
    2. “excel activities” should be “Excel activities"

Editing or Rebuilding an Existing Homepage

Editing a Homepage

If you only need to edit the existing homepage — for instance because an assignment has changed — be sure to update the links to the assignment. Click on the assignment and select Link Options, and then select the correct link from the Assignments drop-down.

Selecting the link from the Assignments drop-down (as opposed to the Discussions section, for instance) ensures that the correct points populate under the title of the assignment on the homepage.

Rebuilding a Homepage

Sometimes — as when assignments have been added or the changes are extensive — you may need to rebuild an existing homepage. Before deleting the existing content and rebuilding, as described above, be sure to capture the following items from the existing homepage:

  1. The URL for the hero image
  2. The course overview text
  3. All module learning objectives

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