Sample Courses

Canvas is a highly customizable platform for presenting your course content. To give you an idea of what is possible, we've created the following sample courses and opened them up to be viewable without being enrolled.

Course 1: This is a seminar taught using a hybrid online/face-to-face model. It uses the Modules as its Home Page and arranges all content for students in sequence using the Modules format.

Course 2: This course presents the same course content as Course 1 (above), but instead of using Modules, uses Pages to organize and link together course content. A Front Page is designated as the Course Home Page. The advantage of Pages is that you can present links to course materials along with commentary and instructions, which is not possible in Modules. Pages are more complex to set up, however.

Course Templates

Canvas Commons is a repository for instructors to share course resources and learning objects. While the content found in Commons spans the entire Canvas user-community worldwide, your colleagues at Pitt have created several course templates that you may find make a good ready-made skeleton for your own course content.

Clicking the Commons button on the left menu (and authorizing your access, if it's your first time visiting) will allow you to view and import into your own course several Pitt-created and approved course templates:

To use one of these templates in your course:

Enter Canvas Commons by clicking on the Commons button in the global navigation menu.
Authorize the resource if necessary.
Click on the name of the template you're interested in.
Browse the preview to decide whether this template is a good fit for your course.
When you're ready to import it into one or more of your courses, click the blue Import/Download button.
In the slideout menu, select the course or courses you'd like to import the template into. (Note: importing a template will not delete or erase content you've already put into your course.)
Scroll down and click the blue Import into Course button.

The course template contents will automatically be imported into the course(s) you selected. You may now visit those courses and add your own course content to the template. Deleting template elements or changing them in your own course does not change them for any other users. The course remains entirely your own to edit, add to and delete from as normal.