Creating a Course Tour
The tour of the course site is your opportunity to set expectations for how students should use Canvas and how they should interact with the course materials.
Canvas enables instructors to use different tools to structure their course. While one instructor may use Modules (as we have in this course), others may use the Pages or the Syllabus tool. Even if students have experience in online courses, the most likely don't have experience in your online course.
The course tour should:
- explain how the course materials and activities will be presented;
- describe expectations for communication and interaction in the course; and
- introduce students to you.
The tour should be linked in the Start Here module of your course.
Creating the Course Tour
While the course tour can be done via text, it's most powerful when using a combination of audio and a screencast (video of your screen).
- Maurea Brown's intro to a course Links to an external site.
- Tarisa Matsumoto-Maxfield's intro to a course Links to an external site.
Several tools are available on campus to do this:
- Camtasia - a recorder and powerful editor for MacOS and Windows. Great for recordings that blend different on-screen activities or require lots of editing. See the Camtasia information for details.
- Panopto - a recorder for all platforms. Great for one-take recordings with simple screen demonstrations. See the Panopto information for details.
Remember to caption your course tour videos. For more details on captioning, see Highline's captioning resources.