Category: Spotlight

Improve Your Students’ Canvas Experience: The New ISU Course Template is Now Available

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The New ISU Course Template is now available for your Canvas courses! Whether starting from scratch or building on previous content, the template is designed to help you build easy-to-navigate courses in Canvas:

  • With a focus on clear way-finding, the template ensures that your students can navigate your Canvas course, allowing them to spend more time learning and less time figuring out where to find various course components.

  • The template provides opportunities for incremental course improvements. Use parts of the template or re-style your entire Canvas course: you can quickly plug in your course information or plan for future enhancements as you become more familiar with the design tools that come with the template.

  • The template proudly displays the Cyclone spirit, from course banners to institutional color palettes! A bonus deck of themed PowerPoint slides and customizable course and video cards will elevate the look and feel of your instructional materials.

  • Built on the Quality Matters (QM) Course Design Rubric, the template incorporates best practices for student-centered course design. The redesigned Start Here module packages student success resources and policies recommended by QM.

  • Complete with detailed guidance in the instructor toolkit, the template offers many basic and advanced customization options.

And the best part? CELT provides both group and individual support for template implementation, helping you to improve your course one step at a time. Start using the New ISU Course Template today and take your course to the next level!

Three Tips from CELT Instructional Designer, Suhan Yao

Suhan Yao is the CELT instructional designer who led the ISU Course Template redesign inspired by the recent updates to the Quality Matters (QM) Course Design Rubric.

The rubric updates allowed CELT to provide tools for designing a better syllabus, options for clear communication, better engagement and improved course accessibility. Suhan offers three tips for using the enhanced template.

  • We included the essential syllabus sections, which are easy to edit. Explore the instructor toolkit ⁠to find quick advice and example wordings for each section. 

  • We removed the required and recommended syllabus statements from the Syllabus page. They now appear on a separate page called Syllabus Statements. Syllabus Statements are updated automatically: simply edit the page and save it without making any changes.

  • We even included the printing instructions at the top of the page, so you and your students can easily print or save the syllabus and syllabus statements to a PDF file.

  • If you make a mistake, you can always restore the Syllabus page to any previously saved version.

  • Take the guesswork out of assembling useful support resources for your students. Our one-stop-shop Support and Resources page in the Start Here module combines technology support, academic assistance, and well-being resources into a neat package and saves your time!

  • Are your students new to Canvas? The Support and Resources page links to a simple but full of practical and easy-to-understand Canvas Student Orientation course.

  • In the instructor toolkit, find simple instructions on how to add resources specific to your course!

  • After you import the new template into your sandbox course, head to the Files area to find a collection of new banner images in the ISU Course Template Images folder. These banners encompass the enthusiasm, pride, and support shown by students, alumni, and fans of the university.

  • Check out the ISU-Branded Templates in Files. We included ditable cover cards with detailed instructions to use as your course’s card on the dashboard or replace a Canvas Studio thumbnail.

  • We saved the best for last! Check out our deck of Cyclone-spirited PowerPoint slides in the ISU-Branded Templates in Files. Use them for your course presentations to match the look and feel of your Canvas course!

ISU Course Template and Support

Import the Template in Your New Canvas Course

CELT recommends importing the template into your sandbox course shell in Canvas first. This way you can experiment with the many features the template offers. Once comfortable, you can transfer your sandbox into the course shell where you plan to teach. To import the template into your sandbox:

  1. From the Help option on the Canvas Global Navigation, choose Global Course Administration.

  2. Once you authorize ISU AdminTools, opt to Request a New Course Shell.

  3. On the next page, select Organization for Course Type.

  4. Select Create from the new ISU Course Template.

  5. Submit the request.

Your sandbox course will be created, and the template will be added to the sandbox course. Be sure to read Toolkit: Explore and Customize the Template in the Instructor Resources unpublished module that comes with the template.

Use the Template with Your Previous Course Content

Once you create a Canvas sandbox and import the template, you can also import the content from your previous course. You can use the template’s features to style your previous content:

  1. Import the template into your sandbox course shell in Canvas.

  2. Import your previous content into the templated sandbox.

  3. Reset the homepage back to the template.

  4. Navigate to a page with the previous content.

  5. Click Edit on the top of the page with the previous content.

  6. Use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+D (Windows) or Option+Shift+D (Mac). to call on the design tools that come with the template.

  7. In the tools that appear to the right, click on the “+” plus and search for Theme.

  8. This will insert the Heading 2 structure at the top of the page.

  9. Now, use the Paragraph on the Canvas Rich Content Editor to style your previous content with appropriate headers and paragraphs.

For more guidance, be sure to read the instructor toolkit that comes with the template.

Examples of the New ISU Canvas Template pages.

Synchronous Training

CELT offers group training sessions to help you use the new ISU Course Template.

Led by an experienced CELT Instructional Technologist, training occurs online. Each session is 40 minutes long with sufficient time for participants to ask questions.

Instructional Support for ISU Course Template

CELT instructional designers are available for one-on-one consultations to provide support for the implementation of the new ISU Course Template.

Send a message to celt-help@iastate.edu or book an appointment. 

Mentoring Opportunities at Iowa State University

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By Krista Klocke, Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching

January is National Mentoring Month, which means this is the perfect time to reflect on how mentors have made a positive impact on your life and career, and inform how you can be a mentor to someone else. Whether formally or informally, mentors make campus feel smaller and more personal by showing care and support through conversations and professional development activities. Both CELT and Iowa State University offer a variety of mentoring opportunities across the “lifespan” of academia. Read on for some highlights!

Mentoring Undergraduates

Besides the mentoring that takes place in academic advising and in interactions between instructors and students, there are other programs that connect undergraduates with faculty members who help them expand their academic horizons:

  • Iowa State Learning Communities, facilitated by Director Jen Leptien, involves more than 90% of first-year students through more than 85 learning communities across campus.
  • The Undergraduate Research Program, led by Coordinator Svitlana Zbarska, manages the research programs that create research opportunities for undergraduate students across campus.


Mentoring Graduate Students

Mentoring continues with support for graduate students in their development as academics. These programs range from university-wide (Preparing Future Faculty and Graduate College Emerging Leaders Academy) to departmental (Ann Gansemer-Topf’s approach to mentoring her graduate students):

  • Preparing Future Faculty, facilitated by Clark Coffman and Karen Menzel through the Graduate College, provides a framework of professional development courses and mentoring for graduate students preparing to begin their careers.
  • Graduate College Emerging Leaders Academy, facilitated by Faculty Fellow Steve Freeman, creates opportunities for graduate students to develop leadership skills and interdisciplinary connections.
  • Mentoring also takes place on the individual level. Ann Gansemer-Topf, Director of Graduate Education and Professor, School of Education, takes a hands-on approach to mentoring her graduate students. Gansemer-Topf explains, “I meet with graduate students who I advise as a group every two weeks. The space is used to provide advisor-student and peer-to-peer support and mentoring … this space affords them the opportunity to learn from one another. It can serve as an accountability group to keep students on track to complete research. Additionally, students not only get mentoring from the advisor and a student, but they also learn how to mentor. The best experiences are watching “new” students transition from the mentee to the mentors.”


Mentoring Faculty (Peer-to-Peer)

A wide variety of opportunities are also available for peer-to-peer faculty mentoring at Iowa State University.

  • CELT’s Teaching Partners Program, led by Instructor Development Coordinator Krista Klocke, pairs experienced faculty mentors with second- or third-year faculty. Meeting throughout the academic year, mentor teams discuss effective teaching practices, observe each other’s classrooms, and prepare materials to document their teaching.
  • CELT’s Faculty Learning Communities provide a space to build connections across disciplines, share strategies for teaching large enrollment courses more effectively, and connect instructors with resources. Read about the Large Enrollment Faculty Learning Community here, and the Fundamentals of Teaching Faculty Learning Community here.
  • The College Peer Mentors program, coordinated by Tera Jordan, Assistant Provost for Faculty Success, works with mentors who are appointed by their college to create networking opportunities and support for faculty.
  • The Emerging Leaders Academy, led by Administrative Director Katherine Hensley, Tera Jordan, and Faculty Co-lead Brad Dell, develops faculty and professional and scientific staff leadership skills, preparing them for leadership positions.


Creating Connections through Community

At its core, mentoring is about creating connections. The value of connections is central to Peter Felton and Leo Lambert’s book Relationship-Rich Education, free as a digital download from Parks Library.

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