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Want To Balance Design, Function, & Engagement? DesignPLUS Is Your Super Tool!

Have you ever wondered how we make CoE courses beautiful, scalable, and functional to deliver exceptional student experiences? We have a tool for that called DesignPLUS!

This past summer the creators of DesignPLUS, Cidilabs, offered a 5 part workshop series over called Summer School for Educators that highlighted how to use DesignPLUS from first time launch of the toolbar to advanced tips and tricks. Each day covered specific elements of the toolbar including:

  • Getting Started with DesignPLUS:
    Start with a tour of the DesignPLUS Sidebar and cover the basics of building content from scratch with Themes, Content Blocks, Images, and the Action Toolbar.
  • Elevating Canvas Content:
    See how to transform and elevate existing Canvas content with the DesignPLUS Sidebar; how to build beautiful and engaging course Home pages; and how to utilize our awesome, built-in Accessibility Checkers.
  • Course Building with Templates:
    Learn how to utilize Templates in DesignPLUS to make content building a breeze, and see how the Multi-Tool can help you quickly scaffold out an entire course’s Module structure.
  • Exploring the Tools:
    Explore our fan-favorite DesignPLUS elements and tools. We’ll see how to use Accordions, Dialog Boxes, Icons, Progress Indicators, Quick Checks, and more!
  • Course-Level Customizations:
    Still want more? Discover the joys of course-level customizations, with your own custom Content Blocks, Quick Styles, Snippets, Icon Categories, and Themes!

If you missed the live sessions, we have video recordings that you can watch on-demand in this video playlist.

Prefer to just dive in? You can launch the toolbar with some quick keyboard shortcuts anywhere in Canvas that has a rich content editor. There are also several helpful resources that you can reference if you would like more specific guidance you would like on different elements in DesignPLUS:

Working on Accessibility in Your Course? Start with TidyUp!

We’ve all done it – added dozens of files into the Canvas Files area of our course to provide content and supplements to our students. It is what the Files area is made for. But then as quarters go by and we change or add more content, the old files have a tendency to stick around and eventually, we open Files and are provided a list that makes doom scrolling look like child’s play.

How do we tackle cleaning up the old files we no longer use while keeping intact the current content that is being used in our course? Enter TidyUp! This handy course scanning tool identifies and can delete unused files from your Canvas course with ease while also offering the ability to provide a comprehensive look at all of the content in your course – including files, folders and Canvas content.

But wait – how does this help with accessibility? When you look at your course’s Ally Score Report, you’ll notice you are provided a score on the overall accessibility of your course. This score is based on the content of your course and even if files are unpublished or not provided to students in active areas of the course they are still considered as part of the score. To get an accurate picture of your course’s accessibility score, you need to remove those files but making sure you aren’t deleting something you actually use can be a bit daunting. Enter TidyUp, your file organizing superhero with features to help you declutter proactively!

Ready to get started? You can start tidying up your course files, folders, and content in minutes after reviewing the short training videos and best practices below!

Getting Started with TidyUp

Get started with TidyUP by enabling it in your Canvas course and scanning your content!

TidyUP Files & Folders

Explore the Files and Folders Tabs in TidyUP.

TidyUP Canvas Content

Explore the Canvas Content area of TidyUP!

TidyUp Best Practices & Tips

  • TidyUp is already enabled in all CoE Canvas courses! You should see it listed in your Canvas’ course navigation bar for each of your course sites.
  • Before you start deleting files, download all the files showing as “Unused” as a failsafe backup. This will download as a zipped file to your computer in case you need to recover a file.
    • Forgot to download a failsafe backup? No worries! You can always go into a previously taught section of the course and download files from there or copy them to the Canvas course site you are working on.
  • Do you use files in question banks in Canvas? Unfortunately, TidyUp cannot scan Canvas question banks so those files may appear in the “Unused Files” list. You may wish to implement these workarounds before scanning your course to avoid accidentally deleting those files:
    • Recommended: Create a Canvas page called “Question Bank Files”. On this page, embed any files or images used in a question bank and save the page but don’t publish it!
    • Add the standard naming convention “QB” to the beginning of file names for files used in question banks.

Questions? Please don’t hesitate to reach out to edhelp@uw.edu for support.