Course Readiness Checklist

DIY Course Readiness Checklist

This list is a great place to start when you are developing a new course or working on a course you have taught in the past. When you are done, if you have completed everything on this list, your students should be able to navigate the Canvas environment with relative ease.

✓ Welcome Video

A simple, friendly, welcome video to introduce yourself to the class.

✓ Video Lectures

Short video lectures (3-15 minutes each) that help build instructor presence.

✓ Orientation Module

Course includes the UCSC Introduction Module from Canvas Commons. This introduction module has useful information for all UC Santa Cruz students. You can import it yourself or email online@ucsc.edu with your course name and code to have it lovingly placed in your course.

✓ Weekly Modules

Course is organized in weekly Modules or units.You can start designing your course by importing the UCSC Course Design Template, which gives you a template to work with. You can import it yourself or email online@ucsc.edu with your course name and code to have it lovingly placed in your course.

✓ Syllabus

Syllabus uses welcoming, accessible, and student friendly language. Expectations are clear. CITL provides a terrific Syllabus Template which you can customize for your course.

✓ Home Page Set

Home page for the course is set to Modules or a customized Page. Visit our Canvas Basics class guide to learn how to do this.

✓ Course Navigation Set

In Course Navigation you can choose what your students see on the left hand toolbar in Canvas. Visit our Canvas Basics class guide to learn how to do this.

✓ Announcements on the Homepage

Make Announcements visible on your Homepage. Visit our Canvas Basics class guide to learn how to do this.

✓ Low/No Stakes Activities

Course offers Assignments with low or zero point values and /or frequent assessments that can be completed in relatively short amounts of time.

✓ Captioned Videos

Captioning increases accessibility for all learners, especially for deaf or hard of hearing students or non-native English speakers. Captioning can also help people focus on the content, improve comprehension and increase engagement. To get started with captioning, use YuJa to auto-caption all uploaded videos. To increase accuracy, request caption correction from Accessibility Corps.

✓ Accessible Readings

For PDFs, make sure the file has optical character recognition. (A simple test: open the document and try to select, copy, and paste a portion of text into a text document. If you aren’t able to do this, or the result isn’t readable, the document needs remediation.) You can do this yourself, using Adobe Acrobat (for example), and you can also get support through Accessibility Corps.

✓ Dates/Deadlines

Dates and deadlines are in place for Assignments, Discussion Posts, Quizzes, Projects, Exams, etc.

✓ Link Validator

The Link Validator allows you to verify that all the external links in your course are valid. The Link Validator can be run during the course development process, and should be run before you publish your course.

✓ Student View

Student View shows you what your students see when they are working in your course. If you can’t see it in Student View, your student can’t see it either. Elements must be published for students to have access. Student View is available on just about every Canvas Page (upper right corner). You can use the Test Student in Student View to determine whether an Assignment or Quiz is working the way you intended.

✓ Publishing 1, 2, 3

There are three stages of publishing in Canvas that must be completed for your students to have full access.

1. Pages/Assignments/Quizzes/Discussions

2. Modules

3. Course

If you would prefer our team of instructional designers to perform the course readiness check for you instead, feel free to email online@ucsc.edu or request it through Accessibility Corps.