Bad Practice in Canvas and How to Fix It

I have opened a great many Canvas courses over the years, and the same problems turn up again and again. None of them come from carelessness. They come from busy people doing their best with limited time. This post names the most common bad practice in Canvas and gives you a fix for each one that you can usually make in minutes.

Why bad practice creeps in

Most bad practice starts as a sensible shortcut. You upload the files you already have, because the term starts on Monday. You copy last year’s course, because rebuilding it would take a week you do not have. Each choice is reasonable on its own, and the course gradually becomes harder to use.

The student pays for it. A learner who cannot find the next task spends their effort on navigation rather than learning, and the courses that ask most of them are often the ones that explain least. If you want the bigger picture of what a good course does, Creating engaging and effective learning experiences is a useful companion, and the Introduction to the PANDA Framework gives you a structure to check against.

The good news is that the same few problems account for most of what I see. Fix those and your course improves noticeably, without a rebuild.

A word on tone before we start. Nothing here is a criticism of the people who built these courses. I have made every one of these mistakes myself, usually in a hurry, and I still find new examples when I review my own work. Treat the list as a prompt for a quick audit, not a verdict.

You do not need to fix everything at once. Choose the one area that would help your students most this term, make that change well and move on to the next when you have time.

Structure: files first, modules never

The most common problem is a course that works as a filing cabinet. Every file sits in the Files area or in one long list, named as it was on someone’s laptop: final_v2, final_v3, lecture 4 revised. Students are left to work out what to open and in what order.

It is easy to see why this happens. Uploading is quick, and a list of files feels like a complete course. But a list tells students what exists, not what to do with it. They cannot tell the essential reading from the optional, or the task due this week from the one due next month.

The fix is to let Modules do the organising. A module is a container that gathers the pages, files, tasks and quizzes for a stretch of learning, in the order you want students to meet them. Name each module for the week or topic, and put a short overview page at the top that says what students will do and by when.

If you are unsure when to use a module and when to use a page, Driving Canvas: Modules vs Pages covers the difference. In short, modules organise and pages explain, so use each for its own job.

Pages: walls of text and “click here”

The second problem lives inside the pages. I regularly meet a single page holding several screens of unbroken text, with a link in the middle that reads “click here”. Students skim it, miss the part that matters and then email you to ask.

Canvas pages are read on phones, on shared laptops and with assistive technology, so a layout that looks acceptable on your large screen can be hard going elsewhere. Students also tend to scan before they read. If the important instruction is buried in the fourth paragraph, many will never reach it.

There are three habits to change.

• Break the text up. Use headings to separate ideas, keep paragraphs short and turn lists into real lists. In the Canvas editor the page title is already the top-level heading, so start your own headings at Heading 2.
• Write links that make sense alone. “Read the assessment brief” tells a student, and a screen reader user, where the link goes. “Click here” tells them nothing.
• Describe your images. Add alternative text that explains what the image shows and why it matters. If it is purely decorative, mark it as decorative.

Consistency matters as much as individual pages. If every page in the course follows the same pattern, students learn where to look. Tips and Tricks for Better Canvas Wiki Page Design has practical ideas for building that pattern, and the editor’s Accessibility Checker will catch many problems before students do.

Assessment: unclear tasks and surprise grades

Assessment problems are the ones that cause complaints, so they are worth fixing first. The pattern is familiar. An assignment says “Submit your essay” and nothing else. The due date is in the syllabus but not on the task. The marking criteria live in a document nobody has opened. Then the grades arrive, the total looks odd, and students are confused about how it was calculated.

It helps to put yourself in the position of a student who has not heard you explain the task in a lecture. Everything they need has to be on the page, because the page is all they have at eleven o’clock at night when the deadline is close.

Each of these has a simple answer.

• Write the task so it stands alone. State what students submit, the format, the due date and how it will be marked.
• Attach a rubric. Students see the criteria before they start, and you mark more consistently. 5 Tips for Building Effective Rubrics in Canvas explains how to build one that works.
• Set up weighting before anything is submitted. If assignment groups carry weights, check that the percentages add up as you intend, because changing them later alters every total.
• Decide when grades appear. The post policy controls whether students see marks as you enter them or when you choose to release them.

Do not worry if your first attempt at a task description feels long. Students rarely complain that an assignment was too clear, and a few extra sentences now save you a stream of questions later.

Dates deserve a special mention. Canvas lets you set when an assignment is due, when it becomes available and when it closes. If those disagree with what you told students in an email, students will follow whichever they saw last, so make Canvas the single source of truth.

Housekeeping: copied courses and broken links

The last problem is the one that builds up quietly. You copy a course forward each year, and each year a little more goes wrong. Last year’s due dates stay in place. Links point to resources that have moved. Unused tools such as old discussions clutter the navigation. A reference to “this year’s exam” appears in a page that was written three years ago.

None of these problems is dramatic by itself, but together they tell students that nobody has looked at the course recently. That affects how seriously they take it, and how much they trust the rest of what it says.

A tidy-up before each run takes less time than the confusion it prevents. It also gives you a natural moment to ask whether each page and activity still earns its place.

Menu wording and positions vary a little between institutions and versions of Canvas, so check them against what you see.

Taken together, these five areas make a short checklist you can run in under an hour. Start with structure, because it affects everything else, then work through pages, assessment and housekeeping in whatever order suits your term.

Try the activity below to check you can match each problem to its fix.

Check your understanding

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