Expand your Teaching Toolkit with Canvas Commons

Canvas Commons offers diverse, customizable resources to enhance instructional strategies and align with learning outcomes.

By Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning

Are you looking to enhance your instructional strategies with engaging and outcome-aligned Canvas materials? Canvas Commons is a valuable resource for educators to grow their instructional toolkit. There are even USask developed resources which offer high-quality, USask-specific materials tailorable to your educational needs.

Why Use Canvas Commons?

Canvas Commons is a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share resources. It serves as a digital library full of educational content, allowing Canvas users to share learning resources with other users and import learning resources into a Canvas course.

Benefits of Using Canvas Commons

1. Access to a Wide Range of Resources: Canvas Commons provides access to a variety of educational materials, including courses, modules, quizzes, assignments, discussions, pages, documents, videos, images, and audio files. This diversity allows educators to find resources that best fit their instructional needs.

2. Collaboration and Sharing: Educators can share their resources with colleagues, groups, or the entire Canvas community. This fosters collaboration and the exchange of best practices.

3. Customization and Adaptation: Add your own flavours! Imported resources can still be customized to fit specific course requirements. This flexibility ensures that the materials align with your own learning outcomes and assessments. Check that the language in rubrics and assignments is actually what you want your students to focus on – not just what the original creator offered.

4. Quality and Variety: Canvas Commons includes resources from users worldwide, offering varying degrees of quality. This variety allows educators to see different approaches to teaching similar topics and skills.

USask Developed Resources
(Search these titles or keywords in Commons)

  • USask Default Template: A standardized template to ensure consistency across courses.
    Learning for Sustainability: Helps students reflect, share, and act for sustainability and learn about the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
  • Research Skills Development: Assists students in reflecting on their research skill development. Suitable for any USask undergraduate course with a research component.
  • Intercultural Communication: Six modules around intercultural communication with asynchronous online activities. Ideal for courses with study abroad or intercultural experiences.
  • Sustainability and Engineering: Course content relevant to environmental, social, and economic sustainability in the Engineering discipline, designed for capstone courses.
Canvas screen shot: green triangle with a white checkmark in the top right corner Look for the green triangle with a white checkmark in the top right corner. These resources are aligned with USask teaching and learning priorities. How can I have my Canvas Commons content labelled as USask-approved?

By leveraging Canvas Commons, educators can select instructional materials that align with their learning outcomes and assessments, creating a more engaging and effective learning experience for their students.

Title image credit: Anton Savinov on Unsplash.com

This article was created with the assistance of AI tools, as described in the GMCTL AI Disclosure Statement.

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. The image was shared by the Province of British Columbia via Flickr with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.