You have several options for the home page of your Canvas course (the page users land on when they enter the course). Canvas allows you to set the Modules area, the Syllabus area, or a custom page as the course home. Keep in mind: whatever you designate as the course home will be what students see first each time they enter a course.
For that reason, we recommend you use a custom home page that you can personalize, making it engaging and inviting. When you receive your course shell before the semester, it will have a customizable page set as home, and you can edit it to suit your course.
By default, the course home page is set up so that it contains:
- Champlain College logo
- Obvious link to the syllabus
- Course calendar grid
- Reminder of how to access Canvas support
Those items are optional, but we highly recommend retaining them. We encourage adding the following basic components:
- An image that relates to the course
- Related text that will describe the course: a description, welcome message, instructor bio, etc
- Any important links you want students to find easily (e.g., a link to a digital textbook if you use one, office hour sign-up link if you use an appointments tool, etc)
The home page will also automatically display recent Announcements above the page content. This is a great way to communicate with students, and we recommend you use Announcements.
Inserting and Editing Content on the Home Page
You can edit the home page using the same tool set you would use to edit any item on Canvas (assignments, discussions, etc.)–the Rich Content Editor. Simply click the button at the upper right of the page to access these tools. Learn more about how to add media like images and videos.
Setting Modules or Syllabus as the Course Home
You can set the Modules area of the course or the Syllabus as the home. If you use a very dynamic syllabus, that may be a good option. Setting Modules as the course home emphasizes navigation, but is rather boring and does not make use of this important opportunity to welcome students and frame the course. Other options include the course activity stream or the Assignments area, both of which have the same drawbacks as setting Modules as your course home.
To set the course home, first click “Home” in the left navigation. Then look at the menu on the right of the screen and find the button labeled “Set Home Page”.
In the popup menu, choose what you would like to set as the home page and click Save.
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