Managing Module Contents

Modules allow instructors to centralize and consolidate their course content and materials into one place for students. Activities and resources, including files, assignments, discussions, quizzes and external links can be placed and arranged to facilitate easy access for your students.

By centralizing your content in one place, you help your student know how to proceed through the course material. When students know how and where to find instructions, activities and resources they can concentrate on learning.

This will accomplish the following:

Cut down on students emails to you asking where to find content
Afford you behind the scenes areas to develop course materials, by hiding links such as Quizzes, Pages, Files, and Assignments.
Simplify your course navigation

Add Course Content to a Module

You can add new or existing content items in Canvas to a module. You can also add an items to multiple modules, or multiple iterations of an item to one module.

When you add items to a Module, please be aware that the status of the Module overrides the state of the individual module items. You may want to consider leaving all Module items in an unpublished state until you are ready to publish the entire Module. Learn more about publishing or unpublishing a module.

Canvas Guides: How do I add course content as module items?

Duplicating Materials

Modules can be duplicated within the course. The duplication option is located in the Settings menu for every supported module item. When a module is copied, the word Copy is added to the end of the item's name.

Please note: It is not necessary to duplicate pages, assignments, quizzes, discussions and files to include them in multiple modules. You can put each item in as many modules as desired without duplicating them. The duplication is a convenience to be used when similar pages, assignments etc. will need to be in each Module, but will be modified slightly to ultimately become different pages, assignments, etc.

Note: Modules that contain quizzes cannot be duplicated. Drag or remove the quiz from the module before duplicating.

Learn More: Canvas Guides: How do I duplicate a module?

You can also duplicate individual module items. Below, please find some resources related to copying your template components:

Adding Module Prerequisites and Requirements

Both module prerequisites and requirements can help provide guidance as to when and how students should access each piece of material within your course. This can also help "declutter" their learning space.

Course Progress

Within Modules, you can view the progress of your students and see how they are progressing through the course.

Learn More: Canvas Guides: How do I use modules to view the progress of students in a course?

Module Prerequisites

When you set up prerequisite modules, students must complete a module before moving to the next module. This can help to ensure that students are not "jumping around" through various modules.

Learn More: Canvas Guides: How do I add prerequisites to a module?

Module Requirements

When you add requirements to a module, students must complete the defined requirements within the module before it will be marked complete. You can require students to complete all requirements in the module, or have them choose one item to fulfill a specific requirement. Examples of requirements include "View the item" or "Mark as done".

Learn More: Canvas Guides: How do I add requirements to a module?