The new YaleSites platform meets the needs of projects both big and small. By approaching the rebuilding process with a flexible mindset, the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning was able to take advantage of several YaleSites features to create a clear one-stop hub for all Canvas-related information.
For Ryan Sobeck, Assistant Director of Educational Technology at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, creativity was key.
YaleSites has a lot more functionality than you may believe at first glance. You may just need to be a bit more creative with how you employ the elements and blocks available to you.
Ryan Sobeck, Assistant Director, Educational Technology, Poorvu Center
Canvas is a learning management system used to support teaching and learning at Yale. To highlight the user’s primary action of logging in, the Poorvu Center team used an impactful Action Banner at the top of the homepage, calling attention to the NetID Login. Now, accessing Canvas is only one quick click away.
The Poorvu Center used the Action Banner block to draw attention to a key action.
Other helpful blocks, such as Accordions and Tabs, allowed for the simple organization of related content, like the course description elements and course roles. In particular, the Quick Link block, in combination with invisible anchors, enabled the team to make useful table of content links that a user could click on to jump to a specific section.
Ryan noted, “I also really love the ability to tag and categorize content, which has made it much easier to organize our content in the back end of YaleSites, but also made it so that I can more easily call that content out or highlight it across the site by leveraging those tags in filtered views.”
He adds that the training session for content auditing supported this review and tagging process of Canvas content.
Visit the Canvas @ Yale website for inspiration on how YaleSites blocks and tagging can be creatively used to present information.