 Building a great online course takes time, and hopefully the new course template will save you a bit of time. It comes in two flavors. One is the generic course template that you can use for any course you're creating, and the second option is one that is customized for the current semester. So whichever one you want, here's how you get it. First, go out to the Canvas Commons from the Global Navigation menu. From here, you can search by our institution, Southwestern College, or my last name, Shailen, or the name of the item you're looking for. It will bring you to this page which explains what is in the template and gives you an opportunity to import it into Canvas. Find the name of your course and click Import into Course. The green bar will let you know that your import has started, and usually it just takes a couple of minutes to get it into your course. So let's go check it out. Here's the course that I imported to, and there it is already. So you'll find that this template includes a starter homepage which you can edit however you wish. You can replace this banner with one of your own. I recommend making them at Canva. You can create your own custom links to various pages in your course. You can add your own photo and customize the fields for the instructor name, email address, phone number, and office or virtual office. You can make this two separate lines if you wish. This is just placeholder text. You'll also see that some of the settings have been set up for you. In this case I had added an image in advance. When you bring this template into your course you will have a Choose Image option here. You can change the image after you have loaded one in as well. At the bottom you will see that some common customizations have been added in here. For example showing the most recent two announcements on the homepage and hiding the grade distribution graphs from students and not letting them create their own discussion forums. So you can customize all of this however you wish. You can also go to the navigation tab and customize your course menu. These can be drag and dropped to change the order and you can also bring up items that have been hidden by dragging them up here. You'll see that I have a module called Faculty Toolkit. Be sure that you don't publish this. If you do the students will see it and they'll be very confused. This is just for you. So there's a page that walks through how to use this template. I give some information about some of the elements on the homepage, the modules and pages, the settings. And there are also some resources down here for you if you want to learn more and want some additional support while you're building. You will also find some page templates here. You're welcome to use these as you're building pages for your course. There is a page that shows you what a video with the smart player looks like. You can play it. You can check out the interactive transcript on the side. Try out the search feature. If you are ready to embed a smart player video into your course, there's a link to the instructions as well as the how to video. If you would like to request captioning with a smart player, you'll find a link to information about how to do that. And then at the bottom of this page is an example of what a film from Films on Demand looks like. You can play it as well. And remember that if you want to add Films on Demand videos, which are all captioned, all commercial free, you use the Films on Demand icon here on the toolbar, which is exactly what I did to find and embed the video at the bottom of this page. You'll also find a page template for wrap around text. So if you'd like to have an image on one side and text on the other, this is the page for you. You'll see the instructions here for an image on the right of the page, as well as an image on the left of the page. There's also a template for a page with tabs. And there is a template for buttons if you would like to play with those. What I recommend you do if you want to try out one of these is not to actually edit the template here, but to make a copy of it. That way you can learn how to use it and then you can make another copy to put additional content in. To make a copy of a page, use the settings gear to the right of the page's name and select Duplicate. This will make an exact copy of the page ready for editing. Back on the modules page, you will see an orientation unit ready for you to customize. There are placeholder pages where you can tell students about your particular course. There are pages about Canvas and online learning. And support pages for Southwestern College students, including a Q&A discussion. Underneath this, you will find modules for each week of the semester. So I've put in the week number as well as the dates. And where it says name me, you will need to go into the edit mode and give this an actual name, whatever the topic is for the week. So that should be all you have to do in terms of customizing the names of the weeks. And within each module, I have added the bookend pages, the opening page where you can introduce the new week to your students, provide the week's objectives, and perhaps list the assignments and activities that they can look forward to for the week. Then, of course, you will add all of those assignments, activities, course content. And then I have included a starter concluding page, a wrap up page, that you can use to recap what was done during the week and perhaps look ahead to get students thinking about what's coming up in the next week. This is all fully customizable, so feel free to change the graphics or the colors, delete things. If you don't want a looking ahead section, if you'd like to do something else, like additional resources, this is all completely customizable. You also can delete extra modules if you don't need them all. So this is for a 16-week semester. If your course is an 8-week course, you can delete the modules by clicking on the gear icon and selecting delete for whichever ones you don't need. Okay, that's it for our quick tour of the template. I hope you find lots in here that makes your life easier. Happy building!