Cultural History for advanced German

Context

Post-secondary German, advanced-level
German 330
Brigham Young University

Purposes and background

  1. Increase accessibility to course materials
  2. Unify student access to their grades with coursework site
  3. Improve organization and visual appeal in material presentation

For German 330, student originally used a google site, set up by their professor. While this worked, connect was not as well organized and it could be tricky to navigate back to critical pages. Additionally, grades were only processed using the university’s homemade LMS (Learning Suite), which meant that student potentially needed to navigate to multiple sites to manage their coursework.

Solution

I recreated the course using canvas, an alternative LMS used by BYU. This included the visual design and organizational aspects of the course. Many of the pages in the older google site were combined into single pages. Superfluous text was trimmed out, and I made an effort to present the most important information in prominent spaces.

Results

Objective 1: Increase accessibility to course materials
Moving course materials to canvas reduces the number of different websites that students need to track, as they likely have at least one other course on canvas. Additionally, improved organization of materials should also increase accessibility.

Objective 2: Unify access to grades with course materials site
The convenience of having course materials and grades on one site makes it easier for students to track their progress and the upcoming coursework side-by-side. It also creates a platform for online submission of assignments and digital sharing of materials (a core component of the course), which reduces paper-waste.

Objective 3: Improve organization and visual appeal in material presentation
Canvas’s editing tools made more complicated elements easier to build and integrate. Things like accordion menus and higher quality images have hopefully contributed to the student experience by making their course more visually interesting and organized. Dark modes forced by browsers or extensions should also work well for those who prefer it.

Screenshots