Lessons Learned from the 2025 Canvas Hall of Fame Winners
On May 22, 2025, three new Northwestern instructors were inducted into the Northwestern Canvas Hall of Fame. This year’s winners are:
- Most Innovative Course: Yiji Zhang, Computer Science
- Best Use of Video: Mindy Thorpe, Prosthetics and Orthotics
- Excellence in Community and Accessibility: Danielle Gilbert, Political Science
While these instructors teach in different fields and were recognized for different achievements, all three share similar perspectives and ideas about how to use Canvas effectively.
Lesson 1: Repeating Structures Reduce Stress
All three award-winning course sites feature repeating weekly structures to help guide students through the course content—a welcoming home page guides students to the specific page landing page for the relevant week where all the learning objectives, class activities, readings, and other pertinent information are listed. Students appreciate this structure, with one noting in their nomination, “The information is really clear and organized and it made everything super easy to access and follow.”
Clear content organization takes time admits Professor Zhang, but she felt that the investment was worth it for the clarity it brought to students throughout the quarter. By reducing the cognitive burden of searching for materials in the course site, Professor Zhang allowed her students to spend more mental energy on learning the concepts of the course.
Related Resources
All three courses made use of the templates provided by Teaching and Learning Technologies in Canvas Commons. In addition, we have added a template of Professor Zhang’s attractive homepage to Commons – check it out and see if a template can help your course add structure to remove barriers.
Lesson 2: Get Help Learning New Technologies
From tech-savvy to tech-nervous, the Hall of Fame winners have a wide range of comfort with new educational technologies. But all three know the value of reaching out for help when learning new tools. The three professors each have experience with other LMS platforms, so they took advantage of workshops and consultations when starting with Canvas.
Professor Zhang attended a workshop on using divs to structure her pages and Professor Gilbert attended an introduction to Canvas workshop. Both programs will be offered again on August 28 – sign up on Eventcat.
While Canvas Hall of Fame instructors regularly incorporate new tools into their courses, they also know to do so thoughtfully to avoid tool overload among students. Professor Thorpe uses the cohort-based nature of the Prosthetics and Orthotics program to her benefit when introducing new structures or tools in her course. In collaboration with colleagues who teach later in the sequence, new technologies added to her course are then carried through to the other courses in the sequence for that cohort of students. While that level of coordination may not be possible in all courses and programs, being mindful of only adding a tool or platform when the core Canvas product doesn’t meet a specific need and keeping external tools and platforms to a minimum avoids student confusion and stress.
Related Resources
Schedule a consultation with Teaching and Learning Technologies if you are considering adding a tool or external site to your Canvas course so we can help you create a cohesive learning environment for your students.
Lesson 3: Let Canvas Design Reflect the Course Values
“Using Canvas” is likely not a stated goal of any Northwestern courses. But goals like “make students feel welcome in the course” and “spark enthusiasm for the course topics” are teaching goals that can be accomplished via Canvas.
Professor Zhang built her Canvas course with the hopes that a clear, approachable course would signal an approachable professor. She hopes that this positive learning experience in an introductory computer science course may even motivate more students to pursue the subject further in other courses.
Similarly, Professor Gilbert sees Canvas as a means to convey her course ethos. She wants her classrooms to be a combination of rooting for her students’ success and setting clear expectations for what they will accomplish in the course. Canvas allows her to communicate with warmth and clarity, check in regularly with students, and provide the learning materials that she hopes will help them think differently about the world. Thus, her Canvas course is set up to reflect her teaching values and care for students.
Related Resources
In addition to programs run by the Searle Center for Advancing Learning and Teaching, instructors can also request the Collaborative Course Evaluation Service through Teaching and Learning Technologies or review the Course Mapping Basics self-paced course to learn how course values can be reflected in a Canvas site.
Bonus Tip: Borrow from Colleagues!
Instructors have a lot on their plates so optimize your time, when possible, with the help of colleagues. Professor Gilbert’s course features a project where students present on a topic in international relations using a medium of their choosing. Incorporating Universal Design for Learning principles, this project elicits a wide range of creative, high-quality projects. And it’s borrowed from a colleague at another institution, which she readily tells students.
Professor Thorpe knows that just hearing from one person in course videos is not as interesting to students as hearing from a variety of instructors, so she uses videos from her colleagues in the program to provide a variety of voices for her students. This has the added benefit of familiarizing the students with other faculty members, who they will work with later in the program.
Related Resource
Learn more borrowable ideas from these instructors at the upcoming TEACHxperts event on Thursday, September 4, 12 p.m. Register on Eventcat.