It can be a bit daunting to set up a course in Canvas for the first time. In order to help OSU instructors get started, we provide a basic Oregon State University Canvas template for campus-based courses. This template provides a standard structure for the course and offers guidance on adding and organizing course content that will help students navigate through the course. It does not prescribe course content and you may modify the template to suit your needs after importing it into your Canvas site. See a read-only version of the Oregon State University Canvas template for campus-based courses.

The template resides on Canvas Commons, a place to find and share course content e.g., assignments quizzes and more. You can import the template into an empty Canvas course site, then either start building in your content from scratch or import specific content from other Canvas sites to add to your templated site. We do NOT recommend importing templates into Canvas sites that already contain content. This will often result in template and course content mingled together in modules that can be difficult to untangle.

To find and import the template from Canvas Commons into an empty Canvas site:

  1. Navigate to the empty Canvas site to which you want to import the template. Make a note of the Canvas course site name or code as you will need this information at a later step.
  2. On the Home page of your course, click Import from Commons in the menu on the right side of the page.
  3. Type "Oregon State University Canvas Template" in the search bar.
  4. Click on the search result with the same name to open the template's resource page in Canvas Commons.
  5. Click the Import/Download button located on the right side of the page
  6. Locate and check the box next to the name of the empty Canvas course (from step 1) in the "Import into Canvas” box on the right side of the page.
  7. Click the Import into Course button to begin the import process.

More details here on importing from Commons.

To import content from another course into your templated course:

  1. Navigate to the now-templated Canvas site that you created with the steps above.
  2. Click the Import Course Content button on the right-hand side of the page.
  3. On the Import Content page:
    1. In the Content Type box, choose “Copy a Canvas Course” from the drop-down menu.
    2. In the Search for a Course section, search for the course from which you want to import content.
    3. In the Content section, choose Select specific content. Do not select all content.
  4. Click Import
  5. Click Select Content
  6. Use the arrow to expand content groups and check boxes to select specific content. Do not select anything from the Modules section.
  7. Click Select Content to start the import process. A progress bar will appear and indicate the status of the import.

For more information and pictures of this process, please refer to Canvas documentation on how to select specific content or watch a video about importing specific content into Canvas.