Organizing LMS and Website Navigation

Clearly, a website needs a clear layout.  Visitors need to know where to go, especially when it's an educational website.  My students visiting the site need to know which pages to visit and in which order, especially since they need quick access to the concepts and assignments specific to that week.  But what's the best way to make that happen?

Organizing Thoughts for Others

When setting up online courses on a learning management system (LMS), it's essential that every page be clearly labelled.  To make this happen, you need to do some backwards planning in course design, and from there it feels relatively simply to set up everything.

The difference with websites, however, is that they don't have the preestablished structure of an LMS.  With websites — especially on platforms like Google Sites — you have the freedom to set up whatever navigation system you like.  The benefit is that you can make it look pretty and potentially more user-friendly than your institution's LMS — the downside is that your students aren't already familiar with the structure, so it takes more work to ensure your website actually makes sense.  And in looking over early pages on this UDL site, I'm secretely horrified by how poorly I put together some of these pages.

With a teaching website, part of the challenge comes from the fact that there are three main types of pages to include:

• Curriculum Pages indicate the overall order of the course, often providing links and summaries to guide students to the right page for a given point of time in the semester.

• Concept Pages describe the course content, such as definitions of vocabulary or examples to illustrate.

• Assignment Pages give the tasks that students need to accomplish outside of class.

In this setup, you want to build a linear order for students to access all their material — you don't want them flailing around in search of tonight's homework.  LMS platforms are naturally built to accommodate this need — assignments, quizzes, discussions, and informational pages all have their specific link types, often with icons.  Additionally, many platforms provide modules so you can arrange these different pages in the order that students would need to access them.  Students simply scroll down the long list of course materials, click on the link for today, and that's it.

Because an LMS platform already integrates vast quantities of data to calculate student grades and control access, most platforms also include a calendar to show assignment deadlines, often across multiple courses.  If an instructor designs a good course with assignments and deadlines, a student doesn't even need to go to the specific course shell to see which assignments are due when.  And if you change a due date, it automatically updates the calendar or perhaps even sends out a notification.

LMS Disadvantage: Hard to Share Materials

For online learning, those functions are absolutely essential, and for in-person courses they can significantly streamline communication.  But privacy concerns keep these functions limited to your current students — with Canvas, I've noticed that links to many resources and videos I uploaded to Canvas for past courses are simply not available to students in new sections, even when I've copied an entire course.  This gets very frustrating after I've put in the hours of work to craft a course.

Additionally, an LMS puts you at the mercy of your institution.  This semester, I realized that all the Canvas courses I built at Heartland before Covid simply don't exist in the system anymore.  I'm not heartbroken because most of those materials got copied into my more recent courses, but I know I lost some materials.  If those were my only copies, I would be rather upset.

This issue becomes even more acute if you switch institutions.  When I worked at Illinois State University, we used Blackboard and ReggieNet (built from Sakai), and I no longer have copies of any of the materials I typed into those programs.  At that time, I didn't use online materials nearly as often as I do now, but I did build a couple online creative writing courses.  Had I been more conscientious, I might have typed those materials first in Google Docs and then copied them over, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead.