Welcome to the Online Instructor Toolkit—a collection of resources, strategies, and best practices designed to support your success in teaching online. Whether you’re building a new course or enhancing an existing one, this toolkit offers practical guidance, templates, and tools to help you create engaging, accessible, and high-quality learning experiences for your students.
Where to Begin: Designing a Canvas Course
If you are new to online or hybrid teaching in Canvas, there are resources available to help you design and organize your course shell. Knowing where to begin is important when teaching online, and the Canvas Training with Pedagogy faculty development course is a great place to start. This self-paced training covers the basics of online instructional strategies and features in Canvas and will prepare you to navigate the platform’s basic features, create content and modules, utilize course tools, and recognize best practices for designing online courses.
If you are looking to enhance your online course, the Canvas Enhancers is a valuable resource. This repository houses detailed instructions on ways to improve your course including information on AI in education, APA and MLA formatting, utilizing technology, and developing skills such as critical thinking and time management.
To ensure all necessary design components are included in your Canvas course, it is best practice to follow the Instructional Design Checklist. This checklist provides a breakdown of what features must be present, such as learning outcomes and alignment, course organization, accessibility, privacy and technology, and progress monitoring.
Minimum Standards for Online and Hybrid Courses
To further strengthen consistency, quality, and student success, the college has finalized Minimum Standards for Online and Hybrid Courses (attached), developed through collaborative faculty and committee work.
These standards outline baseline expectations for course organization, accessibility, instructor presence, communication, and Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI). They are designed to ensure that all online and hybrid courses provide students with a clear, navigable, accessible, and instructionally-engaged experience, while still preserving academic freedom and flexibility.
Key expectations include a clearly organized Canvas course with defined learning outcomes, an identifiable Start Here orientation area, accessible course materials, transparent communication and feedback timelines, and instructor-initiated instructional engagement throughout the term. Regular and Substantive Interaction may take many forms—such as instructional announcements, discussion facilitation, meaningful feedback, instructor-created learning materials, and proactive outreach to students—and should be visible across the duration of the class.
Resources and Strategies
Regular and Substantive Interaction (RSI) is a critical component of quality online education, mandated by federal guidelines to ensure meaningful engagement between instructors and students. RSI benefits students by enhancing their understanding of course material, promoting a sense of belonging in the learning community, and improving overall academic success.
Examples of RSI include: 1) personalized video feedback on assignments, which allows students to understand their progress more clearly; 2) weekly announcements that outline upcoming content and provide motivation; 3) discussion board participation where the instructor poses thought-provoking questions and engages with students’ responses; 4) synchronous office hours for real-time support and guidance; and 5) timely and substantive feedback, which encourage reflection and critical thinking. By implementing these strategies, instructors create a supportive and responsive learning environment that fosters student success.
Creating presence in the online classroom is essential for fostering engagement, persistence, and meaningful learning. Grounded in the Community of Inquiry framework, effective online instruction intentionally integrates teaching presence (clear design, facilitation, and feedback), social presence (connection and interaction), and cognitive presence (critical thinking and application). When these elements are aligned, students experience the course as structured, supportive, and intellectually engaging rather than isolated or transactional.
In practice, presence is built through consistent and visible instructor actions. Short weekly video announcements, timely and personalized feedback (especially video feedback in Canvas), and clearly organized modules strengthen teaching presence. Opportunities for authentic interaction—such as structured discussions, video introductions and video-based discussions, and collaborative activities—support social presence. Finally, incorporating real-world problems, case studies, and reflective prompts encourages cognitive presence by pushing students to apply and extend their learning. Even small adjustments, such as using student names or adding a brief check-in, can significantly enhance the overall learning experience.
High-Impact Strategies
- Weekly video announcements (short, personable, preview + recap)
- Clear module structure (consistent navigation = reduced cognitive load)
- Timely, meaningful feedback (audio/video preferred when possible)
- Explicit communication expectations (response times, grading timelines)
Classroom Impact Meter from GCU
Designing AI-resistant activities in the online classroom is less about preventing tool use and more about shifting what and how students are asked to demonstrate learning. Grounded in principles like authentic assessment and the Community of Inquiry framework, effective activities emphasize process, personalization, and application over easily generated outputs. When students must connect course concepts to their own experiences, local contexts, or evolving discussions, the work becomes inherently more difficult to outsource to AI and more meaningful to the learner.
In practice, AI-resistant design prioritizes transparency and iteration. Multi-step assignments that include drafts, reflections, and checkpoints make thinking visible and reduce reliance on one-time submissions. Activities such as case-based discussions, scenario responses, annotated problem-solving, and short video or audio explanations require students to demonstrate how they arrived at an answer—not just the answer itself. Additionally, incorporating peer interaction, requiring citations of course-specific materials, and asking students to critique or improve AI-generated responses can transform AI from a shortcut into a learning tool while maintaining academic integrity.
Structuring your online course in a way that promotes ease of access and user readability is essential. Course organization can include locating content, providing course navigation guidance, and creating consistent organization of modules and pages. Modules themselves can be organized by week, learning unit, or instructional segment, so long as they each include an overview, instructional materials, learning activities, assignments, and a summary (see Instructional Design Checklist).
Below are several resources to help you get started with designing your Canvas course, including example course designs and an organizational template you can add to your course from Canvas Commons with quality organizational structures for your Modules and Home page.