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DesignPLUS Extended Customizations Course [UW-Madison]
An extended Customizations course is a special course within Canvas that allows designers to make themes and templates that can be used within the Sub Account. Learn@UW has made one extended customizations course for each main sub account under the Manually Created Courses.
This course allows for the customization or creation of the following elements:
- Sub Account Settings
- Themes
- Content block templates
- Banner, Heading, and Link Grid Styles
- Icon Categories
- Policies
- Banner images & Image files
- Templates & Snippets
- Chunks of HTML content that can be inserted anywhere
- Questions
- Primary Tutorials and User Guides
Training Videos
This series of videos covers the various customizations that can be made to the DesignPLUS Sidebar, to provide easy access to custom themes, content blocks, templates, etc.
Introduction
In DesignPLUS, Customizations refers to the way we can customize both the DesignPLUS experience and its available components, either:
- At the root level in Canvas for all courses
- For specific sub-accounts or user
- At the course-level for individual classes
This video covers the various levels of customization that are available.
Account Settings
The Account Settings page of your Customizations course helps you customize how the Sidebar functions for your users.
Color Palette
Build your own custom color palette for your institution (or Canvas class), with as many categories and colors as you'd like.
Content Blocks
- With Content Blocks, you can build aesthetically pleasing and accessibly structured pieces of content.
- Build your own Content Blocks, or pull existing Content Block templates provided by Cidi Labs or UW-Madison.
- Any course instructor or designer can also create Content Block templates at the course level, to simplify their own building process.
CSS Preview
- By adding a [CSS Preview] prefix to any page title, you can see changes made in the floating CSS editor live-reflected in Canvas.
- This helps you preview CSS changes and how they interact with your content and DesignPLUS elements, before making changes to the global CSS that will affect your users.
- When your customizations are ready, you can download the CSS files to upload to your Canvas Theme.
HTML Snippets
Using Snippets, drop chunks of pre-built and pre-styled content right into the Rich Content Editor, including:
- Canvas content
- HTML
- DesignPLUS elements
Customize Snippets to your needs at any level:
- course
- sub-account
- institution
Icons
Create your own custom categories of icons at the root, sub-account, or course level.
Quick Styles
Quick Styles allow users to quickly apply saved colors and styling to DesignPLUS elements. Using an Extended Customizations Course, you can share these:
- At the root level
- To the entire institution
- At the sub-account level
You can also share with a single course by importing the [Quick Styles] page from Canvas Commons.
Themes
You can create your own custom themes in DesignPLUS - by using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, or by writing your own CSS.
- Use customizations courses to create these themes at the root or sub-account levels.
- Or, build directly within individual courses by pulling our DesignPLUS [Themes] page in from Canvas Commons.
Getting Access To The Extended Courses
Learn@UW has created one course per sub account within the Manually Created Courses. Access to these are controlled by the Sub Account Admin(s) for that account. If you need access to this course, please reach out to your departmental support.
Even though the courses are housed in the Manually Created Courses sub account, these courses are tied to both the Manually Created Courses and the Course Guide sub accounts. So one course will control courses in both sub accounts.
Requesting Additional Extended Courses Outside of Course Guide
If an extended Customizations course is needed outside of Course Guide, please reach out to the DoIT helpdesk and they will forward that request to Learn@UW.
Learn@UW will not be creating nor supporting any other Extended Customizations courses within Course Guide at this time.