Mastering DesignPlus

Welcome to Mastering DesignPlus: Your Canvas Companion!
Design Plus

Mastering DesignPlus

Mastering DesignPlus: Your Canvas Companion is a short, practical video series to help UTA faculty design clearer, more engaging Canvas courses. Whether you’re new to DesignPlus or refining an existing course, these tutorials highlight essential tools, real course examples, and time‑saving design strategies you can use right away. The focus is on efficient, accessible course design that enhances the student experience—without adding extra work.

Explore DesignPlus

Mastering DesignPLUS: Your Canvas Companion

DesignPLUS works inside Canvas to help instructors improve course page layout, organization, and accessibility. It adds a DesignPLUS sidebar to the Canvas editor with ready‑to‑use design tools—no HTML, no separate platform.

How to access DesignPLUS in Canvas

To access DesignPLUS:

  1. Go to your Canvas course.
  2. Open (or create) a Page, Assignment, or Discussion.
  3. Click Edit to open the Rich Content Editor.
  4. Look for the DesignPLUS rocket icon 🚀 in the editor toolbar or sidebar.
  5. Click the rocket icon to open the DesignPLUS tools and layout options.

Once opened, DesignPLUS allows you to add menus, accordions, flip cards, tabs, and other interactive elements that help organize content and improve navigation for students. 

What this video series is for

This short video series is designed for busy faculty and focuses on:

  • Time‑saving design strategies
  • Real Canvas course examples
  • Small changes that make pages easier for students to navigate
  • Consistent, accessible layouts you can reuse across courses

Learn more about what DesignPlus is

Self-Enroll in CDE's DesignPlus Course

only available to UTA faculty, staff, and students

Learn more features in the DesignPlus User Guide

From Jess Kahlow’s series from the UTA Center for Distance Education:

This video series was created to share practical tips, walkthroughs, and real course examples that make Canvas design not only easier but more impactful. Whether you’re just getting started with DesignPlus or already familiar with its features. We hope you’ll find these tutorials valuable in mastering all the tools DesignPlus has to offer. 💡If you have any ideas for topics you'd like to see covered in future videos, feel free to let us know—we'd love to hear from you!

Playlist from the UTA Center for Distance Education

Whether you're new to DesignPlus or looking to refine your skills, this series has you covered. Each video is designed to walk you through essential tools, features, and techniques that will make course creation smoother and more efficient.

Mastering DesignPlus: Your Canvas Companion

This guide introduces the DesignPLUS Sidebar in Canvas LMS, showing users how to enable it, explore its key tools, enhance page design with interactive elements, and streamline content creation with helpful tips and resources.

This video demonstrates how to use DesignPLUS in Canvas LMS to quickly refine existing course content, improve structure and visual hierarchy, and create cleaner, more accessible, and professional-looking pages with minimal effort.

In this video, UTA’s Center for Distance Education shares how Quick Checks—simple, ungraded self-assessments—can dramatically boost student engagement, memory retention, and motivation.

In this video, we’ll show you how to transform that space into a clear, welcoming, and interactive experience that helps students actually engage with your syllabus content.

This video explains how to design an engaging and meaningful course home page in Canvas LMS, helping instructors welcome students, highlight key resources, and create a strong first impression that sets the tone for the course experience.

In this video, we’ll walk you through simple yet impactful ways to optimize your module overview pages to better guide students.

In this video, we’ll walk through the QuickStart Wizard, a powerful DesignPlus feature that appears automatically on any new and empty page in Canvas. The best part? You don’t need to know how to use DesignPlus or even open the sidebar.

In this video, we’ll walk through how to use the DesignPLUS Module Builder to streamline your workflow and set up organized, visually clear modules in a fraction of the time. Whether you're creating a weekly structure, topic-based layout, or anything in between, the Module Builder helps you quickly add pages, assignments, and more—complete with consistent naming and formatting.

In this quick tutorial, you'll learn how to use the Multi-Tool in DesignPLUS to set and adjust assignment and page due dates across your entire course—all from one simple interface. Whether you're prepping a new course or refreshing one for the next semester, this tool can save you time and help you stay organized.

This video offers a behind-the-scenes look at designing a Quality Matters-certified course in Canvas LMS using DesignPLUS, blending proven strategies from ACUE with creative design ideas to enhance the online learning experience.

Quotes from Instructional Designers at the Center for Distance Education (CDE)

DesignPLUS has changed how I think about page design in Canvas. Instead of relying on custom HTML or manually maintaining things like page numbers, I can use built‑in layouts, tabs, and a progress bar to organize content in a way that’s consistent and student‑friendly.

Kylie Falce

Center for Distance Education
The MultiTool is a hidden gem of DesignPlus that allows me to create page and assignment templates and build modules in bulk based on those templates. I can also set and modify availability and due dates on a single screen.

Diann Maurer

Center for Distance Education
I appreciate the easy options DesignPLUS offers for organizing content and incorporating meaningful interaction. For example, when presenting a text-heavy topic, I can easily break the material across multiple tabs directly on the page in Canvas, making it more manageable. Below that, I can embed a quick check question to reinforce key concepts and ensure students are engaging with the material.

Brittany Usman

Center for Distance Education
Using DesignPLUS makes it much easier to scale course design while maintaining quality and accessibility. It saves time on page setup and allows me to create more engaging, interactive learning experiences without sacrificing consistency.

Amanda Ehrlich

Center for Distance Education

Video overview

Dr. Christy Spivey demonstrates how DesignPLUS can be used in Canvas to organize course content into clear, navigable pages using menus and interactive elements such as flip cards, accordions, tabs, and practice questions. The video highlights how thoughtful page design can improve usability, engagement, and the overall student experience in online and hybrid courses.