Everyone needs a road-map!

This is even more important when we are talking about online courses. Over the years teaching online I have found how important is to give students right at the very first contact an effective and user friendly tool that takes them exactly where they need to go in the course and that shows them around the course as a good hostess.

Thinking about it seems a pretty logical tah! idea, right? The challenge is making an EFFECTIVE introduction video!
This process takes quite some time, effort and definitely a few failures to launch. After working on Moodle for 5 yeas I thought I had my intro video pretty much nailed down to perfection. I was so proud of it. This year though with the adoption of the new (for me) LMS Canvas I had to remake all my introductory video on a LMS I was not very familiar with, so I am back dealing with my first "failure to launch" Canvas' road-map.

It is amazing how many things I learn in the first 48 hours of the school years, when the floodgate is open and students are pouring into the courses. That's when you find out a lot of the things that can go wrong! This time around though there was a particular step that I totally underestimated and that has proved to be critical in the misguidance of students arriving to the course. I had some great conversations with some of my colleagues at the Distance Learning department, and we are planning to put our hands back on the video and create some guidelines for all our intro to the course videos so that students enrolled in any of our courses would find some sort of consistency in the navigation.

This is my first Canvas intro video and the Home Page shown here actually has been already restyled reducing the size of the 3 buttons, placing them on the right of the welcoming message, and adding my photo and contact info right under the buttons, as you can see in this image on the right.
I am not yet 100% satisfied with the layout of my home page, however this organization did not cause any troubles, while the video did, and this is why I would like to start tacking that first.

I would greatly appreciate any constructive criticism about the video and if you have 2 cents also for the home page, feel free to throw them here as well :)

Next step: listing problem caused by the current video and then start planning the new video!