Facing declining student engagement and Canvas courses that often felt more like digital textbooks than interactive learning experiences, UT High School set out to transform how its fully online students learn. The school needed a way to create engaging, accessible, and consistent courses without relying on time-consuming HTML development or sending students outside the Canvas LMS.
With DesignPLUS from Cidi Labs, UT High School gave its curriculum and instructional technology teams the tools to build engaging, accessible learning experiences directly in Canvas while making course development more efficient. After its first semester with redesigned courses, the school saw measurable improvements in student engagement and success:
As UT High School’s full-time program grew, administrators and faculty saw a concerning trend: student engagement was declining, particularly among younger students. At one point, the school estimated that only about 50% of students were actively engaging in courses and completing their work.
Part of the challenge was how courses had been built. Canvas pages often resembled sections of a textbook. Students read through content and answered questions rather than interacting with what they were learning.
“It’s hard to get excited about your classes if you’re just reading and then answering the questions at the bottom of the chapter or the page,” said Katie Howell, Learning Specialist at UT High School.
Changing that experience wasn’t simple. UT High School was balancing student support, program growth, and curriculum development. And while they had good ideas for creating richer learning experiences, implementing elements such as accordions and hover effects required technical expertise.
The school also wanted to keep students within Canvas rather than sending them to third-party tools, while ensuring the content it created was accessible.
UT High School brought its curriculum, instructional technology, and learning specialists together around a course redesign initiative and adopted DesignPLUS from Cidi Labs to turn their ideas into scalable course experiences.
DesignPLUS is a powerful suite of Canvas course design tools that let educators and instructional designers quickly create well-designed, engaging, and accessible course content without requiring advanced coding skills.
For UT High School, that meant its team could move away from time-consuming HTML work and give course designers tools they could use themselves.
As Technology Director James Garza explained, the team had previously built many of these capabilities on its own. DesignPLUS changed the equation.
“Someone has already done this,” Garza said. “Why did we reinvent the wheel? Once we found that option, it was pretty much a no-brainer. [DesignPLUS] not only helped the quality, but it also helped our efficiency in building these courses.”
The UT High School team developed templates, custom content blocks, and reusable elements that made course building faster while creating greater consistency across courses and protecting the school’s visual identity.
“That allowed us to have consistency across all courses,” Garza said. “It allows us to maintain our brand instead of everyone kind of going Wild West and doing their own thing.”
The redesign was about more than aesthetics, though.
UT High School began using DesignPLUS features such as Accordions, Tooltips, Progress Indicators, Flip Cards, drag-and-drop activities, and Interactive Exercises to make learning active and purposeful.
Hover and click-to-reveal elements, such as Tooltips and Popovers, allow students to see vocabulary definitions directly within the content instead of navigating to a separate glossary. Questions and answers can be placed alongside learning material rather than requiring students to go elsewhere to find them.
Interactive Exercises have been particularly valuable for the school. These low- or no-stakes activities let students practice what they’re learning and receive immediate feedback instead of waiting until the end of a lesson or unit to find out whether they understand the material.
For students learning independently in a fully online environment, that instant feedback can make a significant difference.
After completing its first semester with courses redesigned by DesignPLUS, UT High School saw a 16% year-over-year increase in pass rates. The school also reported a 17% decrease in the number of students behind pace at the six-week mark.
The numbers were accompanied by noticeable changes in student engagement.
Students were interacting more with course content, and those experiencing both redesigned and older courses began asking when their other courses would be updated with DesignPLUS.
Students have responded particularly well to Quick Checks, which allow them to see what they’re expected to learn and immediately check their understanding. In end-of-course reflections, students repeatedly pointed to having questions alongside learning content as something that helped them gauge their own progress and feel confident while learning independently.
Meanwhile, the redesign is still underway at UT High School. The school is working toward bringing its courses up to the new standard across a three-year initiative. But the results so far have given the team all the evidence they need to keep going.
As Garza put it, “I can only tell you what the data tells me. And the data that we have for Cidi Labs [DesignPLUS] is very positive.”
About UT High School
UT High School is a fully online school operated by The University of Texas at Austin. It serves students through multiple virtual learning models, including individual online courses and a full-time high school program leading to graduation.
About Cidi Labs
Cidi Labs creates innovative, easy-to-use tools that help institutions get more from Canvas. From course design and accessibility to content management and student success, our solutions help educators and instructional designers work more efficiently, create better learning experiences, and scale best practices across their institutions.
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