Units, Modules, and Pages

Units

A unit is an individual part of the sequence of the curriculum in your course. For convenience, most instructors think of units in terms of weeks, with each unit being one week of material. This is why you will often hear people talk about Canvas as if units, weeks, and modules are the same thing. But a unit can extend to as much (or as little) time in the quarter as you'd like and contain more than one module!

Modules

Located within the Modules section of your course, a module is the top level of organization within your  course content. A module is a container that can hold pages, quizzes, discussion boards, links to other sites, and links to files, all in a hierarchy. Each of these items occupies one "row" in a module. As you read this, you are in the third module of this course.

Here's an example of a module, with different types of items labeled (note the different icons to the left of each item in a module):

Pages

Pages are of particular importance because they are the basic unit of content in Canvas. Pages may contain formatted text, links to documents, images, websites, and other content, and embedded videos or other multimedia materials, as you've seen already working through this course. We'll get to some other content types later in the course.

Pages are almost always incorporated into (linked within) modules as part of that module's hierarchy, as you see in this course and in the above illustration.

You can create standalone pages and link to them from within other pages. This is useful when you don't want to link to the page as part of your module's hierarchy. For instance, you might create your full syllabus as a Canvas page (rather than a PDF or Word document) and link to that from your Syllabus page.