T-PREP Undergraduate Handbook

T-PREP trains students at rural Colorado colleges to become teachers in their own communities. Those students are scattered across the state, so the program’s Canvas handbook is basically the front office: it’s where they go to check requirements, deadlines, and everything else. The problem was, the handbook had gone stale: links were broken, information was outdated, and even the accurate parts were buried where nobody could find them.

I took this on as the capstone for my graduate degree in Learning Design and Technology at CU Denver, partnering with Dr. Valerie Sherman, T-PREP’s director. We started by walking through the whole handbook together on Zoom, all 29 pages across seven modules, flagging what was broken, outdated, or hard to find. I kept running notes in Canvas during those reviews, and that list became my work plan for the rebuild. I rebuilt the handbook in Canvas, starting with a custom main menu on the handbook’s home page, one entry for each of the seven modules, so students have one clear place to start. Long pages got “see more” links that show the first three sentences and expand the rest on click, so students can skim for what they need instead of scrolling through walls of text. I fixed the broken links, brought the content up to date, and ran every page through Canvas’s accessibility checker, fixing what it flagged. Where Canvas’s standard editor couldn’t do what I needed, like the custom menu and the see-more links, I built those pieces in its custom HTML editor, which I taught myself for this project by building on the basic HTML I already knew.

The rebuilt handbook is live in Canvas today.