Slide Deck Challenge

The Challenge

There is no “ideal” solution for hosting lecture slides…

Ideally, lecturers would be able to keep hosted lecture slides for each lesson “private and locked down” and embedded within a CANVAS Free for Teacher course “Page.”

• “private and locked down” means that the URL for the hosted slides does not appear in google search results, students cannot see nor find the URL, and the slides are not downloadable.
• “embedded” means that the slides are instantly viewable within a Page inside of a CANVAS Free for Teachers course.

Embedding within a CANVAS Free for Teacher course Page would mean fewer clicks and better concentration/focus for students which theoretically would lead to a more satisfying learning experience and better learning outcomes.

Ideally, students would not need to enter a password to see the hosted lecture slides embedded on the CANVAS Page.

eliminating the need for a password is a “nice-to-have” capability, not a must-have capability.

From my perspective, the ideal “fit-for-purpose” solution would enable the lecture slides to leverage the fact that students had to login to their CANVAS Free for Teachers account and enter the hosted course to see the lecture slides (i.e. if someone outside my CANVAS course happened upon the private URL they would not be able to view the slides). Perhaps this would require some kind of API handshake between CANVAS Free for Teachers and Speaker Deck?

It seems likely that part of the solution resides within CANVAS’ External Apps Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) feature. (LTI is a standard created by IMS Global). Users can add external apps for courses via URL, manual configuration, or XML. And, I need to investigate whether the hosted slide deck has the ability to generate a Consumer Key and Shared Secret.