Best Practices Checklist
Administrative
- Give your guides a friendly URL
- Add Subjects and Tags to your guides
- Include your contact information
- Include a photo of yourself in your profile, or at least some kind of image (some options)
- Integrate your guides with Canvas using Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)
Accessibility
- Use descriptive link text — no "click here" links!
- Add alt tags to images(describe the image for those who cannot see it)
- Try to avoid using tables
- Make PDFs accessible for screen readers (see PDF Accessibility)
- Save Word, Excel, and other text documents as PDFs before uploading them, and add "PDF" to the end of the link name.
- Make sure video content includes closed captioning or a transcript
- When embedding content in an iframe, add a title attribute (see “Be sure to add titles to iFrames” for help)
Content
- Use as little text as necessary to get the point across
- Ensure the text is typo and error free
- Use acronyms sparingly and spell them out on the first occurrence.
- Avoid library jargon and complex scholarly terminology
- For course guides, match the language to the syllabus and align it with course objectives
- Add databases using the Database content type
- Reuse content where possible!
- Use small images to reduce load time
- Have links to external sites open in new tabs
Assessment & Maintenance
- Monitor guide usage by viewing statistics
- Focus on having fewer, high-quality guides that can be effectively maintained
- Regularly review and update guides to ensure content remains current and relevant
- Use the Link Checker occasionally to weed out dead links (or add the Check My Links browser extension to your browser for a more reliable link checker!)