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Introduction Customizations Courses

What can you do with a customizations course?

There are a variety of aspects within Design Tools that can be customized. When the tools are installed these customizations are added at an account level with a Primary Customizations course.

An Extended Customizations course allows you to further customize Design Tools.

What can be customized?

Customizations include:

Banner images
Color palettes
Content block templates
Objectives/Outcomes
Support information
Syllabus policies
Template pages
Themes

Additional customizations will be added as time goes on.

Colors Only

If you are only looking to customize the theme colors at a sub-account level, take a look at our Customizing the Theme Colors page.

Primary Customizations

A Design Tools Primary Customizations course is created when Design Tools for Canvas are installed for an institution. The various customizations available are covered as part of the admin training provided by Cidi Labs.

How are additional customizations courses made available?

Additional customizations can be made using a Design Tools Extended Customizations course.

There are two ways these additional customizations can be added to Design Tools:

At the sub-account level
At an individual user level

Sub-Account

By adding some JavaScript at the sub-account level, the additional customizations of this course can be made available to all courses within a sub-account. The JavaScript that is added to the sub account can be created when using the Cidi Labs install form (contact us at support@cidilabs.com to learn more). Additional information can be found in the Account Level Setup page inside of the extended customizations course.

DesignPLUS only supports one extended customizations course at the sub-account level. If a different extended customizations course gets added at a sub-sub-account level, it will override the customizations course(s) defined in parent accounts.

Individual User

The customizations within an extended customizations course can also be turned on by an individual user. This functionality is useful when:

Working on courses or programs that span multiple sub-accounts.
When you want to share customized content with team members.
When you do not have permissions to add/edit account level CSS and JavaScript.

Go to the Sharing Customizations page within an extended customizations course to add the customizations from that course to your browser.

Creating an Extended Customizations Course

Customizations courses were previously available through Canvas Commons. These courses are now managed using the Design Tools Install application. If you are interested in learning how, please send your request to support@cidilabs.com and we are happy to walk you through the process to setup your first Extended Customizations course.

What does it look like?*

The way that these customizations appear varies based on features but you will find some example screenshots below.

Note

When configuring at the sub-account level, you set an identifier (examples: English Dept, Engineering, PHS, Online, etc.). In the screenshots below the identifier was set to "Sub-account".
At the individual level, a "Shared" identifier is used.

Customizations Comparison
Feature	Only Primary Customizations	Extended
Banner Images
Basic Color Picker**
Advanced Color Picker
Content block templates
Objectives / Outcomes
Support Information
Syllabus Policies
Template Pages
Themes

*Actual appearance may vary from the screenshots above as the tools grow and adapt.

**Requires users already using the tools to reset palette to defaults before they see the additional row(s) of colors.