IU Career EDGE

What is Career EDGE?

From the courses students choose and the experiences they have both inside and outside the classroom, they are building the foundation for their future career paths. To help students develop career awareness, we have created a series of online modules in Canvas that can be embedded in courses or other organized activities and used by instructors and academic and career advisors in order to support students as they:

  • Explore their values, strengths and interests in relation to degrees and careers.
  • Develop an academic plan that connects with careers that excite them.
  • Graduate with a solid plan for furthering their professional goals, and be
  • Employed in a career that they are passionate about!

The EDGE Initiative was originally a Lilly grant-funded project led by a team of faculty and staff from throughout the IU system, and it is now managed by the Office of the Vice President for Student Success. Please contact the University Director for Career Development and Work-based Learning with any questions or feedback about the modules.

Faculty/Staff: Preview

Faculty and staff can preview the EDGE modules by signing up for the course yourself using IU Expand. When you enter the course, you will be seeing it exactly as your students would see it.

Students: Self-Enroll

Students can also self-enroll in the modules through the IU Career EDGE course in IU Expand. You can choose which modules to complete, and work through them at your own pace.

Using the EDGE modules

EDGE was developed using Modules in Canvas. Modules allow instructors to control the pathway by which students move through course material. A module consists of a series of pages ordered in a particular way.

You have two options for how to use EDGE in your courses.

Link to the Expand course

Post a link that takes students to the course in Expand and have them sign up there and complete work to turn in for assignments for you. While you may only be using a single module or even a single section of an EDGE module in your course, when students enroll in the Expand course to do their work, they have access to all of EDGE and can come back to it whenever they need to know more.

URL to Course in IU Expand: https://expand.iu.edu/browse/ovpss/courses/iu-career-edge

Make a copy of the modules

Download the module(s) you want to use in your course from Canvas Commons into your own Canvas site (for your course or any other Canvas site you have created and populated, such as one for majors or an advising group). Follow the directions below to download the modules from Commons. If you go this route, keep in mind that every module has links within it to other modules. You would want to remove or inactivate those links so your students don't try to follow them.

Downloading the modules into your own course allows you to make modifications in the text and determine if there is anything you'd like to change to a graded assignment. Students will be able to submit their module work directly to you through your Canvas site.

Once you download the modules, you'll see them as a set of linked pages (see image below).

Screenshot of an EDGE module in Canvas. It is set up just like a standard Canvas module.

When you want to search for and import content into your course:

  1. Log into Canvas.
  2. Click Commons from the global navigation menu (global navigation = your dashboard, courses, calendar, inbox, history, Commons...).
  3. In the search field at the top of the page, type "Career EDGE" (including quotations and click enter. You will see the IU Career EDGE Course, as well as each of the modules. Be aware that there is a version of the course for high school students, which has "high school" in the title and intended audience is listed as grades 9-12, instead of the Ungraduate-Graduate audience on the ones you would download.
  4. As the instructor, you can either download the entire course into your Canvas class, or specific modules. Here are the current module titles so you know what is available:
    • IU Career EDGE Homepage
    • IU Career EDGE Networking
    • IU Career EDGE Crafting Your Resume
    • IU Career EDGE Making a Professional Impression
    • IU Career EDGE Aligning Your Academic and Career Goals
    • IU Career EDGE Learning About Yourself and Your Options 
    • IU Career EDGE Finding and Landing Internships
    • IU Career EDGE Applying to Graduate or Professional School
    • IU Career EDGE Designing Your College Experience
    • IU Career EDGE Negotiating and Accepting Offers
    • IU Career EDGE Writing Cover Letters and Communications
    • IU Career EDGE Searching for Jobs
  5. Choose the module that you are interested in by clicking the picture or title. When the resource opens, you will see some information about it, including a list of the elements in the module. You can't actually open and review the module from inside the Commons interface.
  6. If you wish to import the resource into a course you instruct, click the Import/Download into Course button on the right side of the page.
  7. You will see a list of all your active courses in Canvas. Select one or more courses and click Import into Course to put that particular module in an existing course. Alternatively, if you do not select any course, you can Download the module materials as a file to be added into a course at a later date. You can select multiple courses to import but can only select one module at a time.
  8. The module will appear in the Modules tool of the course into which you imported it; if you downloaded it, it will be in your browser’s Download area.
  9. Note: You will need to remove or edit the dates associated with the various components of the module to align with the term in which you will be using it.