Teaching and Learning News

In November 2012 we spoke with Nicky Didicher, a senior lecturer in the Department of English, about her plan to teach a pilot course in Canvas in January 2013. Recently we checked back to see how she was finding the new learning management system (LMS).

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who has used and felt at home in WebCT for a number of years, she admits to a certain amount of ambivalence. For now, she’s prepared to say that Canvas is “slightly better” than WebCT. “It just has different pluses and minuses.”

What she likes about Canvas

The “pluses” Didicher lists reflect Canvas’s simplicity and ease of use. Among her likes:

- The clean look of the user interface
- The ability to open and work in multiple courses simultaneously
- The ease of linking to files and external resources

Her students have also commented positively on the look of Canvas and the ability it gives them to view all courses in one place and to see their marks as a cumulative percentage.

The challenges she is facing

The “minuses,” for Didicher, tend to be connected to cases in which Canvas requires her to modify practices that she developed and used in WebCT. For example, unlike WebCT, Canvas provides only a single discussion board. That restricts Didicher’s ability to create multiple discussion groups as she has in the past. Another example is the peer review function in Canvas. Didicher likes the function, which allows students to give feedback on one another’s assignments. However, the tool works only with completed assignments, and she would like her students to be able to comment on draft versions.

For SFU’s Canvas implementation team, the feedback from Didicher and other instructors involved in the pilot project has been valuable in determining priorities for system development. The team recently identified options that will allow instructors and students to organize their discussions in more sophisticated ways, and other capabilities are being added on a regular basis.

The conversion process

What about the process of moving her course content from WebCT to Canvas? Didicher’s PowerPoint files transferred smoothly, but a glitch caused the apostrophes in her HTML content to disappear. More significantly, a glossary she created in WebCT to provide definitions of highlighted words in her course material couldn’t be converted. Fortunately, she says she has received excellent support from the learning technology specialists in the Teaching and Learning Centre.

The implementation team will be hiring additional support staff during the summer semester to help instructors who plan to use Canvas for their courses in fall 2013.

Final thoughts

Given the adjustments that she has had to make, Didicher is glad that she had the chance to test Canvas in a class of 11 students before moving her large courses of 250+ students over in the fall semester.

“I’m by no means technology-friendly,” says Didicher, despite her experience with learning management systems. “I use technology for pedagogical reasons, not personal reasons. [But] if I have to do a slight amount of learning in order to make the classroom experience better, that’s okay.”

Related links

One-on-one Canvas help for instructors: Contact Learn Tech in the Teaching and Learning Centre

Canvas support website for instructors and students: www.sfu.ca/canvas

By Vea Banana, TLC Communications Assistant

Even before SFU selected Canvas as its new learning management system (LMS), history professor Elise Chenier (above) had been looking for something to replace WebCT. Her search led her to the cloud-based version of Canvas. (SFU’s Canvas platform will be hosted on SFU servers and will have slightly different features than Canvas Cloud.) According to Chenier, what sets Canvas apart from other LMSs is the greater ability it gives her to customize and modify its modules and components so that they fit well with the courses that she is teaching.

SFU began piloting its own Canvas platform in January, but Chenier’s own experience goes back to fall 2013 when she taught two courses using Canvas Cloud. She used the LMS primarily to provide assignments and for its calendar and grading functions.

“It allows me to provide additional resources within the module of the week,” says Chenier, and that made it easier for students to find the information they needed for specific topics in the class. Since Chenier was using a cloud-based version of the LMS with content stored on servers outside Canada, she had to obtain consent from her students to ensure that no privacy laws were violated. Despite this extra step, she found that using Canvas was useful and rewarding for her students.

Chenier will continue to use Canvas and she’s looking forward to SFU’s LMS migration: “It’s so normal to use an LMS for classes now, it’s really needed. Nowadays, we manage so much information, and it’s almost expected for us to provide extra creative and scholarly materials to students. It’s just the matter of making that information available and readily accessible to students … I chose Canvas because it’s visually clean and both my students and I find that it’s so much easier to use.”

Canvas support at SFU

SFU recently launched a Canvas support website. Instructors interested in learning more about how to work with Canvas may also contact the learning technology specialists within the Teaching and Learning Centre by email at learntech@sfu.ca or by visiting www.sfu.ca/learntech.

Related links:

Canvas support website (www.sfu.ca/canvas)

Replace WebCT Project website

Learning technology specialists (Teaching and Learning Centre)

SFU will begin large-scale migration of courses from WebCT to the Canvas learning management system in May 2013. A number of instructors will pilot Canvas-based courses in January 2013. The “Moving to Canvas” series tracks their progress.

Instructor: Nicky Didicher, Senior Lecturer, Department of English

Course: ENGL 420 Topics in Eighteenth-Century Literature

The challenges

• Move course from WebCT to Canvas without sacrificing capabilities and content
• Recreate existing glossary feature
• Set up multiple discussion boards
• Enable feature for group work, peer feedback, and group discussions

The plan

Nicky Didicher teaches English courses at various levels and makes extensive use of WebCT. She first tried Canvas as a faculty volunteer this past summer. Her assessment: “I like the way it looks … but I’m worried it won’t have the [required] functionality.” Her needs will be a good test for the implementation team.

Didicher will teach three courses in January. She chose ENGL 420 for her pilot project “partly because it uses wikis, partly because it has only 18 students, and partly because I have taught it four times already.” If the process goes well with this small, familiar course, she will convert her other courses, some of which have more than 100 students.

ENGL 420 employs a wiki for work sharing and peer feedback by student groups, multiple discussion boards (for example, a “missed lecture notes” board and an anonymous feedback board) for communication, and a hyper-linked glossary, created by Didicher, to explain course-related terms and concepts.

At present, she says Canvas seems to permit only a single discussion board, and the wiki option seems to restrict posting privileges to instructors only. As for her laboriously developed glossary, Didicher hasn’t yet found a mechanism in Canvas that would allow her to transfer or recreate that feature. She will be working with Robyn Schell, a learning technology specialist in the Teaching and Learning Centre, to overcome these apparent shortcomings.

Will Schell find answers to Didicher’s challenges? Will Didicher be able to maintain her course structure without restrictions? Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series.

Next steps for Didicher

• On December 1, instructors will gain access to SFU’s Canvas implementation
• IT Services will submit the WebCT version of ENGL 420 to an automated “laundering service” offered by the developers of Canvas to move courses from WebCT to Canvas
• Robyn Schell will work with Didicher to clean up the “laundered” version of the course and to find ways to implement the desired capabilities

The WebCT Replacement Project reached a major milestone on May 31 when the university issued a request for proposals (RFP) to replace the WebCT learning management system (LMS).

The document is based on the needs assessment report that was released in March by the project team. That report concluded that “flexibility” should be the “overarching principle” characterizing SFU’s next-generation LMS. It defined flexibility as “the availability of options, the ease of choice and use of options, the range and diversity of applications, adaptability and capacities for customization, and the extensibility of the LMS to smartly adapt to new and emerging technologies and teaching and learning approaches.”

The report also suggested that “the agenda, values, and practices of teaching and learning should drive the determination and ongoing development of a [learning management system] at SFU.”

The closing date for submissions is June 28. The RFP document is available on the www.bcbid.gov.bc.ca website and also here. In addition, it has been sent to the following LMS providers to ensure vendor attention:

* BeezNest (Chamilo)
* Blackboard
* Desire2Learn
* Educog
* Instructure (Canvas)
* Interactyx
* Lambda Solutions
* Longsight
* Lore
* Pearson
* Remote-Learner
* Saba
* Unicon

Once a short list of candidates has been identified, testing of candidate systems will be carried out by faculty, staff, and student volunteers during the summer months to help determine how well each system meets the requirements of the SFU academic community.

This story comes from the WebCT Replacement Project website. See the original post here.

Rob Dainow, Teaching and Learning Needs Coordinator for the WebCT Replacement Project, is meeting with members of the SFU community to determine their needs for new learning technologies.

That number indicates strong interest in the search for a successor to the learning management system that has hosted many of the university’s online and face-to-face courses since 2001.

The website provides news about the project and, more importantly, allows members of the SFU community to contribute their feedback about future requirements for teaching and learning.

Rob Dainow, Teaching and Learning Needs Coordinator for the project, is looking forward to a lively conversation. His goal is to solicit the broadest possible input into the choice of new learning technologies. He notes that face-to-face consultations with key individuals and groups began even before the website was launched. A number of SFU-wide opinion surveys are also planned.

Martin Laba, Director of Academic Community Engagement for the project, shares Dainow’s regard for consultation and emphasizes the importance of the discussion.

“This project is about infinitely more than the application of educational technology,” says Laba, “because it speaks directly to a vision of and commitment to change with regard to teaching and learning at this university.”

He sees the consultation process as part of “a much broader initiative of imagining, developing, implementing, and promoting participation in new and expanded directions and practices in teaching and learning at SFU,” all taking place on the “shifting ground of new and emerging teaching and learning environments, new demands and needs in both face-to-face and online approaches, and changes in the social and cultural lives of our students.”

SFU community members are invited to share their views about the replacement of WebCT by emailing replacewebct@sfu.ca, by commenting on questions posted on the website, or by completing a survey when that option becomes available. Those who find an online forum or survey inadequate for the expression of their views are invited to contact the project team by email or phone (778-782-9438) to request a face-to-face meeting.

The WebCT Replacement Project website is located at www.sfu.ca/replacewebct.