VERY Introductory Training for Faculty

[amanda_taintor]

Last week our district announced the adoption of  Canvas as our new LMS.  I am offering a series of quick 1 hour training for faculty the week before we break for summer.   As we know Canvas has wonderful resources available to faculty and I want to highlight those but I also know the biggest barrier for faculty to overcome will be the import process.   My question for this group of fabulous people what would you recommend covering 1 hour of introductory training.  Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions!

[kona]

What LMS are you moving from?

[amanda_taintor]

Blackboard

[DaleDrees]

Welcome Amanda,

This link in the community may be a good place to start: Canvas Training Courses and then do a search in the community for faculty training and you will find lots of information from  @kmeeusen ​ link that he shared Resource for Transitioning to Canvas and Training Faculty to  @biray ​ 5 Ways to Tackle Faculty Training

Welcome again Amanda!

[DaleDrees]

and of course the Canvas Rollout, Training, and Adoption Strategies (Collaboration) is awesome too!

[bgibson]

"...the biggest barrier for faculty to overcome will be the import process..."  Their "fear" of the process, and possible "failure"?  To allay their fears, you might actually export a Blackboard course and then import it into a Canvas site.  That would give them an idea of how their Bb content would be pulled into Canvas.  It would also give them some idea of what won't come over between Bb & Canvas.  Then it is just a case of guiding them in how they will display their content in Canvas.

*Have you decided whether instructors will be responsible for exporting their content from Blackboard and Importing into Canvas, or whether a Bb Admin will batch Archive/Export all Blackboard courses, and a Canvas Admin will batch import the Bb Archives into their appropriate Canvas sites... or if the district has in their Canvas contract for an Instructure tech to import content for you, for a certain number of courses?

One advantage of importing a Blackboard course export/archive (zipped) file into a Canvas course is that a copy of the zipped Bb archvie remains as part of the Canvas course, while the content is distributed in the site.  Sort of like storage for your old Bb archvies.

[jomontuori]

Hi Amanda,

My high school also transitioned from Blackboard to Canvas this past year. Some balked, some stumbled into it, and others took the deep dive (successfully!).

With hindsight, my recommendation would be to offer a self-paced online course in Canvas for Instructors and another for students. I found and customized one for that can be completed as a student in just a few hours.  (I made the mistake earlier this year of creating my own from scratch, but you can import and customize others' excellent courses. Dale's Canvas Training for Instructors link (above) is the place to look.)

Another mistake I made was trying to bring along curmudgeons: a poor investment of my time and energy. Next year I'll focus on the enthusiasts and hope that good work ripples outward amongst our 100+ teachers. Thinking to start a faculty Canvas Users' Group to share ideas and practices. If anyone has thoughts or suggestions on that, please chime in. Lunch meetings? A Canvas course or group to work within?

[seufertc]

Definitely cover assignments, assignment groups, and the gradebook.. Our students are asking instructors who do not use Canvas to start using it because they want to see their grades. It has been a while since we transitioned, but at the time, having to create an assignment to get a column on the gradebook was very new to our instructors.

[rrichards]

Welcome to the Canvas community!

I'm new here as well, but will throw in my two cents.

I'd recommend beginning with (1) why Canvas matters and (2) how online learning fits into teaching. The "Why" and "How" provide critical context for all of the technical "What" stuff.

This is the "why" and "how" for our organization:

Two "how" videos I've found particularly useful are:

• Introduction to the SAMR Model - YouTube
• Blooms (Digital) Taxonomy - YouTube

[Stef_retired]

What a good looking resource,  @rrichards ​--thanks for sharing! Would you be willing to include this in a new document in the Canvas Engagement Strategies​ group? (And if you're not already a member of that group, it only takes a few clicks to join.)

[rrichards]

Thanks for the positive feedback, stefaniesanders​. I just added a revised version of the resource to the Canvas Engagement Strategies​ group here.

[hrutherford]

We found that bringing over content from our old LMS into Canvas was not "pretty" so, we ended up rebuilding every course.  At our institution where the number of faculty and courses is on the smaller side in terms of many institution, it was a very time consuming process.  I would spend the time in your training sessions focusing on how to use the canvas system, editing, building assignments, etc. and have them bring their content over through copy and paste.  We had to copy and paste into text box and copy from text box and copy into Canvas in order to get the formatting, but it was easier in my opinion than to sift through all the pieces.  The other thing we did was using the file from the old LMS, we had the ability to just upload certain pieces, so we just uploaded all of the files, like PPT and word doc and PDF.

[lhenning]

Our college just transitioned to Canvas from Blackboard last year- we are just ending our first few semesters in this LMS.  I am a trainer by training, education, and nature but was not a trainer this time- I was a student but couldn't resist evaluating the training I received based on what I would have done if I was the trainer...

What I would recommend is someone creating a crosswalk document between Canvas and Blackboard and then short trainings of some sort based on the skills and concepts the crosswalk highlighted.  Unfortunately, the training we had included one trainer who kept telling us to 'let Canvas be Canvas' without helping us see the parallels and similarities between the two.  Some of the items on the crosswalk could be:

• Discussions in Canvas equals Discussion Forum in Bb. 
• A Page in Canvas is the same thing as an Item in Bb.
• A Folder in Bb is equivalent to a Module in Canvas.
• (ok, there are tons of these!)

I really believe if we had training that began from what we knew (a training best-practice) and applied that to our new LMS, our transition and acceptance would have been much easier.  We all know that change is scary - minimize the change aspect!

Once your crew sees the similarities (their very basic training), then you can start playing with building new modules, assignments, activities in Canvas based on what they already have done in Bb.  Minimize the change, emphasize what they know, and encourage them to explore!

Just thinking aloud 🙂 ,

Lindsay

[Stef_retired]

lhenning​, as someone who transitioned courses from Blackboard from Canvas, and who currently trains in Canvas, I respectfully disagree with that approach. Drawing parallels between Blackboard--or any other legacy LMS--and Canvas creates the danger of leading your users to believe that the functionality will be the same across both. It will not be, nor is it designed to be. For examples, in terms of their functionality and features Discussions do not equal Discussion Forums; Canvas Modules don't have folders (although they can be viewed as content wrappers); and so on. While it might be overly facile for a trainer to tell learners "let Canvas be Canvas," the trainer is, in my perspective, setting the right tone for the training with that statement, which I would interpret as: Don't try to recreate your courses item by item, but instead, embrace a new philosophy toward design and content delivery.

On the other hand, if the crosswalk emphasized the differences between features (and yes, as a veteran of those previous LMSs, Canvas's improvements over them) instead of the similarities, I'd welcome such a training approach.

[sean_nash]

Agreed.

Assuming "this equals that" is to gloss over the tiny details that certainly have a potential pedagogical impact. Every time you look at a learning event with new eyes (or even the same old pair) you have an opportunity to redesign for learning.

[kmeeusen]

You bought up a very good point stefaniesanders​, and I love "let Canvas be Canvas". This is an incredibly important concept when migrating between systems, and I've done four! All LMSs are different, but faculty will want them to be the same - just human nature and resistance to change.

We made sure that faculty knew that Canvas "was not your Dad's Oldsmobile", and instead, used the differences as selling points - this is what Canvas will do that Bb could not.

I think that for faculty, the biggest challenge is adapting their person workflows to Canvas. Faculty have very strong feelings about how they manage their time, and I think online faculty have even stronger feelings because initial design/set-up and course management time can be greater when teaching online. When we first migrated to Canvas, we spent a lot of time showing faculty how they accomplish key tasks in Canvas, and even more time simply asking "what do you want to do?" so that we could show them the easiest ways to do it in Canvas.

Moving content is a huge issue, and hrutherford​ brought up a good point about migrating content - Copy/paste is not a bad idea for much of the content. Using the Import from an Export file can be especially messy moving from Bb. There are too many differences in the basic structure of the functional areas. We found, when migrating from Angel to Canvas, that the clean-up was more time consuming than if they just started from scratch.

• Teach your faculty about the basic structure of Canvas,
• Show them how to set up the skeleton of their course through setting up modules, and including the placeholders for pages, discussions, assignment and quizzes in each module,
• Then have them copy/paste all the content they can into each of these placeholders.
• Then show them how to apply the settings for each content type.
• All the time asking them, "How did you do this in Bb?", "What did you use that for in Bb?";
• Then show them how it might be accomplished in Canvas.

But never, ever tell them an LMS is an LMS, and they all work the same - they will become your worst enemy when they realize they all aren't the same.

KLM

[bgibson]

"Icon Understand Canvas"

These icons represent two areas where minor angst can occur for new Canvas users.

I follow our Service Cloud tickets and have seen several instances of the following:

The user contacts the Help Desk and says, "I'm in my Dashboard but some or all of my courses are not showing."

It may be that they don't understand about "favoriting" a course, so that a course card will show in the Dashboard.  Walk them through the simple steps of how to favorite courses.

Items such as documents, assignments, or quizzes are not showing for students.

Faculty need to understand that if they want their students to have access to an item, it must be published.

They also need to understand that even if published items are included in an unpublished Module those items will not be visible to their students.