Effective Faculty Training on Canvas

garciah
Community Champion
11
3456

How does one effectively train faculty on a new LMS?

Training faculty, especially in a large organization with diverse faculty needs is challenging to say the least. I work at a community college with full-time, part-time, and adjunct faculty who teach online, hybrid, and web-enhanced face-to-face courses. LMS usage runs the gamut here as does experience level and training and support preferences.

So, how does one meet everyone's training needs and do an effective job?

We focused on making our training fully online (with optional workshop and appointment hours), self-paced, and asynchronous. We all know that faculty have busy schedules with many demands on their time.

Some other features of our course:

  • It follows universal design (UDL) best practices. For example, we offer multiple ways to learn the training content – video, reading, etc. 
  • It's visually pleasing.
  • The material is chunked and meaningfully organized.
  • The course allows for self-directed consumption of learning materials, while also using requirements, so that learners can track their progress.
  • It offers authentic assessment opportunities. Participants are evaluated on their ability to build out parts of a course.
  • The content dynamically updates when embedded webpages are changed. Canvas Community webpages are embedded and update in our course when they are updated by Instructure, which means less maintenance for the course developers and more time to support faculty.
  • It demonstrates good design and pedagogy.
  • It uses badging to reward faculty who complete the course. Certified Canvas users can share their badge on their social media networks.

How do we know it's working?

Ninety-five percent of faculty surveyed were satisfied or very satisfied with their training on Canvas. Participants have been able to access the level of support they need to complete the course. For example, novice users supplement the online course with a workshop or one-on-one appointment with online learning staff. Participants who have used Canvas elsewhere can demonstrate their skills with an existing or practice site. Some participants complete the course in a day; others complete the course slowly over a period of months.

We don't attempt to teach course participants everything about building a course in Canvas. We show them the basics and empower them with the tools the need to learn more when they're ready.

Are you working on a Canvas training course and looking for inspiration?

Our Canvas Certification course can be found in Canvas Commons. Please check it out and leave us a review. We're always looking for ways to improve.

Canvas Certification course in commons

11 Comments
holtond1
Community Novice

I might recommend posting a link to this in canvas commons.  Searching by name doesn't find it.

Oh I see it is here: Canvas Commons 

garciah
Community Champion

Thanks, Doug! I added the URL to the post.

laurakgibbs
Community Champion

Wow, this looks really nice. Thanks for sharing here! My school has devoted no attention to providing asynchronous online training for faculty, face to face. That seems to me to miss out on one of the biggest problems we face: faculty members who have spent 20+ years as learners in classrooms are often just not sure what it means to create a learning environment online because they have not experienced learning online that way for themselves, and certainly not with the depth and breadth of their classroom experiences. I keep hoping my school will start offering some online learning opportunities for Canvas, and maybe they can get some ideas here. Thanks again for sharing!

cm3644
Community Novice

Heather,

Thanks so much for sharing this! I'm working on creating an asynchronous training course for my institution (also higher ed) and looking at various examples. Instructure's own (Course Instructions: Instructor Orientation) comes to mind but I'm unable to export it. I'm also unable to download yours via the Commons - our institution decided to opt out. I tried a workaround (log in with Facebook...putting my privacy concerns aside!) but no luck there, either. Is there another way I can take a deeper look at your course?

I'll add that we have the same levels of complexity - and some of our instructors work with our team of instructional designers while others course-build solo. It's definitely been a challenge trying to figure out who needs training and on what exactly, considering all those variables.

garciah
Community Champion

Hi Clea, certainly! I tried messaging you, but you need to follow me so that I can send you a message.

kona
Community Champion

 @cm3644 ‌, I'm not sure if you've seen it or not, but we've got an open version of our Faculty Training course as well - https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/strategies/blog/2016/08/05/canvas-instructor-training-and-stu...

garciah
Community Champion

Nice! Thanks,  @kona  It would be great to compile these resources somewhere. Does this exist already? If not, it would be great to have a collaborative document for training resources. Maybe something like this: https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-5037 

kona
Community Champion

I'm not aware of one document, but I agree that it would be great to have one document where people could add their orientation/training resources. So... here you go!!

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-9141-orientation-training-course-index-collaboration 

Add your information and let's try to have people add their information resources there as well!

garciah
Community Champion

Just added! Thanks for setting the page up.

cm3644
Community Novice

Yes - in fact, it was a big source of inspiration when I started researching this massive undertaking Smiley Happy. I've been meaning to say how impressed I am with your site, so now is as good a time as any! 

cm3644
Community Novice

Oops, I still need to figure out this threaded replies thing. Regarding the resources page, maybe there's some cross-over here? https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-3487#Instructors