Introducing: Canvas Certified Technical Admin

[erin_keefe]

Introducing: Canvas Certified Technical Admin

CCTA Now Available for Purchase!

What’s Included in This Post?
• CCTA is ready to launch!
• All about what's included in the CCTA program
• How to find out more and how to enroll

Are you a technical admin of your Canvas instance, or do you expect to be one? The Canvas Certified Technical Admin (CCTA) program is designed to provide technical admins the knowledge they need to ensure a successful setup, design, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of their Canvas instances. This program was released at the end of January 2023, and the first cohort will begin on February 20, 2023. All the info you need is here!

Creating A 'Living' Admin Plan

We're so excited to launch this new program in our suite of Canvas Certified options.

You asked, and we listened!  Last summer we let you know we were working on building Canvas Certified Technical Admin (CCTA). Many of you gave us feedback about what you wished you knew when you were just getting started as a Canvas admin. We took that great info, and also met with Canvas Support to design the courses in CCTA. What we've come up with is a three-course program that will help ANY Canvas admin - new, experienced, root, sub-account - create an Admin Plan for their instance that will ensure best practice, design, and upkeep of institutional knowledge.

What Does the CCTA Program Look Like?

The CCTA program is made up of 2 CORE courses and 1 Elective.

The CORE courses are:

• CORE 1: Canvas Account Organization & Authorization - Explore the best practices and options related to account organization, course management, users and permissions, and authentication and data provisioning
• CORE 2: Canvas Settings & Management - Examine the best practices and options related to settings and tools, analytics and reporting, shared resources, and support and training

After completing the 2 CORE courses, participants will select an Elective to complete their certification. The current electives are listed below. New electives will be added each year:

• ELECTIVE Option: Leading with Canvas for Technical Admins - explore the ways a tech leader can use Canvas to foster a collaborative learning culture by building interpersonal relationships with users and designing opportunities and sustainable structures for users to effectively collaborate to improve student learning
• ELECTIVE Option: Using the Canvas API - This course will help technical admins understand, setup, and discover ways to use the Canvas APIs. 

PRO TIP: When we say Canvas Admin, we mean anyone with the Admin shield in a Canvas instance who has permissions to make changes to the Admin area of an instance, including sub-account admins and those with limited admin access. 

The CCTA program is designed similarly to our Canvas Certified Educator program. The courses are:

• Asynchronous with due dates - each course is six weeks long
• Designed for participant engagement - courses have rich learning experiences, great take-aways and tools you won't find anywhere else, and provide opportunities to learn from your cohort peers
• Facilitated by a Canvas Certified Technical Admin - facilitators will help guide discussions, answer questions, post reminders and announcements, and provide feedback on assessments
• Project-based - no seat time requirement, and no tests. Instead, participants will be creating a piece of their Admin Plan with every Module's assessment

More Information

In addition to great learning and the creation of the admin plan each participant will have after going through the program, we also have an additional benefit. For those that purchase through Instructure (from your sales rep, your CSM, or from a Canvas Certified rep), there will be an additional Support benefit. Canvas Certified Technical Admins will be able to route their Support tickets directly to an L2 agent, which is a fantastic added benefit!

We are having two kick-off webinars during the month of February:

• Tuesday, February 7, @ 1 p.m. ET (K12 focus). The link to the webinar is here
• Tuesday, February 21, @ 1 p.m. ET. To sign up for that webinar, please click here

Need more information? You can check out our CCTA FAQ and our CCTA One-Pager. 

Final Thoughts

We are so grateful for our amazing community! Thank you to everyone who has given us support, ideas, and suggestions as we built this new offering. We are so excited to welcome our very first cohort of CCTA participants, and hope you consider joining us.

Our Canvas Certified team is committed to creating asynchronous, facilitated professional learning that is high-impact and meaningful. We currently offer Canvas Certified Educator, and are working on additional offerings. If you would like to learn more about our Canvas Certified Educator, you can visit our Canvas Certified Educator FAQs or send us an email at cce@instructure.com. 

[IanGoh]

Didn't see this mentioned in the FAQ; what's the cost?

[JamesSekcienski]

Is there an accelerated version or test out option for experienced admin? 

Are there any other ways for experienced admin to earn the benefit of support tickets automatically going to L2 support without this certification?

How long does the certification remain active (i.e. does it expire after a certain amount of time)?  If it does expire, do we then lose the benefit of the support tickets going to L2 support?

[FrankieKirk]

Is there a recording of the February 7th (K12 focus) webinar available for viewing?

[erin_keefe]

@Oian your CSM or Sales rep can help you with the questions about cost!

[erin_keefe]

@JamesSekcienski  great questions!

The certification with the support benefit remains active for one year. To maintain the certification an additional elective is required. If a participant decides not to maintain the certification, the ability to raise the support tickets to an L2 agent will be disabled.

We don't have a test out option. 

One of the key elements of the certification courses is not just knowing the required tech knowledge to be able to reduce tickets, but also being able to form proper support requests and to perform critical troubleshooting to include in tickets. The support team helped to review content to ensure it passed muster for their needs for participants to move directly to L2.

The admin plan that is built in the courses is also meant to become a resource at that institution so that other admins that come in later can have more sustainable success. In essence, one could "test out" by successfully completing all assignments without reading the provided content, but that seems like a real missed opportunity to actually enhance their admin knowledge. If it helps, our Beta test group consisted of all Canvas admins from HE and K12 institutions of varying size (as well as internal support team members) and the majority had years of experience.  Their feedback was that the course helped them not just to learn new things, but to refine knowledge, highlight best practices they were unaware of, and plan for the future. I think this quote captures that, "I learned so much. Like many of my colleagues I had never investigated these options and assumed that what we were utilizing was best practice."

[erin_keefe]

@FrankieKirk I don't have that...but if you sign up for the webinar on Tuesday 2/21 you'll get sent the recording of that one (it will be the same as the previous webinar).

[dmackay1i]

@erin_keefe I wasn't able to make it to either webinars, could I possibly get access to one of the recordings?

[evandenh]

@erin_keefe I registered for the webinar on 2/21 but wasn't able to make it either. Is there a recording of this webinar?

[albertina_clayt]

I completely missed this opportunity. Will there be other opportunities to sign-up in the future?

[BryanMelville-A]

Ah, no offense, but the ability to jump straight to L2 is not much of a carrot, given that we (at CU Boulder) have found them to be at least as frustrating as the L1's. 

How about updating this to include a dedicated L2 resource or a skip to L3?

[kjk123]

Hi,

How is the course delivered ? Are there interactive sessions then assignments  and how does this work in terms of time zones etc.

[SerenaGarcia]

How could I participate in this training? I'm about to graduate in Instructional Design and have been a Canvas student user.

[chriscas]

@SerenaGarcia,

I think you may want to check out the CCE FAQ Site for information about registration/payment options.  You mentioned that you're graduating in Instructional Design, and the Canvas Certified Education program might be a little more in line with that role than the Technical Admin program (but it also would depend on what kind of career role you see yourself going in to).

-Chris