What is the Canvas Community user base composed of?

[james_sanzin]

I was wondering if there was any data on the Canvas Community user base. How many users are admins vs. how many are instructors? How many of those are actually active in the community? If you do not have any data, what do you think the community is composed of based on your interaction?

This was an observation I made as I was noticing the Feature Idea voting process. I notice many features that get proposed that would be amazing for an instructor, but they get very little traction.  I notice that none of the instructors from my school district are active on here besides myself. I am an instructor and our admin, but the admin is more of a volunteer position rather than a full time or paying job (I get a supplement, but it is an extremely small supplement).  My predecessor was also an instructor  and a paid admin, but had very little presence in the community here. 

Could community demographics determine what ideas see production? 

I love engaging in discussion on here, thanks to all who join it.

[laurakgibbs]

Yes,  @james_sanzin ‌: lack of faculty participation here is a real problem I think. I don't think any other faculty from my school use the Community at all; I cannot think of any other OU faculty who have posted anything (???), although you will find instructional designers and other support staff.

In the context of my school, the total lack of faculty participation is not surprising: see the Derek Bok essay on how badly undervalued teaching is in higher ed; I shared it here:

Should We Standardize Online Education?  

Lack of faculty participation is partly how I justify making so much noise here: I am definitely not representative of typical faculty, that's for sure... but the Community needs all the faculty input it can get, since faculty are in short supply here compared to other roles. And I'm not an admin at all; I just teach. Which means I use Canvas every single day along with my students, as do many other faculty at my school. I wish they realized how much the Community can help, providing quick and reliable answers to pretty much any question, along with sharing all kinds of ideas and resources! 🙂

My school's Canvas marketing team is going to start sending out "faculty spotlight" emails, and they interviewed me for that campaign; here's what I said. Will it make a difference? I don't know, but I made sure to mention the Community!!!

What are you most passionate about? I love the way online spaces let people share what they are learning with others so that we are not just learning on our own, but learning together. In my classes, that learning takes place through storytelling: students choose what stories they want to read each week, and then they use their imagination to (re)tell a story in their own way. Thanks to the students' individual choices and their creative imaginations, every semester is a new adventure. Sometimes the students might start off saying "I am not creative" or they might be nervous about sharing their writing with others, but by the end of the semester, each student has become a storyteller, and they are constantly getting inspiration from one another as they share their stories week by week.

How have you used technology to engage your students? The students create blogs and also websites, and those spaces are our online "classroom" where all the learning happens. You can see the class blog streams at Myth.MythFolklore.net or India.MythFolklore.net and use the blog stream link to see what's going on (those are my Canvas course spaces; I use Inoreader to display the students' blogs posts inside Canvas). There are stories, of course, and you can also see what the students are reading, along with other posts they are writing. Every assignment leaves a trace online, either at the blogs or at the project websites.

What are you currently working on? After doing big revisions to my course readings over the past several years (shout-out to Jen Waller, Cody Taylor, and the OU Libraries OER initiative for their help with that), I'm now working on "meta-content" like growth mindset, and I've created an open Canvas course with those materials: Mindset.LauraGibbs.net. I'm also learning more about Canvas, and I'm an active participant at the Canvas Community. I would invite everybody to take a look at what the Canvas Community has to offer; I have really enjoyed connecting with other educators there: Community.CanvasLMS.com.

Anything else you’d like to share? Because I don't live in Norman currently (for family reasons, I'm in North Carolina), I rely on Twitter as a way to keep up with OU news and events. You can find me there @OnlineCrsLady, and I also have a Twitter account for my classes @OnlineMythIndia. One of my favorite features of Canvas is how easy it is to add a Twitter feed to a Canvas Page, and I really appreciate the OU people and programs who share their news and events via Twitter!

[james_sanzin]

laurakgibbs‌ I am trying to get some of our 100+ teachers to get involved and get active. I have STEM teachers and Information and Communication technology teachers that have been using Canvas for far longer than I have who are not active. I have urged them to get into this community and help be a part of the development and growth of Canvas.  They tell me they do not have time (despite the fact that they had a canned course developed by the state). They will often come to me and say, "hey I wish Canvas did this."  I try to give them a voice, but it would help if they would get on and participate. 

[scottdennis]

I've been there, James!

[laurakgibbs]

I hear you! For me, this is one of the DEEP MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE. 

My guess is that if we put a moratorium on email for a month, it would help. Have you ever seen this great video about that by Luis Suarez? (my hero!)

[scottdennis]

Hey  @james_sanzin ,

As you know, users in Canvas do not have a designated role.  Roles are course specific so one person might be a teacher in one course and a student in another.  This means that when they authenticate into the community we don't know a lot about who they are demographically speaking.  Because usernames are usually specific to an institution we can get a better sense of what our institutional demographics look like.  We know for example that there are about three times as many users coming from Higher Ed than from K12 with similar proportions of enterprise level vs mid market and public vs private institutions.

We often hear anecdotally from admins that they feel that admin centric feature ideas get overshadowed vote count wise by ideas that are more teacher centric because teachers out number admins.  We also hear anecdotally from teachers who feel like their voices are drowned out by admins who have more time and inclination to participate.  I actually believe both scenarios play out at different times.

As far as educator participation in the community goes, for people such as yourselves we are very happy when we hear that you are benefitting from discussion with each other and we value your input when you weigh in on focus groups, feature ideas, etc.  

As far as the "problem" of educators not participating goes I can see more than one side.  Part of me thinks that if they are coming and passively getting the answers to questions they have without engaging, that's fine.  They got their answers after all.  On the other hand I wonder how many who might benefit from participating more actively are in fact missing the boat.  

[james_sanzin]

I do not mind them asking questions at all. I actually enjoy teaching even if it is teaching other teachers.  My main point on them participating in the community is for the voting on feature ideas. They will say Canvas needs this, but will not sign up to vote. 

On a side note, I'm walking down the hall and just heard a teacher ask a student, "Did you turn it in on Remind or by Email?" 

You brought up some great points on identification of roles in Canvas. I know many of us serve as teachers, students, and possibly admins. I do feel that most of us would identify as 1 more than the other, much like ethnicity. I'm Native American on one side and Yugoslavian on another, but I don't feel I face the same struggles as either one of those populations, so I just ID myself as Caucasian.  I am our admin, but I probably see things through the eyes of a teacher more so than an admin. 

[laurakgibbs]

I see this also: faculty complain about the LMS, but they have not really taken it upon themselves to do something about that... even when we have a great opportunity like here at the Community.

At the same time, I understand the cynicism. For those of us who have been frustrated by the failures of the LMS for so many years, it was easy to get into the habit of complaining but not actually doing anything about it, because it didn't seem to matter.

That's why I participate so much at the Community: unlike with Blackboard and D2L, here with Canvas it does matter. But after our 10+ years with D2L, I can see why faculty at my school are not in the habit of expecting better/different.

[kona]

I know this isn't necessarily a representative sample, but I looked at the top ten (points wise) people in the Community and what their primary function was. What I came up with was:

Admin - 4

Teacher - 4

Technical specialist of some type - 2

I think this actually says a lot that 40% primarily identify themselves as teachers. Yes, two of them also hold other roles, but even still that's 20% that just identify themselves as a teacher. Heck, even if you look at the top 5 you still get 2 admins, 2 teachers, and 1 technical specialist. 🙂

Thoughts?

[james_sanzin]

Those look to suggest a reasonable distribution of users. It would be interesting to see how those play out across the top 100. 

[kona]

If I had time, I'd love to check that out. Unfortunately other duties/responsibilities call... 

[james_sanzin]

 @kona ‌ same. 

[kona]

If only we weren't so busy with *work* think of all the other fun stuff we could do! 😉

[laurakgibbs]

To me, that is the HARDEST thing about course design: deciding what to leave out!
That's why I have so many extra credit options every week. They are all the assignments I would love to include in the class, but for which there is not time.

If the students can make time, though, oh, I am so happy for them to do the extra credit too! 🙂

Online Course Wiki / week 5 extra credit