What Community Means to Me

scottdennis
Instructure
Instructure
‎06-16-2015 10:53 AM

in_sl_webinar1_2.jpgBack in June of 2003 I was excited.  Soon I would start my first full time position at Lower Columbia College in Washington State as an IT Technician working to install Smart brand boards and other technology paid for by a federal grant.  Among the new technologies was our first "Course Management System."  Nobody at the college really knew what a CMS was, other than that the guy who wrote the grant application has seen something called Blackboard and wrote funding for it into the grant application.  We didn't end up going with Bb but instead contracted with a little company out of Indiana called Angel Learning.

We got ANGEL up and running on a shiny new server in IT and I went off to IUPUI for summer camp.  Some awesome people at Angel helped me get started, guys like Phil Miller and steveb​.  I was like Jasmine in a whole new world​.

But after I returned from Indiana and we convinced a few brave nursing instructors to venture forth into online learning, I was mostly on my own.  I pored through the manuals and emailed back and forth with a few friends from previous IT gigs but was mostly in the dark and feeling a lot of pressure to excel at a job I didn't really understand.  Then I found the ANGEL-L listserv and my world started to expand.  You could ask a question and quickly get back 4-5 responses from really helpful people - not just point and click or How do I... questions but also bigger policy and strategy questions.  Over time I wanted to become one of these helpful people - People like  @rmurchshafer2 ​.  When I got to go to conferences and meet them face to face I felt like I was seeing celebrities and my heroes.

Flash forward a few years... ANGEL my trusted friend and first LMS was reaching the end of its life.  We were sad, tired, and a bit demoralized.  Wandering the halls of a technology conference in Las Vegas in 2011 I met Canvas for the first time.  As soon as I could I was up in my room, trying to learn all that I could.  In the coming weeks I would try to read every post and comment in the Canvas Community.  It was like the listserv from the old days, only better.  The site was easier to use.  I found the same caliber of helpful people, like Matt McGhie and jasong​ who called me one day out of the blue to help me work through a problem. Going to Instcon later that summer in Snowbird I met many people who genuinely wanted to help us get started and become friends.

Now, four conferences later, we are rolling out a new community platform.  This is tremendously exciting, scary and, so far, a joyful experience.  I hope that many people who are themselves just starting out find friends and help in the Canvas Community like I did years ago.