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I'm Nick, a designer at Northern Kentucky University, and we just announced our official switch to Canvas! Now that its official, I wanted to start documenting our transition from Blackboard Learn. I'll be live-blogging our transformation into pand- sorry, our transition to a Canvas institution. I've only gotten active in the Canvas Community recently, so this post will have to do the legwork of recapping what's happened so far.
During our research phase, I learned that our situation isn't unique; according to Ovum, 30% of institutions would significantly alter or replace their platform for online learning by the end of 2016. On top of that, NKU has been looking to increase its online learning presence. Internally, we've had an ongoing dialogue about what has worked for us and what would continue to work for us in the future. Part of staying relevant and effective is having the will to examine where the path of a product is headed. Eventually, we were able to begin piloting LMS options to see what implementation could look like. Canvas presented us important questions we needed to address for ourselves:
We ran a number of pilot courses, with some professors testing multiple LMS's at the same time. Canvas came out as the overwhelming favorite amongst faculty. The only hiccup we experienced was when the internet effectively shut down because of Amazon. As Canvas relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Canvas was unusable for that period of time. Of course, the other LMS we were piloting also went down with AWS. And a number of learning technology tools not tied to either LMS. So that was fun.
Working with the pilots, I noticed two patterns: 1) Switching from "Blackboard thinking" to "Canvas thinking" could be an awkward, difficult process. 2) Actually learning how to use Canvas was incredibly intuitive once faculty were introduced to the software. Most of my time working with the pilots was spent making the conceptual shift necessary to think about how their course would be organized in Canvas versus Blackboard, not so much which buttons they needed to click.
Based on feedback from the pilots, and other factors, Canvas was selected! With the decision made, the instructional design time faced the task of preparing an entire institution to migrate to a new LMS.
Maybe that's melodramatic — colleges can make their own plans for the transition, and some even have their own instructional designer. Its not literally up to just our instructional design team to make it all happen. At the start, though, I was definitely caught up in just the sheer volume of what we were attempting to do. What would it take to shift from the pilot program and bring Canvas to scale? We will be able to stretch our transition out for an entire academic year, which helps immensely, but that's still ~1000 faculty and their associated courses. And this doesn't say anything about acclimating the students to Canvas.
It can be easy to say "Well, they're digital natives, they'll take to it like a duck to water!" But that's not the case for several reasons, some of which are beyond the scope of this blog. However, preparing faculty, and leaving the students for themselves just means faculty will be bogged down answering questions outside the scope of their subject expertise. Moving from students, our old LMS was utilized by staff for purposes completely removed from a classroom. How do we avoid disenfranchising the staff during the transition?
Currently, here's our game plan:
And... I think that's everything so far. Our first Summer Faculty Institute happens next week, so we'll be able to see how it plays out. We'll also dive into a big question that's been looming in mind:
What does it mean to build a Canvas Orientation course?
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