Canvas is a clean and intuitive LMS system which can be quickly mastered. Many can learn Canvas on their own and enjoy doing so through exploring the system. Most of us are busy professionals and are more interested in receiving a solid training foundation that will get us using Canvas right away, like in the term is starting next week situation! As Manager of the Training Team, I hear the question each and every day, Can you record the webinar trainings for us? The Awesome Training team knew there was a better solution to deliver what clients were really asking for, On Demand training resources. So we rolled up our sleeves and collaborated with many other teams at Instructure to develop Training Services Portal for ALL Canvas clients.
The Training Portal provides a high level Canvas orientation for all clients. For those who have Essentials, Standard or Premium Training Packages, the portal provides easy access to On Demand training courses and webinar sessions through a SSO portal to be located in the Help Menu after the update release on November 16, 2019.
Also, you can review specific On Demand course titles based on subscription package.
Training Portal Access
Beginning November 16, 2019, the Training Services Portal was made available in all Canvas Help Menus for North America. If you are a Canvas Root admin and wish to remove the link you may still do so, please refer to this guide How do I customize the Canvas Help Menu for an account? . All North America clients will have access to at least some training content in this portal. Be on the lookout for a CanvasLIVE event featuring a tour of the Training Portal.
Training Portal Content
The Training Portal contains three different learning options: Live SubscriptionTrainings known as webinars, On Demand Learning Pathways, and On Demand Training Courses. All are organized in the Learning Library where you are taken upon first entering the portal. Please note, certain On Demand titles are not available to Essentials Training Subscription clients and Live Webinars are available only to Premium Subscription clients.
Subscription clients can access the #webinar calendar and register for the sessions in the Training Portal. Clients without Subscription Training status will see a blank Training Calendar. Be sure to view the Canvas Training space in the community to view the list of titles and see the session agendas.
Learning Pathways:
Learning Pathways are curated On Demand Training courses around a central theme. There is an Instructor and an Admin facing Learning Pathway specifically for K12 clients and one with a more HED focus FREE for all clients! More Learning Pathways will be added for Subscription Client accounts in the future. These Learning Pathways provide a complete foundation for a Canvas Admin and Instructor. Certificates are issues based upon successful completion of the entire Learning Pathway. Here is the preview of a Learning Pathway agenda:
Courses:
For those who do not wish to commit to an entire Learning Pathway, the all of the courses used to create the Learning Pathways are available to complete individually. Badges are awarded for successful course completion. Here is a sample of the course info page and badge awarded:
Here is a sample video that can be found in our On Demand Courses.
Admin Dash
We also worked with our CustomDev team to develop a reporting window for you, an Admin Dashboard. Here, those who request access from their CSM are able to view the participation and completion of training content for your users. The data can be downloaded as a CSV as well.
Sneak Peak of the Admin Dash Completion Report from a demo account here in Training Services
Just like spaghetti sauce, there is no one best recipe for training. We like options and so do you. From Onsite Trainings, Remote Custom Trainings, Q&A sessions, Commons resources like Be The Hero Updates, Growing with Canvas Updates and Passport to Canvas - Student Canvas Orientation Course, and now the Training Services Portal help to make sure that learning Canvas and its suite of products is never an obstacle in your Canvas journey.
Nice, janiesolinski-ruddy , nice!
Kelley
Just like spaghetti sauce, there is no one best recipe for training.
Uh. My Italian grandmother would like a word.
These will be great just-in-time resources that users need, so thank you for putting all of this together! With that said, if our faculty land in this portal and initially see K12..., "Setting up your instance" admin trainings, and Canvas Support courses, I fear that they will leave and never come back to see what it has to offer.
We really need a way to
I'm honestly excited for the new service, but would hate to see it go unused.
Thank you for your feedback vanzandt The issue is that all of the users are entering a shared portal leveraging Bridge. Therefore it cannot be curated based on the needs of one institution. For each training material topic, we have created a k12 version and HED version to meet the diverse needs. I would recommend using the Tagging feature. There is the ability to filter out by institution type (K12 or HED), role and tool. Here is a short video that covers that function:
Dropbox - Tagging In Portal.mp4 - Simplify your life
As Manager of Training services the On Demand training offerings have been a request of our clients for many years. We have spent many months testing with internal and external clients and with high levels of participation. Those who helped test this platform initially had the same request to curate content, but once the tagging feature was fully leveraged their concerns were alleviated.
Hi janiesolinski-ruddy, Thank you for the response, and helping us understand the limitations of the Bridge platform that has been selected. I'm one of your training subscription customers, and one of those who have requested these on-demand trainings, and easier access to the training portal for many years. I truly appreciate the hard work and am excited for this to come to fruition. With that in mind, I also have an interest in it going well for our users, so I took another 'tag-centric' walk through the training portal and recorded some notes and thoughts, as I went. I hope you take my comments in an entirely constructive nature.
In the client testing, were they directed to Tags or did they organically find and then leverage that tool?
Should I, as a user or Canvas Admin have access to tag things or create tags?
Feedback on existing Tags:
Feedback on the Portal:
As the Canvas administrator for my two-year higher-education institution, I am excited for the "Training Services Portal".
My primary question is will the "Training Services Portal" link in the "Help" button's fly-out menu, which is currently not enabled by default in our non-production environments and does not work when it is enabled, be enabled by default with the 2019-11-16 release?
I am asking because, it would be my preference that it not be enabled by default so that individual institutions can experiment with it and experience it first in our non-production environment.
Based on the wording in the opening paragraph and the "Training Portal Access" section, it seems that it is enabled by default and that each individual institution needs to opt-out instead of opt-in. Opting-out can be difficult because of the unknown timing of when each institution's instance of Canvas is updated. Opting-in will allow each individual institution to have more flexibility for when and how the feature is implemented.
Thank you for reviewing the tagging. Upon your suggestion, I am removing the different versions of HE, HED and moved all content under Higher Education. I am hoping that will be helpful to our HED friends.
I do show a tag for Faculty.
Users of the portal cannot add tags. Again, the portal you are viewing is a shared space even though you as a client cannot see other users. We will be reducing the Tag Terms as we determine what is helpful and what is not. Initially we pulled all of the tool terms from the guides and added those roles and institution types.
As for Date vs Alpha addition, there is a Sort By option so each user can select what is best for them.
The Category system in the Portal does not allow for nested groupings so it is not possible to have Higher Education and a sub category of courses. The logic for the grouping is that a faculty member might have 15 minutes to do some training and would want to choose a learning unit that would fit that time frame rather than viewing all of the learning units available under an audience choice. For that reason we opted for the learning units to be the main categories and the tags used to filter by role or institution.
In the client testing, most of the participants just used the arrow to view the titles much like one might when using a streaming service or cable T.V. That was the reason why we added the tutorial in the beginning. I felt even the search option was not clearly apparent due to all of the graphics in the window and that most of us are used to a search field being gray.
As for Teacher vs. Instructor content that is intentional. As a former trainer, K-12 use the term faculty or teachers while Higher Education prefers Faculty or Instructor. So if you tag Teacher that will return k12 content. I will certainly check to see why the Canvas Admin + Higher Education is not returning any live trainings. Thank you for reporting that!
Hello Douglas. Since the portal is much like a link to a resource like the Canvas Community and cannot be modified by individual Institutions, can you help provide some insight into a reason why you might need to opt out? In addition, this Training Portal will be the access point for all Subscription Training from January 31st, onward which impacts a large percentage of our clients. Having a gap in that access would be detrimental. Feel free to contact me at jruddy@instructure.com if you prefer to share your concerns via email. Thank you!
Hi @dbrace , We were lucky enough to get some early access to the tool. If it stays as-is after full roll-out, then you'll have access to choose what roles to display this item to (e.g. everyone, students, teachers, admins, observers, unenrolled), as you do with other Help menu options. If that stays in place, you could limit it to Admins, until you're prepared to release it to everyone.
I completely agree with your statement...
generally speaking the system/LMS administrators, instructional technologists, instructional designers, and other support personnel for instructors, staff, and students at individual institutions like to see what end users will have access to before they have access to it. This allows them to have a better idea what a service is, what the different roles will experience, how it could be used at the institution, and how to support it.
This is spot on, and as you noted, is probably true of many other institutions. In this case, we'd likely want to have some type of communication to our instructors, prior to them stumbling across the portal, to help them understand the experience they will encounter with having to authorize their account, and then being taken to a different tool/interface (Bridge). We'll also want to communicate how to use the proper Tags to find what applies to them, and (for subscription service) to either encourage folks not to skip the tutorial, or how to find live trainings and use the training calendar.
Todd,
I have seen the link to our beta environment and its settings in the "Help" customization area, even though it does not work.
I do plan on setting it to "Admins" only until we are ready.
The potentially difficult aspect of changing it is when because we do not have an exact time that we will receive the 2019-11-16 update.
Glad to hear that I am not the only person that feels the way that I do.
Doug
Thanks janiesolinski-ruddy, I appreciate your response and cleaning up the HED tags. I also see the Faculty tag now, so somehow I missed it before. I went ahead and tried it out, and I hope that more of the content gets Tagged for Faculty (higher-ed). As of now, choosing that Tag returns a very limited subset of courses, and no live trainings.
Re: the Search feature
I agree with your concern. Even a thin border around the field would make it much more apparent.
Re: the Sort feature
I do realize it can be self-selected. I just think that the Alpha would be a better starting place since instructors are likely to go here with a specific topic in mind, and less for, hey what new thing did they happen to post.
Thank you for the dialog and considerations.
This is exciting! If we have our own Bridge account, will any of these courses/programs be available for download so we can load and track trainings from our own end?
Can you please tell me what's wrong here? In Free For Teachers, I only see one course instead of the Live Trainings, Learning Pathways, Training Courses and Training Videos.
Hi janiesolinski-ruddy, this looks great! I tested it out today and it's very impressive. The problem is, only "K12 Grading and Feedback" shows up in Canvas Training Services for me. When will new content be added?
No, these resources will be found only in this Portal so that we can update them as needed.
Hello, thanks for the note. Some instances experienced this issue today. We discovered the issue in the script and ran it again this afternoon and so you should see the full content based on your subscription training package.
Hello, thanks for the note. Some instances experienced this issue today. We discovered the issue in the script and ran it again this afternoon and so you should see the full content based on your subscription training package.
Hi janiesolinski-ruddy, your information at the top states we should see a Learning Path (free content) for admins and instructors. Our Training Portal still only lists the one K12 Grading course. Should we be able to see the Learning Path content?
janiesolinski-ruddy Unfortunately, "K12 Grading and Feedback" is still the only training available in our instance. Do I need to reach out to Canvas Support about this?
This should be resolved at this point. Please reach out to me directly if this is not the case, jruddy@instructure.com.
This should be resolved at this point. Please reach out to me directly if this is not the case, jruddy@instructure.com.
Hi janiesolinski-ruddy, it seems to be working now! All the additional learning pathways, courses, and videos showed up this morning.Thanks for your help.
Thank you. It is working now.
Thanks everyone for the info on this! We have set this feature to admins only until we can figure out how best to roll this out to our faculty. @soxford @mmoore1 @L_Knight traciebosket
I've been excited to experiment with some of these training and see great potential for use by our faculty. Do you know the timeline to add alt tags to images or address other accessibility standards?
Hello Lisa,
The training team strives to make our resources available to all. Alt tags for images and banners, captions for videos, high color contrast, and use of headers and sub headers designed for accessibility was included in the creation of all of these courses in the Training Portal. As for the Bridge platform itself, here is the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template administrators and decision-makers can use to evaluate Bridge's conformance with the WCAG 2.0 Standards. If you have found that we have missed something when authoring this training content, please feel free to reach out.
Hi janiesolinski-ruddy, I will send you a private message.
I have used Canvas before, and I feel confident using it again. The training makes it a lot easier to work with.
The Training Services Portal was available in my help link yesterday. Today it is gone. What might be the reason?
At our institution we are looking at creating a training course modeled after the K-12 Ready Pathway. We decided to create a similar course instead using what was in the training services portal because we needed to have the ability to track full participation with pre-requisites and requirements. We are also inlcuding quizzes and assignments where teachers need to submit evidence of applying their learning. We love many of the videos in the portal but could not find them anywhere else. What is the copyright license of the videos? Could they be adopted and shared with proper attribution?