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 with easy access to webinar sessions for Subscription Training clients through a SSO portal to be located in the Help Menu after the update release on November 16, 2019. These resources have been developed using another wonderful Instructure resource called Bridge. You can learn more about this tool here, What is Bridge?
Training Portal Access
Beginning November 16, 2019, the Training Services Portal will be 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 four different learning options: Live Trainings known as webinars, Learning Pathways, Training Courses and Training Videos. All are organized in the Learning Library where you are taken upon first entering the portal.
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:
Videos:
Training videos are written and recorded by the training@instructure.com who are former educators, support specialists, Canvas Admins, and Instructional Designers. All videos are less than 15 minutes in length, contain closed captions and housed in Studio so the playback speed can be customized by the viewer. In addition, the video guides will also be added to the portal. Many training videos are free for all Canvas clients! Here is a sample video narrated by Trainer Deactivated user enjoy.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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