Help please! What is the biggest success story you can attribute to Canvas?

[amy_barlow]

Hi Everyone,

Here at the University of Winchester, in the south of England, we have been piloting Canvas for the past year. We love it 7 so do our students! Next week we have to present the findings of the pilot to our Senate Committee who will make the final decision as to whether we adopt it as a university.

Any ammunition you can give to help us make our case would be greatly appreciated! We are looking for bitesize nuggets or summaries from other Canvas users - what does Canvas help you to achieve? Can you attribute any concrete outcomes to Canvas that will help us to wow the panel?

Thanks in advance,

Amy Barlow

Head of Technology Enhanced Learning

University of Winchester

England

[hollands · Accepted solution]

Hi  @amy_barlow 

So I'm not sure if these will be helpful but I have two that might. The first is a presentation I did about our switch to Canvas. This was at my former institution but we were able to roughly measure an increase is faculty adoption and a drop (a significant one) in support tickets. I think the stats are around 30 minutes. It focuses a bit more on LTI rather than user success but it did show how psyched everyone was for Canvas. I've always used LTI to get people excited about Canvas

Creating a Teaching Ecosystem_1

There is also a stories page for example this is the higher ed one: Higher Education Stories, Reviews, and Testimonials | Canvas Learning Management System

And one from my former school. Rider University Doubles Adoption and Lowers Support Tickets with Canvas - YouTube 

Hope these are at least somewhat helpful.

[amy_barlow]

Thanks so much Shaun - lovely evidence around how user friendly it is - I'll share your statistic!

[scottdennis]

Hi Amy,

It is a bit dated now (3+ years) but here is a deck I created back when I was in a similar situation before I came to work at Canvas:

Five Things about Canvas - Google Slides

Hope it helps.

[amy_barlow]

Hi Scott - really helpful - like the 5 reason Canvas won!

[kona]

 @amy_barlow ​, here are some recent numbers from our Institution:

Adoption Rate

• Spring 2015 – 90% of full time faculty are using Canvas
• Fall 2013 (first full semester using Canvas) - 76% of full time faculty were using Canvas

Results from our spring 2015 faculty survey about Canvas found that:

• 97% of faculty who responded were having a positive to very positive experience with Canvas.
• 100% of faculty who responded were confident to very confident in their ability to successfully use Canvas for future courses.

Open ended faculty responses to the question – What features in Canvas do you find most useful and/or helpful?

• It helps enhance communication between instructors and students and gives everybody a consistent place to start when trying to find some information.
• Overall this has been an easy program to work with and interact with students.
• The "email students who did not complete" from the gradebook. Very helpful. I also like the email options - it really helps speed up the process of email.

Results from a spring 2015 student survey about Canvas found that:

• 95.5% of students who responded were having a positive to very positive experience with Canvas.
• 90% of students who responded were confident to very confident in their ability to successfully use Canvas for future courses.

Open ended student responses to the question – What features in Canvas do you find most useful and/or helpful?

• I especially like that as soon as you open Canvas you can see immediately what is due that day or week. It helps me to stay organized and is much easier than writing all of my due dates down. I'm so happy with that feature.
• The "What-if" grades help me to figure out how well I need to do in the future. The calendar is handy for checking how long I have before an assignment is due. I'm sure one can argue the environmental friendliness of being able to submit assignments via the internet, as well.
• I like being able to easily check my grades, as well as use the "what if" feature for grades. The discussion forums are very easy to use as well as responding to other people. I really like the canvas app for my android phone, it makes it easy to check things when I am away from home and I have even submitted homework and answered discussion questions using my phone.

[amy_barlow]

Kona - thanks for taking the time to share this, much appreciated. Your satisfaction scores are impressive!

[dejonghed07]

 @kona  - Great survey results! Are you willing to share your survey questions? We just started using Canvas this semester and are currently creating surveys to send to faculty and students. It would be very helpful to learn from a community college with more experience using Canvas!

[kona]

Absolutely! I'm not in the office today, but should be able to get it to you on Monday.

[dejonghed07]

Thank you! We really appreciate your help.

[kona]

 @dejonghed07 ​, sorry for not getting you this in a more timely manner! Here's the link to the pdf of the survey we send out to students via survey monkey - CanvasStudentSatisfactionSurvey.pdf - Google Drive

Hope it helps!

[dejonghed07]

Thanks,  @kona ​! This is very helpful.

[kmeeusen]

Hello Amy: 

Here is a link to a Google doc I created when we first started our migration almost 3 years ago: 24 Reasons to Love Canvas.

I believe I have even more reasons now, and this community is one of those.

Kelley

[amy_barlow]

Love this - I've pinched the idea - thank you!

[scottdennis]

I love that you "pinched" the idea,  @amy_barlow ​ - so fun getting more and more people in the UK into Canvas and the Community.

[kmeeusen]

Hi  @amy_barlow ​:

When we were migrating 3 years ago and I had to convince faculty to jump on the bandwagon, I created the following 24 Reasons to Love Canvas document. I updated it a bit for you, and removed content that might be branded for our instance. I hope this helps.  I notice Jive messed with the formatting, but you'll know how to clean that up.

24 Reasons to Love Canvas

1.  Speed Grader - cuts grading time by up to 50%.

2.  Crocodoc - can annotate and grade written assignments without leaving Canvas.

3.  Ease of navigation for students - move forward and backward using the navigation links or next and previous buttons. Control left-side course navigation menu, and content links to documents, discussions, assignments and even quizzes

4.  Communication tools - send a message, send an audio note, or send a video to students from multiple places within your class – including all grading activities!

5.  Rubrics - Add Rubrics to assignments, discussions and quizzes to help student know what is required to achieve a certain grade and make grading the assignment easier. Align rubrics to course and/or institutional outcomes.

6.  Course Analytics - Canvas contains a section for course analytics so you know what the class is doing and when.

7. Schedule and Course Calendar are linked to assignments so when a date change is made in one it happens in all.

8. Course Copy – copying content between quarters has never been easier, and Canvas will even automatically adjust the due dates for you.

9.  Course Outcomes - These can be added to a course so you can be sure your assignments align with them.

10.  Notifications - Students can set up how your communication comes to them and how often, and be notified regularly of course activities.

11. Upgrades - No downtime as the LMS is cloud based. 

12. 3^rd party Application Integrations -  Khan Academy and Ted Ed (to name a few) integrate easily into classes from either course level or at an admin level.  You can even use the redirect integration to create custom navigation menu items for useful web pages

13. Help - truly useful help and support features, including all users being able to request or vote on new features for Canvas.

15. Synchronous Delivery – Big Blue Button web conferencing tool is integrated in Canvas for easy live office hours, live lectures, instructional continuity, live demonstrations and more.

16. Draft State: publish (make available and visible to students) and unpublish (make unavailable hidden, and not used in gradebook) content in Canvas to provide better access and design control.

17. Unlimited course sizes – no limit to the use of engaging media.

18. Notification of Due Dates – Canvas has six different location that remind students of due dates, helping online students to better track their classroom responsibilities.

19. Modules: Canvas is designed to incorporate content into a native module structure. Modules make it easy to organize content for your students, and make it more accessible to your students

• The drag-n-drop capability for reordering modules and module content simplifies the course creation process, and supports standardized course structure.
• Module structure permits the hiding of content areas (quizzes, Assignments, Discussions, Pages and Files) further simplifying navigation.
• Modules can support sequential and laddered instruction by controlling access and forcing sequential movement through module content.

• 20. Content Creation tool for modules: this tool not only permits the creation of content, but also the re-use of existing content. Including:
• Assignments:
• Quizzes:
• Files:
• Content Pages:
• Discussions:
• Text headers:
• External URLs
• External tools:

1. 21. Page Tools: Permit the re-use of course components, and easy construction of in-course navigation links (content links), and also includes a full Rich Content Editor and  an HTML Editor.
2. 22. Virtually unlimited course sizes: We know that media-rich classrooms improve student engagement, but we also know that media files are large. Because Canvas offers unlimited course size, we can use as much media as we need to create an engaging learning environment aligned with course objectives.
3. 23. Rich-Text Page Editor: Besides the expected features of the page text-editor in Canvas, this editor permits the easy creation and/or upload of media content, and embedding of media from a variety of sources including YouTube, Flickr, Khan Academy, TED, and more than 100 library collections with an HTML Editor.
4. 24. Group Collaboration Tools: Canvas provides a group structure that creates a virtual sub-classroom within an existing course where students can collaborate in discussions and document creations.

[scottdennis]

This is now also very out of date.  Its a deck that I created to help in presentations right after the college system I was working in adopted Canvas:

Five Things about Canvas - Google Slides