Stories of Change: St Mary's College Toowoomba

Since 1899, St Mary’s College in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia has motivated students to reach their full potential and seek lifelong learning. The school, which offers a wide range of subjects in years 5 to 12, looks to technology to achieve modern teaching and learning. The school’s 1-to-1 ICT (Information and Communications Technology) ensures that all students have access to a device and digital resources inside and outside the classroom. That way, administrators say, the students have greater independence to learn and pursue innovation in their education.

Over several years, St Mary’s tried a variety of learning management systems (LMS) to satisfy staff, student and parent priorities. However, Brendon Willocks, the Director of School Improvement said, "We found these challenging to get staff buy-in because of the complicated user interfaces or complex workflow to complete simple tasks."

St Mary’s staff began to evaluate systems and digital tools. “I had come from a school that had used a learning management system extensively in our teaching,” said Leah Dempster, St Mary’s Director of eLearning. “We wanted somewhere the students could access their course content and engage with teachers online.”

St Mary’s selected the Canvas learning management platform and rolled out Canvas school-wide in 2015. Canvas was different than other options because it was cloud-native, open-source, and fully supported. Within two years of starting Canvas, St Mary’s teaching staff achieved 100% adoption.

To find out St Mary’s favourite parts of Canvas, how the school uses Canvas Data and integrates Canvas into its professional development, you can read the full case study.