[Ateneo Graduate School of Business] Using Canvas LMS for Strategic Planning and Execution processes
Hello, everyone. When I saw the time slot that was assigned to me, I said, Cool. I'll just try and energize in an icebreaker for twenty minutes. But here we are, and we'll have to break the ice in a new way, talking about what Mark what, you know, what we just saw. How we use the Canvas LMS, not just for teaching, but also for administrative purposes. And this slide shows, well, me, but more importantly, my function as a leader of the organization.
When I when I reflected on this presentation, it occurred to me that the processes that I will describe illustrate my own personal journey interwoven with an organizational journey. And this is how I introduce my own perspective as a leader. In my own consulting company, among my projects was design, organizational develop for a multinational client. They said, this has been good. Could we bring you to two of our other offices in two other countries provide your service to them too.
And of course, I said, No. Thanks. Instead, I said, what if I deliver to your people, you don't have to fly me over. And it will just require entry level skills. So I designed and relied on what was then state of the art tech, self paced, desktop delivered training via optical disc.
Fast forward a few years, and I was head of an international unit with offices around Asia. I had to hire and manage those teams and manage them simultaneously across the region. Fortunately, another burgeoning technology enabled me to to do just that, Internet communications. In fact, my team was not just an early adopter. We were a trailblazer in how to use the tech, and we won one of the first Wendy Awards.
To this day, I say that to chase clout with techies. And here I am. I'm doing it again. We're looking at the photo of Tom Peters, bestselling author of manuscript books, in search of excellence among them, and a rock star of that industry. When I talked to Tom, it was early evening in Manila.
It was early morning where he was. And he said, Jet, I wish you could see me now. I'm in my farm in Virginia. The sun's rising, The mist are dispelling. I have two dedicated lines connecting me to the outside world.
I don't have to dress up. I'm on overnight delivery from FedEx anywhere in the world. And I said, wait, hang on. That's a vision. That's a great way to operate.
So that impressed me so much that it became the model for my own company. And I was again a very early adopter of what we now call WFH, and that became my default mode. My main reason, my main motivation is quite ordinary. I just wanted to be with my kids as they grew up. To summarize, Internet communications, no matter how crude, desktop delivery, working remotely.
These themes and experiences would serve me in the years to come, such as when the pandemic hit. K. So this is a screenshot of my Canvas page, welcoming my PhD students. I teach a PhD class. What became the first ever course to be delivered on Canvas in the whole university, not because that was my goal, but my first batch of online students were so gung ho to start.
Bless them. In fact, if I remember, we did it in what looked like a better version of Canvas. Here I am telling them, you know, we have to be patient. We're all in this together and so on. Early days.
A couple of months later, I was offered the deanship of AGSB at the undergraduate school of business in the depth of the pandemic. I already had years of running an organization remotely, But there was an added twist. Not only were we remote, but our data Was it hard copies stored inside folders such as these, inside metal cabinets, inside that office that we could not even go to. If you remember those of you in Manila, if you remember what ECQ was like. The solution is the core of this presentation.
We use the Canvas learning management system as the main administrative tool. After all, it was twenty four seven available, accessible, scalable, and more importantly, interactive. In describing this journey, it occurred to me that I could do an alliterative framework of five years and start with our experience. This is a quote from doctor Randy Bass of Georgetown, a guest speaker in one of the learning sessions of the university. Designing from context, for context.
This has been our guiding principle. Everything we did, we had to start from context, not from inside, not from content. So using Canvas, we tracked and discussed the most significant shifts in the context of our school for the next five years. We came up with a top ten, and here we were. This is how we started.
We then house everything in its own Canvas course. This is the homepage, which also shows you a diagram of the entire strategic planning process. We did it live. We were doing it live. And therefore, everyone knew exactly where we were at any point in the project.
And we try to use all of the tools, crowdsourcing through Canvas, better than sourcing ideas in synchronous type meetings, among other advantages. Video conferencing with archived videos such as this roundtable with subsequent deepening of the discussion, We use this extensively to build our work. It's important for me as a leader to build community. Remember, I was a newbie in the organization, cut me from outside. Speaking of engagement, that was the next step in the ladder of benefits of our approach.
We engage external stakeholders. This is my own private advisory board. We engage internal stakeholders, the leaders of the university. Other internal stakeholders, students and alumni, participation broadened, deepened. Everything was accessible.
You could go back and forth to all of this content. And just like in any course as project head, the benefit of using the LMS as administrative tool was that I could track all of the people in their activity, useful in twenty twenty one, useful in twenty twenty five. Our planning sessions are built on strategy conversations. That's an Ateneo staple, following Ignatian principles of discernment. Conversations, well, Canvas facilitated those.
So this is among many of the conversations that we conducted and archived and are still alive. We conducted several benchmarking exercises, again, designed for context. Because of the nature of the medium, it became more visual, more engaging than the usual reporting. Having proved that we could use the LMS for our planning processes and that it was effective, the next step was expansion. That meant expanding it to even more processes, especially for execution of the strategies.
Here is a diagram of the Canvas page that became like the starting point for all of these other courses. And all of the execution components you can see here, Each of these is clickable, and each of these is its own large Canvas course. Using as many of the applications as we could. For example, under academics in the middle in purple, you'll see a box called OB, outcome based education. We know that.
So when you click on that, Here's the homepage for OBE, which houses a complete OBA playbook, all one hundred slides of it Annotated an OBE checklist so that faculty could themselves check whether their courses complied with outcome based education based on AU and QA criteria. We translated the criteria into a very comprehensive checklist that they could use. And all of these courses supporting execution pages. So in Ateneo, we follow the principle of adaptive design for learning. Shout out to our colleagues in the audience.
To ensure that you can access the course from any device, after all, in twenty twenty five, if it's not on your phone, it doesn't exist. Are there challenges? Of course. Starting from ten o'clock. Tech skills and fluency are variable. We all know that.
But when you scale it to how much we've scaled it and we've extended the scope to how much we've extended it, the variability becomes even greater. We can never have enough faculty development. By the way, faculty development, that's its own Canvas page. Engagement is double edged. The more engaging you make it, the more it demands engagement.
It's like you're feeding a monster. Right? And more frequently. Constant content creation can become a burden. One of the biggest obstacles Top right, two o'clock, is cultural. Do you have an asynchronous culture? The mental model still for many folks is still the meeting.
We can only communicate when we sit down together and hold a meeting. K. K? But it takes effort to change this culture, and that's what we have to do. That's what we've had to do, and we do it one member at a time. Finally, integration can be complex.
The more we scaled it, the more they acquired vigilance in the nitty gritty work of maintaining proper flow and links. So I was excited to hear earlier this morning about the agents that we could use to do that work for us. Thank you. Next came extension into new technologies. And what could be more topical Then, of course, generative AI.
We'll talk about it the whole day. AGSB was the first school in the whole university that came up with our own Gen AI policy, which I wrote, not because we wanted to be first. But because, you know, again, designing from context. Early on, I gathered students in a big town hall meeting on Zoom, and I asked them, raise your hands if you're already using GenAI in your work, for your work, every day. Four out of five raised their hands.
Two years ago, it was already BAU, business as usual. Therefore, we realized the students were ahead of us. We needed to catch up to them. We had to leapfrog over our initial fear. Like many business schools, we studied this well documented case, The Wharton experience.
Right? If you haven't seen it, the operations manager professor of Wharton tasked chat GPT to take his exam based on a case study, and, of course, the AI aced his exam. And this was our first realization. If AI can already analyze a case, then analyzing at the case should stop being the competence that we're trying to teach our students. It has to go beyond that. So the clear conclusion, instead of outlawing AI, we needed to revise assessments.
I'm lifting a quote from one of our town hall meetings where the student said, yes, you need to do that. So one example to illustrate this. We have a strategic management paper, an important paper in our school. Part of that is you're familiar with this external analysis. Right? A student submitted a paper.
I looked at it, the external analysis, and I said, no way. This is machine generated. To test it, I ran it through three online checkers. All three said machine generated. As a control variable, I got a piece of my own original work, Scott's honor.
I fed it through the same online checkers. The online checker said machine generated. And here was our conclusion, Sarah, right in the face. If you reach a point where you're trying to catch it, it's too late. So what we did was we went back to the student and said, wait.
You You know what? Tell us how you're going to use it for your particular company in your industry. From your experience, derive how you would prioritize this, and so on. Here, we turned it. It was great. And we told ourselves, wait, we should have asked that in the first place.
Therefore, Assessments is the final is the first and final answer. When we started, it was kinda neat. AI could handle the product of learning, and the students could handle the process of learning. K? So lower order thinking, critical thinking, problem solving integration. That's up for the students.
If only the world were so neat, and if only the world was at a standstill. We have to recognize that AI was going up the ladder thinking very quickly. So instead of pushing technology down the ladder, we had to move up the ladder ourselves, continue to move up the ladder, constantly striving to define the human value added. K? And the way I even say this, I said, we have to define what it means to be human in twenty twenty five. It's not that that's not even a joke.
So we have to summarize our policy as succinctly as we could. There are items in your syllabi that said no use. There are items that say empowered use, and there's an elaborate description of each. Some professors have fallen back on oral exams to escape the reach of AI. In an ironic twist, I held oral exams, But using a famous technique, students had to recite, not to me, but to Gemini, and I programmed it with a detailed rubric and a persona of a pesky student.
Okay. Did the students enjoy it? Not the one reciting. But when I asked, it was an online class, and asked, how do you find this? Hearts were exploding all over, you know, the online page. They loved it. And so we are developing assessments, aiming to move up to AI integrated assessments like what I just described.
One of our aspirations is to get ourselves, our students, and our faculty To one of the highest forms of thinking, metacognition. More than just learning something new. No. Thinking how you think, changing how you think. That's one of the highest orders of learning, and that's where we would like to head.
Like with any change effort, of course, there's a learning curve and an adoption rate. We're not all there yet. But to borrow a phrase from John F. Kennedy, let us begin. We're also empowering ourselves.
After all, we have to practice what we preach. Having developed an elaborate playbook, we feed the rods syllabi to Gemini. We feed the criteria. We feed the whole book of William Spady, and then provide the human value added at the end. So here's a snapshot of one of those Canvas pages.
Where we use Gemini to assess whether the course is compliant with OBE using the AUNQA criteria. K. And later, professor Menana Arasid will discuss this in more detail in the panel to come. So the question would be, does the leader of today's organization need to be a techie? I will be the first to say No. Having sub depth skills helps, maybe, but leadership is still the primary competency.
At the start of this presentation, I said I would share two parallel journeys. There are actually three. There was always and always will be a parallel tech journey, and we are eager to sail into the next horizon. Thank you and good day.
When I when I reflected on this presentation, it occurred to me that the processes that I will describe illustrate my own personal journey interwoven with an organizational journey. And this is how I introduce my own perspective as a leader. In my own consulting company, among my projects was design, organizational develop for a multinational client. They said, this has been good. Could we bring you to two of our other offices in two other countries provide your service to them too.
And of course, I said, No. Thanks. Instead, I said, what if I deliver to your people, you don't have to fly me over. And it will just require entry level skills. So I designed and relied on what was then state of the art tech, self paced, desktop delivered training via optical disc.
Fast forward a few years, and I was head of an international unit with offices around Asia. I had to hire and manage those teams and manage them simultaneously across the region. Fortunately, another burgeoning technology enabled me to to do just that, Internet communications. In fact, my team was not just an early adopter. We were a trailblazer in how to use the tech, and we won one of the first Wendy Awards.
To this day, I say that to chase clout with techies. And here I am. I'm doing it again. We're looking at the photo of Tom Peters, bestselling author of manuscript books, in search of excellence among them, and a rock star of that industry. When I talked to Tom, it was early evening in Manila.
It was early morning where he was. And he said, Jet, I wish you could see me now. I'm in my farm in Virginia. The sun's rising, The mist are dispelling. I have two dedicated lines connecting me to the outside world.
I don't have to dress up. I'm on overnight delivery from FedEx anywhere in the world. And I said, wait, hang on. That's a vision. That's a great way to operate.
So that impressed me so much that it became the model for my own company. And I was again a very early adopter of what we now call WFH, and that became my default mode. My main reason, my main motivation is quite ordinary. I just wanted to be with my kids as they grew up. To summarize, Internet communications, no matter how crude, desktop delivery, working remotely.
These themes and experiences would serve me in the years to come, such as when the pandemic hit. K. So this is a screenshot of my Canvas page, welcoming my PhD students. I teach a PhD class. What became the first ever course to be delivered on Canvas in the whole university, not because that was my goal, but my first batch of online students were so gung ho to start.
Bless them. In fact, if I remember, we did it in what looked like a better version of Canvas. Here I am telling them, you know, we have to be patient. We're all in this together and so on. Early days.
A couple of months later, I was offered the deanship of AGSB at the undergraduate school of business in the depth of the pandemic. I already had years of running an organization remotely, But there was an added twist. Not only were we remote, but our data Was it hard copies stored inside folders such as these, inside metal cabinets, inside that office that we could not even go to. If you remember those of you in Manila, if you remember what ECQ was like. The solution is the core of this presentation.
We use the Canvas learning management system as the main administrative tool. After all, it was twenty four seven available, accessible, scalable, and more importantly, interactive. In describing this journey, it occurred to me that I could do an alliterative framework of five years and start with our experience. This is a quote from doctor Randy Bass of Georgetown, a guest speaker in one of the learning sessions of the university. Designing from context, for context.
This has been our guiding principle. Everything we did, we had to start from context, not from inside, not from content. So using Canvas, we tracked and discussed the most significant shifts in the context of our school for the next five years. We came up with a top ten, and here we were. This is how we started.
We then house everything in its own Canvas course. This is the homepage, which also shows you a diagram of the entire strategic planning process. We did it live. We were doing it live. And therefore, everyone knew exactly where we were at any point in the project.
And we try to use all of the tools, crowdsourcing through Canvas, better than sourcing ideas in synchronous type meetings, among other advantages. Video conferencing with archived videos such as this roundtable with subsequent deepening of the discussion, We use this extensively to build our work. It's important for me as a leader to build community. Remember, I was a newbie in the organization, cut me from outside. Speaking of engagement, that was the next step in the ladder of benefits of our approach.
We engage external stakeholders. This is my own private advisory board. We engage internal stakeholders, the leaders of the university. Other internal stakeholders, students and alumni, participation broadened, deepened. Everything was accessible.
You could go back and forth to all of this content. And just like in any course as project head, the benefit of using the LMS as administrative tool was that I could track all of the people in their activity, useful in twenty twenty one, useful in twenty twenty five. Our planning sessions are built on strategy conversations. That's an Ateneo staple, following Ignatian principles of discernment. Conversations, well, Canvas facilitated those.
So this is among many of the conversations that we conducted and archived and are still alive. We conducted several benchmarking exercises, again, designed for context. Because of the nature of the medium, it became more visual, more engaging than the usual reporting. Having proved that we could use the LMS for our planning processes and that it was effective, the next step was expansion. That meant expanding it to even more processes, especially for execution of the strategies.
Here is a diagram of the Canvas page that became like the starting point for all of these other courses. And all of the execution components you can see here, Each of these is clickable, and each of these is its own large Canvas course. Using as many of the applications as we could. For example, under academics in the middle in purple, you'll see a box called OB, outcome based education. We know that.
So when you click on that, Here's the homepage for OBE, which houses a complete OBA playbook, all one hundred slides of it Annotated an OBE checklist so that faculty could themselves check whether their courses complied with outcome based education based on AU and QA criteria. We translated the criteria into a very comprehensive checklist that they could use. And all of these courses supporting execution pages. So in Ateneo, we follow the principle of adaptive design for learning. Shout out to our colleagues in the audience.
To ensure that you can access the course from any device, after all, in twenty twenty five, if it's not on your phone, it doesn't exist. Are there challenges? Of course. Starting from ten o'clock. Tech skills and fluency are variable. We all know that.
But when you scale it to how much we've scaled it and we've extended the scope to how much we've extended it, the variability becomes even greater. We can never have enough faculty development. By the way, faculty development, that's its own Canvas page. Engagement is double edged. The more engaging you make it, the more it demands engagement.
It's like you're feeding a monster. Right? And more frequently. Constant content creation can become a burden. One of the biggest obstacles Top right, two o'clock, is cultural. Do you have an asynchronous culture? The mental model still for many folks is still the meeting.
We can only communicate when we sit down together and hold a meeting. K. K? But it takes effort to change this culture, and that's what we have to do. That's what we've had to do, and we do it one member at a time. Finally, integration can be complex.
The more we scaled it, the more they acquired vigilance in the nitty gritty work of maintaining proper flow and links. So I was excited to hear earlier this morning about the agents that we could use to do that work for us. Thank you. Next came extension into new technologies. And what could be more topical Then, of course, generative AI.
We'll talk about it the whole day. AGSB was the first school in the whole university that came up with our own Gen AI policy, which I wrote, not because we wanted to be first. But because, you know, again, designing from context. Early on, I gathered students in a big town hall meeting on Zoom, and I asked them, raise your hands if you're already using GenAI in your work, for your work, every day. Four out of five raised their hands.
Two years ago, it was already BAU, business as usual. Therefore, we realized the students were ahead of us. We needed to catch up to them. We had to leapfrog over our initial fear. Like many business schools, we studied this well documented case, The Wharton experience.
Right? If you haven't seen it, the operations manager professor of Wharton tasked chat GPT to take his exam based on a case study, and, of course, the AI aced his exam. And this was our first realization. If AI can already analyze a case, then analyzing at the case should stop being the competence that we're trying to teach our students. It has to go beyond that. So the clear conclusion, instead of outlawing AI, we needed to revise assessments.
I'm lifting a quote from one of our town hall meetings where the student said, yes, you need to do that. So one example to illustrate this. We have a strategic management paper, an important paper in our school. Part of that is you're familiar with this external analysis. Right? A student submitted a paper.
I looked at it, the external analysis, and I said, no way. This is machine generated. To test it, I ran it through three online checkers. All three said machine generated. As a control variable, I got a piece of my own original work, Scott's honor.
I fed it through the same online checkers. The online checker said machine generated. And here was our conclusion, Sarah, right in the face. If you reach a point where you're trying to catch it, it's too late. So what we did was we went back to the student and said, wait.
You You know what? Tell us how you're going to use it for your particular company in your industry. From your experience, derive how you would prioritize this, and so on. Here, we turned it. It was great. And we told ourselves, wait, we should have asked that in the first place.
Therefore, Assessments is the final is the first and final answer. When we started, it was kinda neat. AI could handle the product of learning, and the students could handle the process of learning. K? So lower order thinking, critical thinking, problem solving integration. That's up for the students.
If only the world were so neat, and if only the world was at a standstill. We have to recognize that AI was going up the ladder thinking very quickly. So instead of pushing technology down the ladder, we had to move up the ladder ourselves, continue to move up the ladder, constantly striving to define the human value added. K? And the way I even say this, I said, we have to define what it means to be human in twenty twenty five. It's not that that's not even a joke.
So we have to summarize our policy as succinctly as we could. There are items in your syllabi that said no use. There are items that say empowered use, and there's an elaborate description of each. Some professors have fallen back on oral exams to escape the reach of AI. In an ironic twist, I held oral exams, But using a famous technique, students had to recite, not to me, but to Gemini, and I programmed it with a detailed rubric and a persona of a pesky student.
Okay. Did the students enjoy it? Not the one reciting. But when I asked, it was an online class, and asked, how do you find this? Hearts were exploding all over, you know, the online page. They loved it. And so we are developing assessments, aiming to move up to AI integrated assessments like what I just described.
One of our aspirations is to get ourselves, our students, and our faculty To one of the highest forms of thinking, metacognition. More than just learning something new. No. Thinking how you think, changing how you think. That's one of the highest orders of learning, and that's where we would like to head.
Like with any change effort, of course, there's a learning curve and an adoption rate. We're not all there yet. But to borrow a phrase from John F. Kennedy, let us begin. We're also empowering ourselves.
After all, we have to practice what we preach. Having developed an elaborate playbook, we feed the rods syllabi to Gemini. We feed the criteria. We feed the whole book of William Spady, and then provide the human value added at the end. So here's a snapshot of one of those Canvas pages.
Where we use Gemini to assess whether the course is compliant with OBE using the AUNQA criteria. K. And later, professor Menana Arasid will discuss this in more detail in the panel to come. So the question would be, does the leader of today's organization need to be a techie? I will be the first to say No. Having sub depth skills helps, maybe, but leadership is still the primary competency.
At the start of this presentation, I said I would share two parallel journeys. There are actually three. There was always and always will be a parallel tech journey, and we are eager to sail into the next horizon. Thank you and good day.