Situation
The University of Akureyri (UNAK) in Iceland has grown rapidly since it was founded in 1987, and today it offers higher education programmes in Humanities, Social Sciences, Health, Business, and Natural Sciences to nearly 3,000 students.
While the university has a first-class campus in the heart of the rural town of Akureyri, the majority of its students live further afield in cities or abroad and have always relied heavily on its online provision for flexible learning.
The edtech stack and choice of LMS are particularly critical in this type of environment. The legacy system was failing to meet the needs of both the university and its students, so they set out to explore other solutions.
Insights
Before adopting Canvas in 2018, UNAK used a “free,” but in reality very costly, legacy LMS hosted on its own server. They experienced high levels of downtime, and the setup lacked a user-friendly interface.
The UNAK team identified their needs for a new platform:
- Little-to-no downtime
- GDPR compliant
- Highly intuitive and user-friendly
- Accessible across different devices
- Easy to learn how to use for students and staff
- Able to tailor interactive courses and present them engagingly
Solution
After a Canvas demo, the team was impressed by its simplicity, engaging interface, and reliability. They decided to make the switch and were pleasantly surprised by the speed of the implementation and rollout within the institution.
The university focused on assigning a super admin in each department to support implementation, and soon the entire faculty and student body were using it every day.
The implementation phase for Canvas LMS went really smoothly for us. It took about half of the time we expected it to, in large part because almost everyone from across UNAK was so impressed by its capabilities that they were on board with the switch from the very beginning.
Helena Sigurdardottir, E-Learning Developer/Instructional Designer, University of Akureyri
Outcome
Canvas LMS has become an integral part of the fabric at UNAK, where much of the communication and learning takes place online.
- A reliable connection for remote learners. UNAK now enjoys 99.9% uptime, thanks to Canvas’s cloud-hosting with AWS.
- A better user experience. Students highlight Canvas LMS’s user-friendly interface and the ease with which they can navigate courses.
- Online Learning community. Using Canvas facilitates the creation of an engaged online learning community, as all courses at UNAK are offered online in a flexible model.
- A wider reach and time savings for teachers. Staff can share videos and interact with hundreds of students simultaneously in Canvas LMS. Features such as SpeedGrader help teachers save hours of time and deliver feedback effectively to large groups of students.
- Continued growth for UNAK staff. The university holds weekly Canvas workshops and ensures all users have access to support, whether through an online help desk, every day open online sessions, or private sessions.
- Support within the Canvas Community. UNAK feeds insights and suggestions to the Instructure team via on-site Icelandic user groups, where they also collaborate with the growing Canvas Community in Iceland.
“I’m proud of how we’ve managed to connect our geographically dispersed population at UNAK, and deliver accessible experiences for every learner. We’ve built a cohesive and supportive community across Iceland, one that is powered by the functionality of Canvas LMS.”
Helena Sigurdardottir, E-Learning Developer/Instructional Designer, University of Akureyri
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