University of Liverpool and Canvas LMS: Driving student satisfaction and international growth

I'm Andy Dolbin, associate director for business systems within IT services. I've been at the university now for just over eight years. I think my favorite thing about the role currently is that ability to influence in the strategic direction of the institution and digital in particular. So working through opportunities for both staff and students to improve the educational experience. It's a really exciting time. My name is Ben Macrae.

I'm an education developer as part of a department called the Centre for Innovation in Education here at the University of Liverpool. We've got an education strategy which encompasses active learning, authentic assessments, research connected teaching, and then underlying that we want students to be confident, digitally fluent, as well as sort of part of the global citizenship of Liverpool. The previous LMS here at Liverpool was quite clunky and dated. The look, the feel, it wasn't very intuitive. So staff were doing the bare minimum of using that LMS and not doing anything in terms of inter activity, collaboration, or communicating with students.

My name is Craig Goacher, and I manage the digital education services team within IT services at the University of Liverpool. And I've been working here for just over eighteen years now. For years with our on premise solution, we typically geared up to doing one major upgrade every summer. We will be planning it and and testing it for weeks, if not sort of months. Now being on the cloud with Canvas is is great.

It just takes away a number of workloads and just means that then we can focus more on innovations and work that's gonna add value. Canvas was set apart from the rest on the tender process. It brought a lot of the things I was looking for within an LMS. You could do lots of different assessment efforts through it. The app looked really useful and easy to use which we'd never had beforehand.

People were really friendly, open to suggestion, answering all our questions. Compared to the other suppliers they were a level above, I would say. I think what we found with Canvas, and we went through, you know, an extensive tender exercise there, a, the development roadmap was was absolutely there, and we could see how intuitive it was, how modern facing, how it would enable us to put the focus on the user but also develop our pedagogy. My name's Susan Canning. I'm the director of the Center of Education Development and Support for the faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of Liverpool.

Canvas has helped us improve pedagogy. There's a lot of uses of Canvas quizzes. Canvas studio has been fabulous where you can record your presentation and yourself within that presentation and then add a quiz into it as well. It's been great. I think Canvas has helped a lot of students tackling accessibility issues because there are students who need special attention to reading.

And Canvas has special features which has helped our students to read better, dive deeper into what the reading material is all about. During my undergrad, I did not like that system much because it was very difficult first because it was not accessible through mobile and it had to be accessible only via university systems. So I would say that Canvas is, like, way better than the previous one because I can do everything from one system. I don't even need to open my laptop. I feel like Canvas has improved our accolades and our reputation here at Liverpool in a number of ways.

We've seen things like our tech reputation move from silver to gold. We've seen ourselves climb up certain tables. And then how it's done that is that students have been more satisfied with the experience they've had through the LMS. I wouldn't want us to move away from Canvas. Not only Canvas, but a number of the other tools as well.

In terms of how Canvas can help us with our strategic goals, as we grow and as we grow internationally, one of the things that attracted us to Canvas is how scalable it is, gives us a lot of adaptability. I do think Canvas will be useful for attracting international students. I I think there's a lot of commonalities between what we use on our LMS systems and theirs, so it's not such a big culture change when they come to University of Liverpool. Canvas seems to be improving a lot of their features that we like already. The portfolio system's gonna improve, new changes to the assessment engine. All of these are probably gonna have a big impact in how we teach and I can see us expanding our global reach to not just people in Liverpool but across the UK and the world.