University of South Florida

For the University of South Florida, or USF, the transition to Canvas Catalog was transformative. Kevin Hitt, Academic Services Administrator, Nancy Dimis, Assistant Director of Corporate Training & Professional Education, and Dr. James Welsh, Director of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology shared the benefits they’ve seen since implementation.

USF prides itself on being a major research university led by outstanding faculty that promote innovative scholarship and creativity to deliver a world class educational experience. In the last 20 years, leadership at USF decided to be intentional about fostering community both in the virtual and in-person classroom and through the creation of on-campus green spaces where students and faculty could collaborate.

At USF’s Corporate Training and Professional Education (USF CTPE) department, non-credit training program courses run everyday throughout the year, providing training and upskilling for non-traditional students. Having a registration system in place that provided a seamless customer experience was a necessity. With their previous systems, automated enrollment reports would take days to generate updates to course rosters and only offer a snapshot of enrollment at one point in time.

The need for a simple, expedient registration process was front of mind, according to Dr. James Welsh at the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, whose student population is mostly working professionals.

Instructors at USF CTPE were accustomed to waiting days to get access to reports with their enrollment data. With Canvas Catalog, faculty could now get access to their course enrollments at any time–no longer stalled by reporting delays. Instructors were also now able to export reports in the format that made the most sense for them.

“You used to have to wait to receive an automated report that would give you a snapshot of a point in time of what your registration is. Now, you have live access to real-time registration data. Anytime you want you can login to the dashboard, see the live registration data, and export your own report,” says Welsh.

Additionally, the ability to have different storefronts and payment connections has expanded accessibility according to Hitt. Setting up separate payment gateways in these custom storefronts, Welsh added, has allowed USF CTPE to create a pipeline directly from each Canvas Catalog storefront to their respective financial accounts..

“...Any departments that are doing non-credit work in our office can directly collect revenue [through the payment gateways]…which is a major thing because…if all of those transactions come into a central point and then have to be transferred out to their respective departments, it’s a lot more work than you would imagine,” said Welsh.

All in all, Canvas Catalog has served as a gateway for USF CTPE to empower its instructors and course administrators with both realtime enrollment data and a simple, streamlined way to allocate funds to their appropriate department.