Exploring Alignment of Canvas Best Practices Between K-12 and Higher Ed

Thank you for joining me here this afternoon for exploring alignment of Canvas best practices between a k twelve institution and several higher ed institutions. I'm excited to share a little bit about our folks' experience with this, informal collaborative research project that they undertook, but first, I just wanna put the question to the room. Have you had any fun over the past two days? Good. Okay. I'm so glad. This is my first instructor con.

Since becoming Canvas administrator for my district, I'm having a great time. I'm just kinda soaking it all in, so very glad to be here sharing this with you. As well. So thank you for joining me this afternoon. My name is West Donovan.

I am the instructional application specialist for Chesterfield County Public schools in Central Virginia were just southwest of the city of Richmond. And basically what that means is if our students use it on their school devices, and it's supported centrally by the district. I am responsible for keeping the lights on. And I love it. It's the best job I've ever had.

And no two days are the same. So that's pretty terrific. My Twitter handle is there. I didn't include the bird because I don't think we're supposed to anymore. I don't think the bird is the logo.

It's it's it's an x and I think we're all eagerly awaiting the word on if we're still tweeting or if we're sing or crossing or something else. So I'd love to connect with you there. So I'm going to share with you a bit about this, action research experience that three of our instructional technology leaders in our district undertook I'll share I'll I'll contextualize it by sharing a little bit about our district and about the folks that did it. Why we did it? The steps that we took, what we found, and what we're going to be taking away from it as a district, what I personally I'm going to be taking away from it. There's a whole other chapter there.

And hopefully, if you can can take away something, either that we found or maybe you decide to do something like this yourself in your own educational context, then, I will definitely mark today in this session a total success. So Chesterfield County Public Schools, a little bit about us, we're the fifth largest school district in Virginia. There are three districts in Northern Virginia that are larger than us, and then Virginia Beach is also a little bit bigger. But we serve sixty four thousand students In thirty nine elementary schools, thirteen middle schools, and thirteen high schools. Two of our schools are completely virtual.

We have a K eight synchronous virtual experience that was, founded and established as a result of the pandemic. Our younger learners needed. Some of our families needed a virtual option for their younger learners. So that is a fully synchronous experience. They meet together four class at specific times of the day.

All of their coursework is in Canvas. And then we also have CCPS online, which is our fully asynchronous online high school, which has existed since two thousand five. That is definitely not a pandemic response. That programs serve students who may want an extra space in their schedule to pursue an advanced elective or their attending a specialty center and they wanna complete some of their requirements on their own schedule over the summer outside of school, and etcetera. So we have two, unique programs in that way.

The other detail that I'll point out is that our instructional technology support model is somewhat decentralized. So you heard me talk about we have, about sixty five buildings. Each one has their own instructional designer assigned to the school. They are in that building full time. They report to the principal of that building and they are integrated completely into that school community, which is great because it means they're completely in tune with the needs of their building.

Sometimes that makes whole district efforts a little bit difficult because they are entrenched in that school environment. So, that's something that'll come up a little bit later, just something to know about our our instructional technology support model. These are the three team members. Three of our instructional designers serving in our high schools that undertook this effort. You will notice I am not on here.

Allow me to explain why. I definitely want to call out and give all credit to my friend and colleague Doctor. Barbara Bingham, who's the instructional designer at Causeby High School. She was originally going to be here presenting this session because she conceived of this idea and this team got together and undertook this work themselves. They are all instructional designers serving their own buildings, but they self started and took the initiative and undertook this work, which is fantastic.

Unfortunately, Doctor. Bingham was not able to make it to instructure Khan. So I am presenting this in her place. So all credit to Doctor. Bingham, her contact information will be up here on the screen at the end of the slide deck so that if you do want to connect with her or any of the other team members, they would be happy to to speak with you if you have questions that I may not be able to answer, about their work.

So this was also very personal for all three of these folks. They all have either seniors that just graduated just left Chesterfield County Schools and are heading off to college in the fall, or, I think one of them has a a student that graduated our schools last year and has been in in school for a year. So this is uniquely applicable to all three of these team members, and they are all phenomenal instructional leaders in their own right. There are lots of great things happening in the state of Virginia with Canvas. Our district rolled out Canvas during school year twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.

Was our soft rollout year. Our instructional technology team got their hands on it in the spring of twenty eighteen to to get familiar with it. We made it available to teachers that fall in twenty eighteen, and then twenty nineteen to twenty twenty was our everybody's in year. Canvases our digital instructional hub, away we go. And of course, the pandemic did hit during that school year and that completely changed our approach.

But also during twenty twenty, the Virginia Department of Education decided they were going to provide Canvas for all districts in the state of Virginia. Which is great. And all of our districts are at varying stages of Canvas experience. Some like us have been in it for five or six years. Some of them rolled it out last year, are rolling it out this year, and some of them have not yet made that transition.

But Also, very recently, the entire Virginia community college system decided that they were all going to move as one to Canvas. Many other colleges and universities are making their way into canvas. So canvas is pretty ubiquitous in the state of Virginia right now. Lots of good things happening with Canvas in our state. So along those lines, the team that you just saw asked themselves the question How can we get together and make this mutually beneficial for k twelve and higher ed alike? How can we collaborate with our higher education institution, colleagues, and teammates to better prepare students to use an LMS in their environment.

And how can we open a two way street of information sharing and collaboration to improve the learning experience on both sides of that. So that was the question that they set out to answer when they, began to do this. Just a couple of things about what we already do to further contextualize, where Chesterfield is with Canvas. Of course, we've been in Canvas for about four or five years now. We do have common district settings that we have enabled through a district template.

We have a template installed at the district level that standardizes the navigation menus and settings for all of our courses. And then we allow schools. This was new for us last year. It's been one of our success stories for the last year. We rolled out optional opt in templates for individual schools.

And so, schools We had about half of our schools opt into that. Of our sixty five schools, we had thirty five participate last year, and I've got six new templates waiting for me to get back to Chesterfield and install. So, that's been a great thing to do. This is this is something that the team found was happening, over the course of their investigation, one of the things that we really had already dipped our toe into, so to speak, and that's everything from all the way down at the elementary level where maybe it's a home page and a calendar template for our youngest learners or a days of the week, today's learning templates page based templates, things like that all the way up to the high school level with, module structures and policies and procedures and all of that at the high school level. So a couple of things that we already did as a district.

So action steps, we, that is to say the team, aimed to connect with the three to five most frequently attended colleges and universities in Virginia for their students. And develop channels of communication that will hopefully extend far into the future. This was not meant to be just a one off kind of thing the goal was to build partnerships with many different higher education institutions of differing sizes, and, differing academic emphases, build partnerships, information share as much as we could. And then take that back to all of our folks. Our our entire instructional designer team and by extension our faculty and see how we can adjust our canvas experience for our own students to better prepare them, for what comes next and to make that cons that that bridging experience a little bit more consistent for for everybody.

So the team started by contacting, the school counseling coordinator at school sites because they keep all kinds of data on what our students do after their high school experience, whether that's, pursue a higher ed opportunity, join the workforce, serve in the military. They administer a senior survey in Chesterfield County to all our students that, provides that data for them. And so they went to them and and ascertained where do our students generally go in Virginia for, their higher higher education experience? And then after that, they used our old friend, the Google search engine, and just typed in name of higher ed institution instructional design team. And that provided them with all of the contact information that they needed. They reached out to between five to seven schools in total.

They had about a fifty percent response rate. So we ended up communicating with about four schools in total and as scheduling, as folks had scheduling availability, they they had between thirty and sixty minute Zoom calls in teams, as individuals with members of these instructional design teams. And they had some pretty fruitful conversations, had some really nice talks, that they were able to, let the instructional design team members generally lead and guide through their content. When the conversation lagged, these were the questions that we asked. In particular, what learning man what learning management system requirements are there for digital and in person classes? The team found that the institutions with which they spoke had many, many more expectations and guidelines in place for those asynchronous distance focused classes, not so much for in person classes whereas in our our district, canvases our digital instructional hub for all of our instruction.

In fact, one of the reasons that we moved to Canvas as early as we did was based on parent feedback that said, Hey, we really need one consistent place to go for all of our course information. It was either they didn't know where to go at all or their student had seven teachers using three or four different communication learning management solutions. How how instructors communicate with students is also highly relevant because until this past school year, Canvas inbox was the only way that our teachers communicated with our students. We just now this year turned on Gmail addresses for our high school students. And part of what drove that was that our students were asking to use that to apply to these institutions of of higher education and to apply for scholarships and use it to further their educational journeys, in that way.

So lots of fruitful conversations. I'm gonna give you the highlights because there's obviously a lot of content that they all reviewed. But what the team generally found was that, our higher education, instructional design, colleagues were generally just as interested in what we were doing as we were in what they were doing. As as a lot of educational institutions in the state are are kind of moving toward canvas, altogether. So, generally, the instructional design team walked our folks through their templates, their sample courses in great detail, and explaining the rationale for why things were the way that they were.

They did share a lot of content with our team for later study we wanted to hear as much as we could in that thirty to sixty minute time frame, and we established the that two way communication channel for for future collaboration. Like I said, we hope this extends far into the future. There were three consistent things that the team noticed applied generally everywhere. One of which was I think the newest to our particular team. So consistent design and consistent mapping, meaning students have a consistent and experience of where do I go to find x, y, and z in my course.

Which is which is always good for student to have a consistent, experience across courses in an institution. Now you heard me talk a little bit about our use of templates earlier Those templates do differ by school, but in each individual school, each school has their own template. So the experience across individual schools is is consistent and is consistent in that school. So that's that's logical to have a consistent way to access all your materials and courses. And again, for us, that's generally, the module experience for our secondary students down to are young learners that, generally will have everything linked in a in a page, a page based experience because, you know, our our youngest learners, k two, they're not in canvas necessarily every day.

So there's, there's not as there's just not as much to put together there. The key learn that Doctor. Bingham was eager to tell me about was an early access week or week zero where and I wanna I wanna share with you the exact quote from her because I think this is important. Regarding, regarding week zero. Although we were somewhat familiar with it, none of us had considered using and we did not understand the why.

So here you had the team members who were already moderately familiar with this idea, but in sitting down with folks who had been intentional about building it out and using it, They learned a lot more about it and now Doctor. Bingham, in particular, immediately went and built out an entire week zero experience that I'll I'll show you a little bit later. And and I'm sure that she would love to talk with you about and share if if you had an interest. But when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense to have a week prior to classes starting where instead of a student having to figure out where everything is stored in the class and complete content and complete and submit assignments. The intent for this early access week is to find the the assignment is to find your course materials and prepare to engage with the course content throughout the term, in that way.

So that's definitely something that we're gonna be sharing with our entire team and and that I'll elaborate more on in just a second. And then the third one, introductions in the course, referring to, in this case, primarily teacher video introductions. Nearly everyone we spoke to had And every every course that the team looked at had a teacher video introduction explaining, here's how the course is structured, here's how you use the course to its fullest fullest extent, where you where to go if you need help, where do you where do you go if you, need extra resources? And I think we can generalize that to personal touches by the teacher in a course generally. Students will have a better experience and of course that for want of a better phrase, courses that are lived in. That are are that have a lot of teacher touch points and that make the student aware that the teacher is engaged with them in their learning and and they are they are right by the student's side as they engage with engage with this material.

So we took all of this information. And I'll show, like I'll, like I said, I will show you the, week zero module that Doctor. Bingham built out for use in our district. I am act absolutely going to have her share all of this with our full instructional design team during our quarterly meetings this coming year. But she added not only course materials, but resources that are generally applicable to school and to the district for parents to access right then.

And I think that's a vast improvement on on my experience with my own parents getting information about my coursework in the form of you know, the big folder full of papers coming home and you had to sit down and sign them all here during this early access week where we're showing students, hey, here's how you're gonna access access your assignment Here's how you're gonna engage with this content. Why not involve parents in that too and provide those school and district based resources the parent observer role in Canvas was something we onboarded and turned on and made available to parents very early on. Fortunately, we were prepared when the pandemic hit. We had our parent onboarding infrastructure in place, and that is generally available to our parents. They can create observer accounts.

Get that pairing code, download the parent app, and then they have access all of that content just like the students do. There is the study that the team, cited as they were doing their research that shows that early access increases, innovative thinking, and preparation for students. I kind of liken it to when you get a new board game and you're excited to down and read the instruction manual to make sure that and I realize that's not everybody, but I that's definitely me. So that's that's kinda what what it makes me think of is getting ready to engage in that way and make making sure I'm all the way prepared to, engage in that. Here is the week zero module, and I hope I made it as big as I possibly could.

But if you would like to have these slides or would like more information about this, please do let me know at the end. I'm happy to share, as much as I have, but from the top, we have, a welcome from the instructor, a video from the instructor. Many of our high schools in Chesterfield have student success mentoring program at, at high schools and and middle schools. So there's a page for meeting your student success adviser, your peer mentor, so to speak. And then an introduction to Canvas, a brief, tutorial on recording videos in side of Canvas and doing video submissions for, select your own way to show mastery, sort of assignments, and then there's a couple of other topics that that folks can customize as needed, including some assignments at the bottom for things that teachers may need to get back from parents forms or acknowledgements, extracurriculars, things like that.

And then here is what, Doctor. Bingham put together for the, these modules have names. They're just they're just, white it out. I think she may have borrowed it from a teacher that may not have wanted it. Shared all the way, but, these, weekly modules that show students exactly what they are responsible for over the course of a given week.

Of course, a variation on that is having the module per unit sort of setup as well. But, really emphasizing the idea of we want students to have a consistent experience across their coursework. And of course with modules, you have all kinds of ways to customize those to your specific needs. It's not like all the modules have to look the same with the rich content editor. There's all kinds of images and beds, videos that you can that you can put in there.

So there's there's, infinite ways to customize that even even beyond a standard template. We have explanations in our template that shows teachers exactly what to put where. I think our schools do a really good job of the ones that have opted into templates so far. I think they do a really good job of this already is making sure that teachers know where they need to take action and what is what is standard to the school. So just like, you know, here's where your introductory video goes.

Here's where you put your office hours. Here's where you put the best ways to contact you. And and and different different pieces of content, like that. And Doctor. Bingham has also began started to customize specific training tools for teachers to not only train the teachers on what to do, but also explain why they matter in the context of the teacher's own unique school environment and why teacher and and and why the school has decided to proceed in this fashion.

And then the last thing I'll share is, course quality rubrics. We this is definitely an area I think district wide we can improve on We do provide currently teachers. We have our our course ready checklists, which are, a brief document. It's seven steps Here are the seven steps that you need to, complete and take so that your course is ready on day one. A lot of the higher education instructional design team members that were interviewed by our team make use of the State University of New York online course quality review rubric.

And that's what this screenshot is that goes a lot more in-depth not only of what do you need to set up but why do you need to set it up that way? And how do you go about setting it up? So here again, that's the State University of New York online course quality review rubric. And, Doctor. Bingham is in the process of customizing that to use at her own building as well. Finally, before I close, I want to share something that I've learned individually as a result of, obviously, I wish doctor Bingham was here to share this with you herself. And and and and share her work with you and talk more about it.

But one of the things that I realized getting this from her and sharing it with you Me, from a a division central office standpoint and the team members that undertook this work being in schools, the week zero early access week, the video introductions, and the consistent method of accessing content. All three of those are great findings, and Doctor. Bingham's gonna share it with the entire instructional design team, and they're gonna benefit from that. But You heard me talk a little bit earlier about the CCPS online asynchronous program with which I worked prior to arriving in my current role, all three of the key takeaways The big three are things that our own online high school already does. So that says to me, oh man, I need to better engage our asynchronous online instructional design team and get them together with our instructional design folks in the building because I'm sure there are many other, best practices that they could share and and ways to improve the the learning experience in Canvas for students in that way.

So that's just a nifty little, zoom out, learn that I had as a result of being able to to help doctor Bingham by sharing this with you. So if you perhaps want to engage in something like this yourself and your own individual, educational context you can do so if you're a k twelve school district by attending your identifying your frequently attended schools by students as they as they leave your district in your state, where do they go? And contact them and engage with them, see how they use canvas, as a learning management system, as well as their application of the universal design for learning. That's one thing I left out earlier. A lot of the folks that we spoke with made reference to the universal design for learning guidelines, which is a great thing. And then you can develop your templates for each school You can engage school based personnel to to ascertain what needs individual schools have consider level based needs, individual school needs, how existing best practices can fit into what you might build to use in the future.

And then you heard me make reference to the State University of New York quality review checklist. I've also linked in the in structure canvas provided course design checklist, which is a terrific resource. It is very comprehensive. It's something that instructional designers or root canvas LMS admins can sit down and customize for their own buildings because it's pretty enormous. If you've not seen it, which I had not until not too terribly long ago.

It's pretty enormous. And so it's the the the best way forward in in my mind is to take elements of that that are appropriate to your new your unique situation and customize it for your own educational context. So to close and wrap it all up, I will share this quote with you, which I think is embodied by our whole experiences are a whole experience here. Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up. That's Oliver Wendell Holmes.

And I think that happened multiple times throughout, the course of this whole experience. So got some references to share. And then if you have any questions, I am happy to answer them. Otherwise, I didn't think that folks would mind having an extra fifteen minute to catch their breath and maybe make their way to their next talk. So thank you all for joining me.

I hope this was helpful to you, and I hope you have a great rest of your time here at Instructure Con. And I'll hang out for a while down front cut the mic off. But, there's my email, doctor Bingham's email. She'd love to hear from you if you'd like to get in touch, and, I'll hang out down front here for a little bit.