Instructure’s Awesome Sauce for Developing Professional Learning

So I'm so excited to be here. Do you know how you have those, presentations or sessions that you're you just feel like you've got something of value to share. That's what I'm feeling today. And this is why, I have been in instructure for over ten years. That's a long tribe in world. My current role is director of people and culture.

I've been in that role for a little over a year. And before that, I used to manage the team of instructor designers. And I got that role in March of twenty twenty. I'm sure a lot of you remember what happened. It was funny that, like, I got that role.

And then, like, two weeks later, it was like, oh, this and of course, you know, March of twenty twenty, We're not really sure what the future looks like, but come like September, I was like, this is a lot. And the team grew from four people to eighteen. So a lot of growth in helping support dedicated people, or maybe they bought a pile of hours, or templates, that type of thing. And I share that because I still am really good friends with them, and I've been able to get the best of the best, not only from that team, but also clients that they've worked with, and bring that to structure and then to you today. So I also have a PhD in instructional technology from Utah State University, and then you can read that other little blur And I'm gonna share a little bit about why that humanitarian work is important.

So last month, I was It's my cute daughter. She's so beautiful. I was in Nepal, and I was sleeping in concrete floor And I was thinking about this session, which you're probably like, what? What is going on? Why would you be in Nepal and think about in structure, Con. But it was more of that reflective moment of what is my NorthStar and what matters to me. And if you happen to connect with me on LinkedIn, you'll see I really have a desire to make the world a better place.

So I was thinking about, in what ways I've done that, raising children, going on humanitarian trips, being out in structure for over ten years, renovating a home, and I was thinking about this session. And what would I want to hear if I was in your feet? In your seats today. And like I said, I'm going old school. Like, I've got old school notecards. I didn't know what perhaps like a bougie set up with all the little notes over here So that's why you've got pen and paper.

You can close your computer if you want. I'm also supposed to remind you that you don't have to take pictures any of the screens, I'm gonna share my slide deck, so I hope you're just like fully present and absorb everything today. So, Let's talk about what you're gonna hear in the next forty five minutes. What are the best practices for utilizing canvas studio impact, credentials, catalog, and more. And there were three large initiatives that I've taken on in the last team months since I've been the director of people and culture, which means I'm responsible for things like engagement, our engaged survey, and also of the learning and development.

Now, spoiler alert, and this may come as a price to you, but we weren't using Canvas for our internal professional development. I know. But for people that know instructure for a while, we used to have this product called Bridge, which is targeting corporate, as a corporate LMS. So we were using that. And when I applied for the position, so that was April of last year, I knew that our contract was gonna expire at the end of that year.

And so I had this little epiphany. Like, it'd be cool if we used our own products. And then I don't know, like, if engineers were like, why is it seventeen clicks to do that thing? Like, maybe they'd be like, I know how fix that. But I also it was one of those things that I didn't realize I was running a marathon. I thought it was gonna be like a walk around our blog, and it was a lot.

Like, the technical, I was fortunate to have a lot of connections being in a structure for so long to get those technical components figured out. But, so I'm gonna spend the bulk of our time talking about conferences as professional development, what you can do if you're putting on conferences or professional development, and then we'll also talk about onboarding and kind of what's on the horizon. So the first thing we did is we have an annual professional development week at instructure where we invest in our people And you can see the logos on the left hand side. And I was just ready for something fresh. So we reached out with marketing, and They still kept our mountain theme.

We wanted to keep it timeless, not have a year attached to it, so we stripped out the year. And of course, we wanna use credentials. So we wanted to make sure that whatever the logo was, that we could, take a spin on that and create, badges to go with our professional development. We also had a great campaign. So we mailed out little packs of stickers, and you guys got the same little panda, a lot of you, in from the swag, if you notice that.

So we mailed that out. And because we're a global company, we also sent out that sticker as a PDF and had them mail out in country. We put on this cute little video that says, oops, it didn't play. I wonder if it will. Did not.

Okay. That's alright. If you're really curious about that, you can find me on LinkedIn to find that little video, but it promotes, you know, that we have our annual professional development, and mail that out, email that out, put it on our internal candidate on our intranet. This is one of my very favorite things that we did. So we created this asynchronous way for people to support that, base camp session.

We called them Mountain Guides, and put together a slide deck, pulled in all of their pictures from their Slack profile, and asked them to put on what was their role, how many years they've been at instructure, and what was their literal or figurative mountain that they've climbed. And it was just a fun way for people to connect in an asynchronous way, especially because we span so many different time zones and regions. We have a Slack channel, and we also hosted a Zoom meeting that we recorded for people that weren't able to attend to have a pre event to help get them excited about this. And with that, we made sure that we had managers, we had individual contributors. We wanted to people in all of our regions represented.

We ask for them to promote base camp internally. We ask for them to promote it on social media, And that they would also put it out on LinkedIn so that we could get both internal and external presenters. Now, spoiler alert, that will be happening again and probably a couple of months. So if you connect with me on LinkedIn and you're interested in being part of our basecamp presenters, feel free to submit. We also wanted them to, moderate our sessions, so that was part of it too.

Our marketing team, again, did a great job putting together Zoom backgrounds. And then we had both our participants and presenters utilize those backgrounds rounds. So if marketing's watching this or anybody's in the room, thank you. Our marketing team really crushed it with this initiative. And then when they also created Google's slide so that we would have that consistent branding throughout.

And then we shared this template out with presenters. So the call for presenters, we had a Google form because we're, utilized Google a lot at instructure. And then I love that all that information went into a spreadsheet, and that became our tracking internally, who was going to need to be invited to present, whether we had received their headshot, whether we had their bio, that type of thing. And I have an amazing instructional designer. Kimberly was not able to be here today, but she put together this conference course together, and I wanna give you some of the nuts and bolts of how that worked in Canvas.

Oh, I think we missed Yeah. So that's what it looked like in previous years, a little spreadsheet, and then those links would host the recording where people could go to. But, of course, I think we have studio, and I'd love to look at analytics for people, that watch after. So we put it into a course, And then this feels like a stroke stroke of genius, which again, I can't this isn't all of my work. There were a lot of that we're working on this.

But we had it organized by day initially in modules. And you can see there's color coding as well, which aligns with our connect align and grow. You'll see that color theme throughout. And then it was organized by day, and then the time, and then the name of the session and presenter. Okay.

So then how's that gonna support badging? Well, after we had the session, then we would drop that same page down into another module, one for connect, one for align, one for Grow. We would strip out the day and time that wasn't relevant anymore. And then we would put the recording in from the session. That felt like a lot to say. But if you've ever done this type of work, that really felt like a stroke of genius.

Like, this is gonna be awesome. And so then we had one module for connect, one for align, one for row. You can see how those played out there. And then if people completed all three of those badges, they got the final one, the base camp. I also love our assignment supported UDL.

So we didn't really care what they submitted. They could take a picture of their notes, or they could take a screenshot of the person presenting. And again, I'll share this slide deck out, but if you aren't sure about following me on LinkedIn to get that, this would probably be the one slide that I wanna capture, because I think that's a pretty great way to show people that are taking professional development at your institute, what can you capture to make sure that they were actually there. And of course, we had a page for each presenter This is another one that I think is pretty brilliant. So every picture, every presenter had submitted their picture.

We had their session, session objectives, whether it was connect or align or grow, people could tell at a glance what session that went to. And then the next one here will show a little giphy of what the entire page looks like. And then you can see there was a session recording. We enabled comments so that people that were watching it after the fact could still have level of engagement. Every page also linked to this Google doc where you could make copy of the Google Docs so that they could capture notes from their session.

And then this was a major amount of love. So Kimberly took everybody's picture. She did her little white out magic, put it onto a base camp thing, and then people put this out on social media. And the day of base camp, the first day that it launched, it was so fun hop on LinkedIn and see all of the little, like, just the rainbow look that was out there. And it was another way for people to see that, like, we're really investing in our employees and its structure.

Now, I don't even know why I have these notes. Like, I know this inside and out. And there's some social media love that you can see. Like, that was just it was so fun to see that happening. And there's screenshot of the zoom presentation and seeing everybody with their zoom backgrounds and smiles.

And, you know, when you just it felt like this was kind of one of my work babies that I just put so much effort into this. So to see people smile and engaged and excited about it, like that was a good little capture. Gotta keep going past my notes, because then we also had a Google form. If anybody has an instructional design background, you think about analyze design, develop, implement, evaluate. We wanted to make sure that we had improvements for next year's round, so we wanted to capture some feedback.

And then I'm fairly confident this isn't gonna open up, but let's see if this, that's true. I'm actually not gonna take time to do it. Here it goes. Just kidding on that one. Nope.

It didn't go. Alright. I imagine a lot of you are teachers in here, and how many of you have your little Manila folders of link, your little notes that students have given? So Slack messages, we took screenshots of those, and put them into this base camp love note, little slide deck. For those rainy days where you're like, I need a reminder that what I do matters. I we all have those days, right? So that's a good little tip for you, if you're in a digital world to go back and revisit that what you do matters.

And because I sometimes go over the top, I actually thought about like planning a wedding. I could never have two years to plan a wedding because I would just keep going level. But, so I had a little thank you note. I had to handwrite the thank you notes, load up all the little packages with the little Cotopaxi fanny pack and the little love note and thank our presenters for presenting. So I'm not gonna say that'll happen next year, but if anybody happens to be a presenter, I'm sure something would show up in the mail for you.

So I wanted to focus the session in this format. Lessons learned what worked well, and what will we do different next time. So music playing when people entered our digital room. And I think if you got here earlier enough, I said something along that. Like, should have had music because it just brings this nice energy to the room.

So should have done that today. I'll know for next time. That core set up, the module organization and the badging, all of that worked really, really well, asking our mountain guides to be chat moderators really helped because it's me and one other person that's kicking this off. Like, that's a lot of work. So having them as chat moderators was super great.

And having one person download all the videos from Zoom important to studio, crop, catching, and then another person putting those videos into the course worked really, really well. What do we do differently next time is have one person responsible for all those zoom links setting, adding them to Google Calendar, like the logistics of that, having too many people in it kinda need the water. It's a tedious, but important job. And to make sure that all the settings are done correctly, we'll do that next time. We use Google, so putting Google calendar invites on everyone's calendar ahead of time as optional attendees would have made it a, I think, our attendance in person a little bit better, but I ran the stats for, a different project.

And from the previous year to twenty twenty two, we had a ninety eight percent increase. So, and our employee base hasn't really improved, not improved. It hasn't increased that much. We're probably in about fifty people. So that's pretty substantial.

And we offered it in November. Which quarter three is always busy for us. We also have Thanksgiving, and we dim the lights, and it's the end of the year. So people that are revenue based, like that a harder time. So the plan is to launch it in February.

So we'll probably have, you know, fourteen or fifteen months between base camps this time. We also pushed out that submission, probably too late. It just that crunch time then put a lot of effort on us at the towards the end. And I learned this from our engineering team. They have a a annual professional development session just for their team called pandemonium.

And they do like a high level like would you like to present? Just give us like three bullet points what you'd like to present on. And then you're selected to present, then you put the effort to, like, do a final description and title and all of that. So I think we'll go back direction. I think it makes it easier for just submitting an initial submission too. Any questions about that? Yeah.

Well, we have fifteen hundred, and I tracked it by session and link total number of people that attended sessions, but there's duplicate, right? Like some people attended one, and but it was close to three thousand. And it was three days, and I think we probably had ten ish hours of PD on the hour every hour for ten hours straight. So thirty sessions probably total. So that's an average of one hundred. Yeah.

Any other questions about that chunk? Yeah. What do you think accounted for the what was the main thing that you think accounted for the increase in participation? And I'm supposed to be repeating those questions. So the main thing that calendar for the increase of participation. I would say part of it was the mountain guides, like getting people that campaign sending out the video. Sending out stickers.

If you're coming in, feel free to grab a little pen and post it, or, yeah, there is a post it on there, and there's a couple more chairs open you'd rather sit down. I also think people were super intrigued by like, what's Dion gonna do with this? Because I tend to go over the top with things. And having been there that long, I think they were like, what's gonna happen here? I would say probably those three things. But, but the, I'm sorry, but the year before you had speakers. Correct? Yeah.

We've always had internal and external speakers? Promotion. You would say it would be the promotion that increased the the attendance? I would say it was the promotion And I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but, like, people know me and they know that I tend to go over the top as you'll see at the end of the session. And so I think people were interested in what I was seeing. And I really, like, I was kind of fresh to the team so to, like, network with my external connection and have them there. But, like, are you wondering what could you do to get in to increase professional development at your institution? Think these are those thinking there has to be some sort of big change.

What there were a lot of big changes, right, a new person doing it, two people doing it instead of one, using our own product, the social media, like putting all of that out there. I think people really genuinely got excited about it. Yes. Virtual, or was it did you have some sessions or some kind of I love that question. Yeah.

So the question is, are we, was it completely virtual? And it was? I ran statistics in May of twenty twenty two to kind of get a sense of here I am new in this role how many people are remote, and our companies percent remote. So we really wanted to make sure it was a remote friendly event. Yes. Go ahead. Branded that whole PD that way? Well, it had you saw the spreadsheet.

So that was one level of branding, and then you saw the little, like, that, that was previous branding. Yes. Yes. The zoom backgrounds, the slide decks, the social media love, the, yes, all of that that you saw that had that specific branding was all new. There's for last November launch.

Okay. It is hot in here. Isn't it? But remember, there's a reason to stay to the end. Okay. So now we're gonna talk about onboarding because that was a new thing for us to do, and again, to use Canvas to track onboarding.

So we came up with this theme journey, your instructor journey, and onboarding to success. And, I mean, you can tell there that we're using sequential order and prerequisites that we used modules and then essentially progression bars, but those are all done by hand. Anybody that does would love a progression bar, you know, it's a little bit painful. But they're so we had the orange for the first module, purple, etcetera. And you can see that that progression bar is kinda like grayed out you're not in there.

So I'll show you a couple of other screens of what that looks like, pages and assignments, and Again, like, I think it's fun to see the magic that can happen when you have people that know HTML coding because those look pretty darn good. And look up at the top, the progression far, like making that. Which, I mean, that one's not hard, but I am super grateful that there's people smarter than me on my team. Genally, if you're familiar with that, that's a great interactive where you roll over it. So this is showing added structure, some of the major milestones that have happened year by year and mastery paths.

So we have people in different regions. So we wanted to figure out how do we direct people that have US benefits versus other regions. So we use mastery paths to make that happen to direct them to one module or another. And if you're familiar with mastery paths, this should look familiar. If not, that's a kind of cool.

I feel like underutilized canvas feature that's out there. We also leverage blue printing because we, people want to know what does this new onboarding course look like? But we wanted to be able to divide out the live course versus people that were just interested. So we have our parent course where we have all of the up date content, and then periodically send out updates so that the live is always getting what they need, and then, the view only course for managers and other employees. And impact, I don't know if that's something that you're familiar with, but you can have that roll over and kind of provide context. So we have contractors at instructure that don't qualify for benefits, so that's how we were able to get them to jump over that they didn't need to do that module of content.

And so when we think about onboarding and what worked well, for sure was having quizzes for each module to make that participants, new hires understand and agree to, certain policies, having that synchronous session in breakout rooms, so people show up every Monday at nine o'clock mountain time, and they have that support from IT and HR. But then if they need to, then they go into their asynchronous portion and walk the videos and learn about culture and our values, etcetera, and then they come back. And that's been really helpful because then if you need that, like, holding for help me understand different benefits, then they can join a breakout room and talk to somebody on the HR team. We did learn the mastery path, so you have to turn those on at the course level before pushing that out if you're utilizing a blueprint course, and that they're to turn on mastery paths for everyone. That's like a little subtle detail about mastery paths.

Also, to make sure that you provide clear instructions for new quizzes, because sometimes that's a little bit tricky in the navigation for people if they're not familiar with new quizzes. And I always try to maintain content in one place, so we'll continue to embed Google docs into the course so that we're not trying to maintain content, sometimes here, and sometimes there. Okay. I'm aware of the time, and I got five minutes, and you still have a little, like, engagement thing. So I'm gonna talk about professional development and just showcase that utilizing catalog, and there's the cute little panda again.

And again, we used, impact because we have a special button on the global navigation so that people can get to the catalog. So that's another kind of life hack right there. And we embedded videos and help guides from we are partnering with Lattice as our performance management tool. And it's so great because that course was probably the quickest one to put together that maybe I won't say it looks the best, but looks amazing. And then when lab us updates their, videos.

They are automatically updated in the course. So the maintenance is super easy with that one. And Kimberly and are very proud of ourselves being, a finalist for the onboarding trailblazer award that's put out there by Lattice. So we'll find that out in a couple months. And what's on the horizon? We're working with Instructure's leadership academy to put together content for all of our mid level managers, then you can see the badges that are listed there.

And lessons learned so far with professional development. We did a needs analysis using Google forms, as well as live focus group sessions, and consideration of global implications, like how are we gonna make sure that the synchronous sessions are available for people that are, you know, twelve hours ahead of us. Our executive committee is super excited to be able to support data driven decisions, and using AI as a thought partner. I don't know if you use that to help write learning outcomes, but I'm like, this makes me so much more efficient, just as like a a checking point We did have contractors help us. I have been a professor at Utah State University, so I did a project based learning course, and we had students that were helping us with course creation as well interns, and I even had a gal from Fiji that came over for a month and stayed with me in Cash Valley, which I'm sure that was a big culture shock for her.

But so she's been able to help with the work too. And pre creating badge templates been super efficient. What we've learned is using Asana for project management is making us more efficient, and making sure that they're a strong alignment with the training and surveys and evaluations to make sure that we're meeting the expectations and need of our employees. So we've talked about best practices for building courses and conferences in Canvas, how to utilize credentials, impact, studio, and more. And I wanna leave you with this.

And we've got one minute that I would like you on your post it note to think about what is your north star. Mine is to leave the world a better place. I would love for you to write down your north star. And then ultimately, I want those post its to be on this wall over here. And then only put it up there if you're okay with me taking a picture of you can put your name on or not.

And then before you actually put it on the wall is when I will give my spoiler alert. So go ahead and take thirty, forty five seconds to write your nose drawer. Yeah, please. It is like smart sheets. Yeah.

Not yet. But I love that you're prepared to do it. Any other questions while people are writing their north star? Yeah. How much of those are paid for extra add ons or, like, when I go back, am I gonna have access to catalog? Catalog is a separate price, so studio. But like the HTML coding that you saw on there, that is all What if I was to do a shameless plug, and it's probably because I helped manage the team of instructional designers, but like if you're interested in, like, learning from the best and then being able to implement it in your own institution, like that's something that I would consider buying is just like ten or twenty hours or something.

I get no commission from that. I promise, instructional design. Just reach out to your CSM. Oh, my video is not gonna play. I don't think This is a cute little video of people saying Nava stay in the village.

So you'll have to use your, imagination for that. Alright. Somebody has a purple star. And on the back of one purple star is a star, who has that little Maybe that maybe that one didn't get taken. Okay.

Put them up on the wall. I still have a gift for somebody in this room from Nepal. So let's make a little, post its up there. You have this opportunity to connect with me and Kim oh, that guy is gonna be sad. He left.

You have an opportunity to connect with me and Kimberly only linkedin, because she wasn't here, she offered to meet with anybody on Tuesday or Thursday on August or third. You can see the times there. Just send me or Kimberly a message on LinkedIn, and and we'll invite you as to both of those sessions. Oh. You have the purple star? Oh, you found it.

It would okay. I'm just gonna randomly go up there and do, like, spin around put my hand out, and somebody is going home with prayer flags from Nepal. I thought that was so clever, because then it would be completely random. But I love all this up here. Thank you for this level of engagement and putting yourselves out there.

It's also on the back of that handout. You can scan the QR code and connect with both of us on LinkedIn. Which I feel like that's another, like, that's pretty cool. I am so grateful for smarter people than me. Alright.

Here we go. Okay. Helping people achieve their best self. Does anybody wanna enjoy that gift. Yeah.

And really, thank you so much for coming. I know your time super valuable, and I appreciate that you spent this time with me today. So thank you.