A Shining Example: Don't Overlook Canvas LMS for Remote Onboarding

You all so much for being here. My name is Aaron Smith. I am an instructional technology trainer at the University of Memphis. This is my one of my newest colleagues. Brandon Moss. He is also an instructional technology trainer.

And today, what we're going to be talking about is a process that we did, sort of from two perspectives. Looking at using Canvas to remotely onboard new employees, we're gonna see it from the perspective of how we built it, and then we're gonna see what it was like to go through the process us. And then we'll have some things at the end too. Some options for questions, if we don't cover everything that you're interested in. So before we get into, the process that we did, I wanted to talk a little bit about the common onboarding process, or maybe lack thereof, because the the traditional onboarding process for any kind of organization is you get hired.

You meet with HR, your first day. You sign a bunch of paperwork, you pick your your retirement, your health insurance, and then you're led to your desk and said, okay, Maybe we have some some like Title nine training or something for you to do some policy information, but begin working. Right? It's, it's a process where you have to kind of learn on the job. That's the classic one, especially in non entry level positions and things like that. A little bit about my first week.

My first week started at the University of Memphis started a little bit more than half a decade ago. In the middle of the summer. My first day I went to HR. I signed all my paperwork. I picked my retirement and all that.

My second day, I went to my desk. I saw the people that were on my hiring committee. Hell, that's nice to see you all. I sat down and I said, they said, here is a folder. And in this folder is every document we've created in the last seven years.

Read it. And so I started at first. I organized it by date. That was the only organization that that folder had. And I started reading from the earliest thing that they had created when the department was created.

Until the latest thing that they had which is a bunch of power points and trainings and things like that. So I began that process of sort of self teaching trying to figure out what in the world I was supposed to do in this job. And then I came in for my second day. And because of the way things worked out, Some people were sick. They weren't there.

Some people were on leave, and I was alone in the office for my second day of work. And then an order came down from our IT security department and said, Hey, we need to add, a message in an announcement in the LMS that we were using at the time, warning people about phishing attacks. Here's the language to put in there. I I was pretty sure I knew how to do I was pretty new to administration of that LMS. Oh, there we go.

That's pretty, used to, administration that LMS, but I had to Google it. And I'm like, I can do this. It'll be fine. I'm the only one here who who has the ability to do it. So I googled something I got it done, posted it, felt good about myself.

Now at the time, we were oh, I was a wall away from the call center. The help desk. And I realized that I had done something wrong because it was the middle of summer. And normally there'd be one phone call every so often. But the phone started ringing about at ninety seconds after I posted that message.

And more phones were ringing. So much so that they weren't able to answer all the phones. And I said, I've I, that's me, I think. What I had done was I had accidentally sent an email in that announcement out to most of our roughly twenty thousand student and forty five hundred faculty and staff, letting them know that they were in imminent danger of a fishing attack. Which, by the way, when you get an email like that, that looks a lot like a fishing attack.

I made it through the week. I still have my job. But that's the kind of thing that can happen when you don't know what you're supposed to be doing in an organization. That's the kind of thing that you get when you don't have a nicely structured onboarding process. We did about the same thing.

I actually became in charge of the onboarding process from that time on. And we did about the same thing for years. One of my former, people that went through that onboarding process with me is right here. We did about the same thing. We brought them in.

Here's a big folder. Read through it. If you got questions, turn around your desk, ask them. It's fine. It worked for some.

It didn't work for others. Then we had in twenty twenty an opportunity, a terrible, miserable opportunity to change the way we did everything. And I I will I've said this before, and I I will continue to say it. It's the best worst thing that ever happened to us, going remote, fully remote for that period of time, and Mostly continuing since then. But we have did about the same thing.

Hey, here's a bunch of information. Take a look at it, and let me know if you have any questions. Until about the summer of twenty twenty two, when someone mentioned, I don't remember who, but someone said, you know, we use canvas to train, and provide professional development for faculty, why don't we use it to train our new employees? It's an obvious solution, to a problem that we didn't realize we had. So that process, that that suggestion started an entire new wave of ideas and how we could bring people in. And more importantly, keep them.

So the process started How do we build something in canvas, an onboarding process that is going to go beyond just HR? HR has their process. We need ours. We had to figure out what they needed to know. That was the first thing. What did they need to know? And that's never changed.

What they need to know is they need to have the technical knowledge to do the work. That's the thing we've been training on them this entire time. That was never an issue. We need to show them exactly what they're gonna be up against, exactly what they're going to have to solve, hurdles are gonna have to jump through, projects are gonna have to do We're gonna have to show them all that information. We're also gonna have to let them know about policies that affect us directly, not just university wide policies, but policies and agreements we may have with other departments and divisions.

There may be an agreement that is just between our department and the registrar. And nobody they wouldn't know that when they signed their papers the first day with HR. Also, the strategy that guides what projects we do, how we do them, what projects we accept, what things we turn on and turn off. And then we had to decide what we wanted them to know. What do we want a new hire to know? We want them to know who we are.

Especially from a position of never having met us and maybe never physically meeting us ever. We need them to know who we are, what we care about, how we communicate with one another. We also wanted them to know what we value, not just values as in like work ethic, professionalism, but values in what do we actually like in a person? What do we expect out of a person? Like, is it a lot of times a lot of times when you're in academia or in IT, or in you've just support in general? Really important to be the smartest person in the room. How do you communicate that that is less valuable than the person who can empathize with the problem that someone's having? How do you show them that they that to be successful here, you don't need to be the best at your job you need to be your the best with people and the best at solving problems. So we wanted to communicate that.

Our things like humility, empathy, finding your own voice, and your own way of doing things and sharing that with the group. All of those were things we wanted people to know. So we started putting it together. The process was one that it started out with the idea that every single person on our team was going to have a voice. They were almost gonna force to be have a voice.

So if everyone has this by the way doesn't mean we wrote by committing. That would have been miserable. If you ever had to write a single document or an email together with a bunch of people, it takes way longer than it should. No. We we gave, different portions of the course to different people in our department, but we also went through it together, and all of us had a chance to edit And that mainly is because we all have different perspectives.

We all have different things that we have found are important. Different things we have found different mistakes we have made that has led us to different conclusions, things that, maybe you've never run into a certain issue when another person has, and you've never talked about it before. When you start a project like this, if you ensure that everybody in the department has a voice in its creation, you get all of that experience all of that institutional knowledge that gets slip through the cracks because it's not important day to day. You get to put that in here. We also got kept a conversational tone.

When you're in academia, right? You it it becomes kind of second nature to write in a very stodgy way. Impenetrable. We didn't want that at all. We wanted people to understand again our culture, who we are, So we wanted our voices to shine through this. Not just, you know, Grammarly's voice, but our voice.

Right? And so we kept our tone in every single thing we wrote conversational, even edited if it sounded too academic or too stodgy. And because each one of these things is written by a different person, you get this, the strong variety of different voices in each one of these areas of modules. Each one of these pages, videos are different. They show you know, what the information itself, but also who we are, and and how we expect to speak to one another. Especially when we're trying to educate one another.

We also wanted it to be a student driven experience. That was super important to us mainly because the idea of having to hawk somebody and say, are you done yet? Have you finished that? Have you read it? That's that's horrible. That's, like, it's parental. We didn't want that. We wanted to be able to open up large modules for them to read through for them to be able to pick what they wanted to read.

And then to meet with them and talk about it, have conversations with them about it so that, they could let us know what they were getting out of out of different modules, out of different information, if they had any extra questions, if they needed something clarified, you want it to be a student an experience with expectations of completion pleading things at certain points, but also that was that was really fed through, having conversations saying, are you ready to move on to the next one? We needed to do a couple things because of the nature of our department, it involves, people like me and and Brandon who, spend their time training faculty in very technical ways. So I always describe myself as a mechanic, like I'm there to fix problems, I'm there to support you. We also have instructional designers, that You know, they have methodologies about how to express knowledge that's way better than we do over in in, just pure training and support. So we wanted to include multiple formats of information so that you weren't stuck in a single thing. You weren't just reading after document after document, doing the thing that I did when I started.

We have text that shows you know, what we expect you to know, some information for you to know, conversationally describing sort of, a process or a change that we've recently gone through in this case. We also have links out to guides, canvas guides, or guides are one of the many, enterprise software that we support. And we include videos embedded through studio, that walk the new hire through maybe just how to do something, or maybe it's examples, good examples of best practices or bad examples when things go wrong and things get hard. We have links out to ticket. We use a ticketing system for our support.

So we have links out to those tickets that say, Hey, here's where things went right, and this is good communication. Here's where things went wrong, and that's bad communication. Here's where we made a mistake. Important to show the mistakes, and that leads to, the third part, we have a lot of examples here. Tons of different types of examples, examples of those good and bad things, but also examples of how to communicate with somebody.

What's all the information that you need to share with somebody when you solve a problem for? Or when you're asking more information about a problem. Canned responses, but not just don't just take this response as it is, use this as the basis, to provide your own voice to it. Rewrite it in your own voice. But really it comes down to everything we shared, the good, the bad, the ugly, the hard stuff, the easy stuff, even getting down to there were whole thing whole areas where, you know, the answer is you're gonna have to figure out how to solve this problem yourself, because each one each type of problem that comes in is unique. When a when someone needs help with an assessment, that's a unique situation.

I don't have a great, a single great example. Here's a bunch of different examples of it, but It's all about the process that you develop on your own of of of how to solve a problem. That comes in with the last point here, which is honesty. At all points, we were honest about what it was like to work, with our department. That was really important to show people, that sometimes it's difficult, sometimes it's busy, and other times it's not, but it's all met with a a team that supports one another.

To communicate that, we had to show not just expectation but good, bad, and ugly. When you're trying to teach people anything, it's important to know how well they're doing. Right? We don't have any traditional assessments in this yet. We especially didn't want it to be something, where we Alright. Here's a bit of information.

Let's test to see if you've mastered it. Here's a little bit of information. Test to see if you've mastered it. We didn't want it to be something that, like, testing so you could join a club wanted to be something that you absorbed naturally, holistically. And part of that was not always hawking people asking if people if they were done.

With certain sections, having being able to have those conversations. But instead relying on the data that's already generated by Canvas, to see how well they're doing or how often they're accessing the course. So we use student data to see what they were accessing and when. So we didn't have to ask them all the time. We use new analytics to see how often they were accessing the course, how they were handling maybe different pieces of information.

Are they routinely going back to certain pages or spending long hours, different places, or are they having maybe a hard time? Something that we need to intervene because they're not spending enough time in the course. We use studio insights a lot because there are a lot of videos in the course. And we use those for a few different things. One, to see how, if if you know, the new hires are actually watching the videos, but also to see what parts they are watching over and over again, Is that something we can we can then come with a conversation, say, is is this something that you find really helpful, or is this something you find really obscure? Like, did we not explain this well enough? It's an opportunity for us to do some remediation on our end to maybe fix a video, rerecord something new entirely, that explains it better. You know, this is the first time we've done it, but even if it was the millionth time, there's always an opportunity to fix something so that it can better explain these complicated technical cultural topics.

We used also a host of video conferencing. We we met a lot. More than once a week, to to talk about this, to have, conversations about how well it was going, if there's anything that they've gleaned, any anything that they felt is truly valuable out of this process, as well as being always available. Now, that doesn't mean three AM. You can text me at three AM, but I'm it'll be later when I respond.

But when you when you chat, when you send me a text, when you send me a chat, you want a call, say, Hey, can we can we get on a quick phone call to see, if you I have a question that I wanna ask to be available like that. It's not all asynchronous. It has a huge synchronous component because when you are Nobody, the process of, bringing them in is one of a conversation. So you need to have that there as well. We realize that.

The next thing that we're gonna that's gonna happen here is that that's really the process that we did that we followed to get the course ready. The idea is to structure a methodology that we use to get the course to the point where we were ready for a new hire to come in and view it. Now we're going to hear, what Brain's experience was with the process. Alright. Thanks so much y'all.

I'm just gonna talk a little bit about what my experience was like as the, first new employee to be onboarded. Now, my previous onboarding experience had been very similar to what Aaron described, the very sort of conventional, you know, For me, it was three ring binders. It wasn't folder. It was a big three ring binder, with a heavy emphasis on shadowing. Prior to joining this team, I've been in libraries for about seventeen years.

So lots of on the job training, lots of shadowing. And there's nothing wrong with that per se, but I do think that there is a better way to do it, and I think that the Canvas onboarding was the better way. So I'm just gonna explain saying, why I prefer that? Number one is more flexible. Like Aaron mentioned, you know, you're starting a new job. You are, you know, enrolling an insurance, you're, you know, getting your ID tag made, you know, you're worried about, well, when's my last paycheck my previous job, and and when my first paycheck is there gonna be a big gap, like, you're stressed out.

You're incredibly busy. With Canvas onboarding, it's extremely flexible. If you have your laptop or a phone, you can work on onboarding, especially if you're doing something like I had with a heavy emphasis on shadowing other employees. It's very difficult to coordinate schedules when, you have all of that going on. On.

Well, with Canvas onboarding, if you have your phone in your pocket, you can do some of your onboarding. Nexus engaging, that, that folder, that three ring binder, not really attention grabbing, not really something that's entertaining, or it's something that really, captures your mind, you imagine nation, but with Canvas onboarding, you can add videos, you know, using the principles of instructional design, you can really create great engaging content that's really gonna spark your employee's interests. Next up is clarifying, One of the most stressful things about starting a new job is not just the job itself. It's the tiny little sort of ticky tacky things like learning the jargon, right? The abbreviations, the acronyms, the, you know, names of other people and other departments who you haven't met yet. And no new employee wants raised their hand in every staff meeting twenty times.

Excuse me. What? Who can you clarify? So the Canvas onboarding course a great sort of storehouse for all of that kind of information. One of my favorite pages we have that, Aaron put up was, What departments are we confused for? And it has a list. Sometimes people think we're the center for teaching and learning, and we'll say, this is what they do, this is what we do, This is why people confuse us, and this is who you refer emails that we receive that should go to them. This is who you forward that email to.

So it's a really great storehouse for that kind of information. And speaking of storehouse, it's referable. It's a great reference, I still go back to the onboarding course, probably every couple of days because it's a really great place to store you know, standardized language. Maybe you get a ticket in that you don't get that often. You don't remember how to do it.

You haven't memorized that. It's in the onboarding course. So even nine or ten months on, I'm still looking at the onboarding course. So those are the reasons why I prefer Canvas onboarding to the more conventional style of onboarding. But I'm gonna talk a little bit about the section that sort of struck me the most that I enjoyed going through the most, and it really told me this is a team that I wanna be a part of, and these are people that I wanna work and that is our um3d values section.

This was sort of the section that explained our norms, our, you know, behavioral expectations and our workplace culture. So if we're talking about workplace culture, we need to talk about culture more Right? And so what is culture? I really like TS Elliott's definition, which says that culture is sort of the collective habits interests and, beliefs of a people. So when we talk about that, what we're really talking about is social culture. That is the culture of, you know, your country, your region, whatever other demographic you belong to. Now, that can take centuries or millennia to develop.

And that's what contrasts it with workplace culture. Our workplaces don't have that kind of time or that continuity to sort of let things happen naturally like that. Workplace culture is not a given like social culture tends to be. But that's actually strength for workplace culture, because workplace culture can be deliberate. We can decide, it's not just received the way our social culture is, we can decide this is what I want our workplace culture to be, and this is how we want to express it.

So why express it at all? Why express our workplace culture? Well, there are consequences to not deliberately communicating your culture to your, to your coworkers and your colleagues. I'll give an example. I used to work at a place, I worked here for about a decade, and we were friends. Like, we got along. We went out beers after work.

We worked down the street from our minor league, baseball park. So we used to go catch a game on our lunch break. If there was a matinee game, we'd go see an hour of baseball. We went to each other's weddings. We went to funerals for family members, like we were a community.

And then we made a couple of, strategic blunders, and hiring. And we brought on people who maybe did not have the same values as the rest of the team. And our workplace culture died. There was gossip back biting, people started calling in sick. One of my coworkers, one of my favorite coworkers I've ever had, she started calling in sick every Monday.

Because she could not face getting up, you know, after a nice enjoyable weekend, getting up and coming to work because of what happens. At work because of these, bad hires that we made. So if you don't deliberately express what your culture is, the culture is gonna be set by the loudest people in the room. And you might not necessarily want the loudest voices in the room to set the tone. So if communicating culture is important, why do it on your Canvas course? Well, as previously mentioned, you know, retention.

And, and engagement. Communication culture and canvas, you can really use all of those principles of instructional design that we used to really maximize the retention of the learner. Next, you have it allows revision. As new situations arise, maybe you missed something. Maybe there maybe something came up, maybe there's something in the news, and you need to go through and reevaluate what you're explaining to your employees, where your colleagues, it's as easy as going in and just adding a new page or editing a module.

Next, it enables real life examples. And also, I I would also include artistic examples there. We're like, as Aaron mentioned, we're, you know, you have words like teamwork and humility and and empathy. And those are great, but those are very abstract. Right? You you need to put meat on those bones because they're so abstract that they can just become subjective.

Nobody's gonna say I'm not a good I'm not a good team player. Everyone is gonna believe that. But if you actually provide examples, then there's a concrete measurement, with which you can gauge your own behavior and see, am I actually a good team player? The example that I like to use is, my kids, I have two sons, they're five and eleven. They are obsessed with the movie, the Sandlot. And they'll do this.

They'll, pick a movie, and that is the only thing in the world that exists. For about a month. And then they'll completely forget about that movie and then move on to the next one. So they got over space jam, and now they're on the original space jam for the record. And now they're on the sandlot.

So me and my wife kind of found a way to don't wanna say weaponize that, but we we found a way to kind of encourage encourage it. So if you've never seen the sandlot, there are spoilers ahead. It's been thirty years you've had you've had a chance. But, so the sandlot, there's this kid named Small. Small is kinda dorky.

He's kinda nerdy, not very good at sport. I don't expect anyone at Instructure Con to, to relate to that. But he's, he's kind of a dorky kid. He moves to a new town, and he wants to make friends. So he goes out, he sees a bunch of kids playing baseball.

And he goes out and wants to play with the kids who are playing baseball, and he humiliates himself. He falls down, breaks his glove, looks like an idiot. So he runs away, runs home. He says, I'm never gonna do that again. I'm just gonna be a nerd, locked in my room.

One of the kids who plays baseball's name is Benny. And Benny is kinda like the cool kid. He's kind of the leader of the baseball group. Benny shows up It's like, Hey, where have you been? We've missed you. And Small's like, I don't wanna play with you.

I mean, he's like, come on, dude, you wanna play with us? We know you do. So then he gives him a glove, gives them a new hat, and invites them back to come play with all of them. All the other baseball kids don't want smalls there. Like, this kid's a loser. He's a geek.

We don't want him here. And Benny kinda says, shut up, guys. He's playing, like, be nice. He's playing with us. He's, you know, so my wife and I have adopted, be a Benny.

That's kind of our, become our phrase that we use with my eleven year old, because when you say be inclusive, be generous, be mind. Those are just abstractions. Like, that can mean anything you wanted or don't want it to mean. But when you give a concrete example of, hey, in this kind of situation, do this. If your friends are being jerks, tell them to stop, then that's an actual measure that you can use to, gauge the appropriateness of your own behavior.

So, basically, just embed the sandlot in your course, and y'all will be good. And then lastly, it accelerates assimilation. You know, a new, by kind of articulating your group's identity and their norms and their values, new employees can quickly understand kind of this, understand what's going on. They understand how this place works, what this place values. And that sort of expedites, team building and sort of acculturation into the team.

Yeah, that was my experience with this, and that's why I wanna urge y'all to use this for, both the technical and the cultural aspects of your onboarding. And I'm gonna give it back to Aaron to talk a little bit more. So It was a success. Alright. And it was a success twice, actually.

Because we've onboarded more than one person, and and it it is on is set to be a success in the future as well as we bring in more people in this, in this department. But that doesn't mean that we we knocked out the parking ticket perfectly the first time. So what did we learn from the process? One of the things we learn is we need more opportunities for input. We need a a more vibrant course, really. There's a couple things in the course that give those opportunities.

One is a sort of book report. When, we hire new people, New hires have to read a book called Getting Naked by Patrick Lindsay. And it is a it's a book that's basically on professional, organizational, humility, and empathy, and honesty, honestly. But the process of reading that, you know, the process has always been in the past, here, read this book, to read it? Great. We need to have more.

We've we've had conversations about it after they read it, we we we go in-depth. We need more opportunity to discuss it in a broader way. And so one of the ways that we we are changing the course is we're adding in, just a discussion board, like, just a regular discussion board, to have new hires add their thoughts on the book because there are a million different ways you can absorb that information and internalize said. But more than that, we are also opening it up for everybody in the department because because by now, we're getting almost everybody in the department at this point, has read this book. I know I had to read it when I started, but other people are are also almost done reading it And we wanna put those perspectives in that discussion as well.

We wanna see, you know, how how these types of ideas, the thought process in this required reading, evolves over time. So we get to see people that may be no longer with you know, soon to be no longer with the organization, with the department, their input in this. What what was their perspective on this? We get to see how that information evolves on the time. Same book, different perspectives. We want all of that included.

We also want to use more integrations. One of the things that we definitely are adding into the course is, padlet. If you know what padlet is, there we go. Padlet. Padlet is, basically an integration tool that you can use, this own standalone product, but you can integrate it into your Canvas pages to basically provide a format for people to discuss in short, you know, kind of commentary at their comments to the page things they got out of it.

You can ask questions, give them prompts, and they can write, their own commentary on it. That can also be available over time for as as the page evolves, each individual page as it evolves, as it changes, We still have that commentary that shows, what people are getting out of it at any specific time. And then it becomes just a richer experience in general, something that we can use to foster discussion. More than just the technical information or examples, it becomes, a self generated bit of content. Another important thing that we didn't really think about at the beginning, but became obvious at the end was that when you finish the course, you need to become responsible for the course.

Not the lone responsible person, but you need to become one of the people who's responsible for the course. So really the onboarding process, which is, which has generally been a single point of contact. I'm the person that you're gonna talk to, or you're gonna talk to the director. That is no longer the case. Now we wanted to have, we wanna have more responsibility on the people that have just gone through it because they have new perspectives, fresher perspective, on the type of things that are required, to do the job.

In in this, I've been doing this job for almost too long to see where the gaps are in my knowledge. But someone that's new, they understand those gaps really, really well and can fill them in in this course in a way that I cannot. It's also become a repository for institutional knowledge And that has been, Brandon already talked about it a bit. It's something that I go back to, to make sure when I do a certain task a different way. I go back and adapt the course.

When I learn something new, go back and adapt the course, it's something that we've used, beyond beyond just the standard, Hey, you're gonna look at this course and when you're done, you're never gonna have to look at again. It's become something that we've used beyond using Wiki's, big folders full of documents that no one could read in a million years. We use this now as a thing to go to because in Canvas, it can be structured in a way that enhances learning and then a course like this also makes it easy to find the thing you're looking for because it's in the same place every time. It's also repeatable and adaptable. No one has copied this course directly, but through conversations and through, A lot of good kind of word-of-mouth of how this happened.

Other parts of our our own university have started to create their own versions of this idea, to use Canvas, a tool that is readily available and that they don't have to buy. It's already purchased. It's right here available for them to create their own courses to talk about their own technical responsibilities that need to be covered in their own culture and their own values. And we generally believe that this would be this would be a vital tool for anybody. You already own the product.

You don't have to go and buy a new professional development product, you have it. You are you are developers, your admins, your educators, you know what to do already to fill up these courses. You can take anything we've said today, as as guidance but you already have the foundations of the way to train the people that come through. So, please, if you would like any more information about us, you can always go to mythos dot edu slash canvas. Find out more information about ours, you can use the QR code, to get there as well.

I'll I'll pause here so people can snap it. But yeah, it's Memphis dot educanvas, find out more about us and how we use canvas, who we are, and the department as a whole. But yeah, if you have any questions, I'll move on to the, to the other QR code that is good for, your scavenger hunt. But I'll get you in one second. Yes.

No. But that's a that is a great, idea. And it's become something that so that was me. It's become something that is, more and more important. Oh, I'm sorry, off boarding, like the process of off boarding.

It's become more and more important. One of the things that has really been important about this is This course, particularly, is, as a repository of institutional knowledge, that you lose when people leave. That process gets done throughout, especially by making making new hires or responsible for the course, the process of retaining institutional knowledge, things that aren't obvious, that you're going to lose when someone leaves that process happens naturally in the creation and administration of this course. So there is a part of it that is also already, being done But, it's not it is an interesting formal idea to, like, to actually formalize in this course or a separate course. Of course, as that sometimes people will be even more honest when they're leaving Yes.

The sometimes, honesty of the value of honesty is is never easier to achieve when someone's out the door. Said no quizzes, but you added discussions. Do you have simulations or applications where they can go in? Going around the top edge, whatever. So we have, in there, we we invite the especially when we do our Canvas training module, is the question is, do we have simulations? We don't have, have, have assessments, but do we have simulations or things they can do? We invite them as they complete the Canvas model module to go in our test environment and use that. They can use test environments, beta environments to, to try things out before we give them full rein over the actual product.

So, yes, we do provide options for that for, for of our products that's available to. And then for other ones, supervised learning. So they're not gonna mess anything up. It gives them a chance to to complete, complete activities that they would have to do as an administrator. About chef? Yes.

I know a kinda one way I was gonna ask him how much were you affected by not being able to shout out since that was the number. Mhmm. Yeah. I think the the team is just very open. And like Aaron talked about with communication, it's, you know, I never had a question that went unanswered.

Everybody was very available. So I I didn't really miss, shadowing per se because the the opportunity was still there to see the experts at work and, and to consult with them. And also there was shadowing in a lot of different things. We do a lot of training and professional development in our department, And shadowing is still an important aspect of that. It's just remote.

And since we do our trainings remote, and our professional development remote, that was also they just attended those. And then, recently with our newest tire commisha, it it's become kind of even more formalized as you watch me do it, and then you and I both do the training together. You pick a part that you wanna do, and then we move on to you doing it alone while we're there to support you, and then we can push you out to see to let you go. Yeah. I forgot about that aspect.

But yeah, I remember when I did my first training, Aaron was there watching me. And afterwards, he kinda went through. I apologize for my voice y'all. I'm not used to clean mountain air. Yeah, get back get back to the dirty south.

Yeah, Aaron was there. You know, watching. And, you know, he let me lead the training. I think you only jumped in, like, once or twice when, like, a microphone wasn't working or something like that. And then, afterwards, he kind of gave me some pointers about, hey, you know, next time change this, maybe, you know, next time mute people when they come into the room, you know, just little things like that.

So, yeah, that's drug to forget about the, that aspect of shadowing. People be loud. They don't mute their microphone. Yes. Have any issues or experience any, like, pushback or transitioning your information through this, module, or course itself, and then Do you see any issues with keeping it up and getting it taken for? Or, like, what keys he might happen as I've seen it where people no longer have So for pushback, no.

And I think that really revolves around the process or lack thereof that we had before, our information was so many different places that the idea of organizing it into a singular place was really valuable to everybody who needed to buy into the idea. Every stakeholder that that needed to have a voice or would have an opinion against it, was for it. I can see that if you already have a, a really well codified, like, information management system or process that that moving it into this may be a little bit more difficult, to, to get people to buy into that process. But, I don't think, that it would be impossible because it doesn't preclude keeping keeping information anywhere else. It just, is that this when you put it in a single place like this, it makes it easier to, to come back to and to retain.

It's also I believe that if you're if you are continually advocating for something, it becomes easier if someone's keeps hearing it, we have this We have this campus course. We, you know, we have people that, you know, on our team that, really didn't go to the course very much, and even over time to say like, oh, that information that you're looking for, it's in the course. They start using it, picking it up. And then it becomes, like, gradual cultural change without having to say the scary c word, you know, change is coming. You know, you don't have do that, you just say, Hey, this is available too, and our new hires are going to do it.

And if you actually, if you have a question about that, go and look there as well. What's the second part of your question? About keeping it updated. So that was one of the things about having, about having transition on who was ultimately responsible for it, giving it to the newest person because the newest person likely has the least amount of responsibility on least amount on their plate. So if you give the responsibility ultimately to the newest person on the team, they can take that over and keep it updated as we have meetings, and we have policy changes and process changes, they can take that over and add to it. We have not run into an issue yet about not being able to keep it updated.

And we have plenty of plans already that have been generated by our newest hires, to change things, adapt things and add more information. So right now, there's no, there's no scary issue of not being able to keep it updated. But it's something that, I mean, it's that's a natural process. If it isn't advocated, if it isn't talked about, it'll die. So part of it is just the human human aspect of keeping it updated, is keeping it in people's minds.

Alright. Thank you all so much for being here. I really appreciate it.