NET+ Canvas Newsletter
May 2021
In this version of the NET+ Canvas Newsletter, learn about the latest updates from Instructure about Canvas, comments and feedback from the Canvas Advisory Board, as well as best practices in Canvas use around the Internet2 Community.
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Instructure Updates
Updates from Instructure regarding Canvas product offerings.
Canvas Studio Guide: Higher Ed Edition
Click here to download the guide in PDF.
Your Guide to Choosing Student Success Software
Click here to download the guide in PDF.
Case Study: Coastal Alabama Community College
Click here to read about how Coastal Alabama Community College used Canvas to support an 18% increase in adult education in the first six weeks of the pandemic.
Click here for all things Higher Education by Instructure.
Save the Date: InstructureCon 2021 | October 7 2021 | Canvas LMS
Save the date! InstructureCon 2021 will take place on October 7, 2021. Get the chance to expand your Canvas LMS skills, catch the latest news, and connect with educators and education experts. More Info here.
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Canvas Advisory Board Updates
Upcoming Meeting: June 9, 2021
The next Canvas Advisory Board meeting will be on June 9, 2021. The June agenda will be finalized on May 26th, but current meeting agenda items include:
- Institutional Profiles
- Webinar Update: Instructure Partner Program
A complete listing of all Canvas Advisory Board meeting agendas can be found here.
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May Meeting Recap
The agendas for all our 2021 meetings have been published, including our May meeting. Please note, these are working documents and subject to change so please check back for any updates.
The May meeting revolved largely around privacy concerns with Learning Management Systems like Canvas and a recent article that was published by The Nation. Daisy Bennett, the Instructure Privacy Officer, spoke to the fact that most concerns currently revolve around a lack of transparency with regards to data practices, and therefore efforts will be focused around providing further and easier access to information regarding privacy when it comes to Canvas. These efforts include the creation of a Data Ethics Committee (currently in the planning/exploration phase), the Canvas Privacy Website, an Instructure Privacy Hub (release date June 2021), as well as Community Privacy Standards Committees. Daisy is also pulling together an article, the goal of which is to consolidate information about privacy standards and practices that is currently spread out among several different resources (Instructure Privacy Website, Community Articles, Canvas data scheme, etc). Daisy will also soon be publishing a series of blog posts explaining the various resources available on the Privacy Hub.
The previously mentioned Instructure Privacy Hub is set to go live in June of this year, consolidating several privacy-related resources & information sources. A link to the Privacy Hub will be provided in our next newsletter.
Shaun spoke briefly about planning for 2022 which will take place over the next 6 weeks, and a helpful spreadsheet was shared that lists the top concerns for each member institution regarding the upcoming calendar year.
A reminder was also given to all advisory board members to please fill out the Canvas Institutional Profile Survey if they haven’t yet done so. These profiles will be a very useful informational and diagnostic tool for the Advisory Board as well as the greater NET+ Canvas community once completed, so we greatly appreciate your cooperation!
Keep a lookout for the next Canas Advisory Board webinar to be published in summer 2021.
Should you have any questions or want further information around the work being done by the NET+ Canvas Service Advisory Board or a copy of the Partner Program Report, please don’t hesitate to visit us at https://spaces.at.internet2.edu/x/7BOJCQ or contact us at netplus@internet2.edu and we will be happy to respond.
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NET+ Canvas Program Update
Temporary Business Model and Pricing Update
We have been working with Instructure over the past several months on a temporary program to bring some relief to struggling institutional budgets due to the pandemic. Thus, I am happy to announce a program that is effective immediately and will conclude June 30th, 2021.
The program allows for pricing discounts for institutions that are going to begin a new Term. If an institution is able to commit to a longer Term length, then they will be able to take advantage of such discounting. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to email us at netplus@internet2.edu and we can share the specifics.
Service Advisory Board Goals for 2021
These are the goals that the advisory board is looking to perfect at the January 2021 meeting:
Goal #1
Develop with Instructure a customer success culture that:
- identifies service and support best practices and next steps
- benchmarks Instructure's service and support appropriately for universities
- aligns Instructure's service and support to best help universities achieve their strategic goals for teaching and learning
Decision: Quarterly check-in, beginning in February, with a focus on how we measure success for Instructure's customer success culture.
Goal #2
Develop a foundational construct with Instructure that outs in place a predictable process for the board to advise and offer insights on future product development or acquisition including cadence, structure, and practice for exchanging ideas.
- Deliverable: 3 “exchange” activities using/iterating this process on things that Jared, Shaun, or product owners are thinking about during 2021
- Deliverable: one of these “exchange” activities is to initiate a Contributing Team for Canvas Data/Live Events
Goal #3
Continue to develop and refine, with Shaun, a strategy and process for I2 and R1 Peer universities to provide Instructure with actionable information on pain points and unmet needs. The strategy and process should be synced with Instructure's product development cycle and allow Instructure to clearly communicate status and progress back to the universities.
Goal #4
Decision: Instructure cannot reasonably do the actual data sharing piece at this point, and universities are likely not ready to use/share de-identified data. And, we're all waiting to see what Unizin is doing in this space. So, we've decided to refocus on (a) what questions we want to answer with Canvas data, and (2) the best way we might answer those questions with the data. We'll tackle this topic in March with Oxana's replacement. 1/27 update: We may also want to explore a de-identified data sharing program thorough I2.
NET+ Canvas - HELPFUL LINKS
Around the Community
Commentary from I2 Canvas users: advice, best practices, feedback.
R1 Peers
The Canvas Peers Research Universities Group (or R1 Peers Group) brings together representatives from large public and private research universities to share best practices around using Canvas and the surrounding ed tech ecosystem to support teaching and learning. They also collaborate closely with Instructure (Canvas vendor) and sit on the Internet2 NET+ Canvas Service Advisory Board to improve the Canvas platform and user experience for research universities. This group represents more than 250 members from 45 institutions of higher education and research across the United States, and around the world.
For context, recently the R1 Peers Group has collaborated in the following areas:
- Tier 1 support
- Archiving
- 3rd party integrations
- Pain points
- Data privacy
LRS Standards SIG
The Learning Records Store (LRS) Special Interest Group (SIG) assembles use cases for an LRS, creates an LRS reference architecture, and develops implementation/engineering best practices. The SIG promotes open standards that enable data from a variety of teaching and learning tools to be included in the LRS.
This group is chaired by the University of Washington and meets monthly on the fourth Wednesday of the month. For more information or to join this group, please reach out to Matthew Buss (mbuss@internet2.edu). Thank you.
Most Recent LRS SIG Meeting Agenda - 3/24/2021
Brown University is collaborating with Unicon on efforts to provide the infrastructure, visualizations, process and expertise to faculty and administrators so that they can use data from multiple digital course tools and university systems to gain insight about how their decisions impact learner engagement. Roland Hall and Katerina Stepanova at Brown shared their work on the data infrastructure with this group. Brown is now ready to continue the discussion LInda Feng from Unicon initiated in the fall on data retention policies.