NET+ Canvas Newsletter
July 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.
The Instructure Learning Platform
Meet the Instructure Learning Platform: making EdTech more personal and student success more equitable for every stage and style of education. Find out more here.
2021 Educator of the Year Nominations Now Open!
It’s time to recognize those very special educators in the United States that are shaping the next generation of students and positively impacting their lives. Learn more here.
New Instructor Coaching Program: Panda Pros
Instructure is launching a new program, called Panda Pros, that is targeted at helping instructors get coaching sessions for free directly from Canvas experts.
Starting next week (July 6 - September) Instructure will be offering free 25 minute coaching sessions with Instructure experts to any educator who is interested and using one or multiple of Instructure’s edtech tools. Experts will be available from 6 AM to 6 PM MT Monday-Sunday, to help answer instructor questions.
This is a great opportunity for instructors to have coaching sessions about a variety of topics: module best practices, instructional design, Speedgrader, strategies for formative assessments, Canvas Quizzes, accessibility, and so much more. Instructors can sign up today, so feel free to distribute this to your faculty as you see fit.
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.
What does InstructureCon Online 2021 have in store?
- Get Inspired
- Connect With Community
- Catch Up With Instructure
- Upgrade Your Skills
- Partner With Our Partners
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Canvas Advisory Board Updates
Upcoming Meeting: August 11th, 2021
The next Canvas Advisory Board meeting will be on August 11, 2021. The August agenda will be finalized on July 28th, but current meeting agenda items include:
- Discussion with Instructure CEO
- Webinar Update: Instructure Partner Program
- Institutional Profiles
A complete listing of all Canvas Advisory Board meeting agendas can be found here.
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July Meeting Recap
The agendas for all our 2021 meetings have been published, including our July meeting. Please note, these are working documents and subject to change so please check back for any updates.
IPO & Eesysoft
Melissa Loble (Chief Customer Experience Officer at Instructure) announced that Canvas is continuing to move forward with their IPO process. Instructure was public 16 months ago but since went private, and now they are going public once again. No significant changes from the client perspective are foreseen as result of this move, other than a greater access to cash from the market for Instructure. The reaction from the overall higher education community regarding this change has been fairly positive, with only slight concerns regarding management and ownership. Melissa was excited about this change, given that public companies typically pay their employees better and tend to retain talend more successfully. She also touched on the fact that public companies tend to be more growth-focused as opposed to profit-focused, which hopefully means that we will see strong investment in innovation and resources from Instructure going forward.
Instructure also recently acquired the company Eesysoft (now rebranded to Impact, and is currently working to incorporate various aspects of this software into the Canvas experience (including the Studio and Portfolio applications). Impact services will also be available for sale separately if higher ed institutions are interested. All of Instructure's data privacy policies will be applied to Impact.
Melissa also gave a reminder for us to promote the Canvas Panda Pro's online program at all of our member institutions: https://www.instructure.com/panda-pros
Updates and Feedback on Catalog
Sidharth Oberoi (Director of Global Product Management) gave updates about how Canvas is currently hard at work modifying and updating the Canvas cloud and Catalog to cater to global trends, cultural differences, and alternative learning styles. Canvas has made commitments to address the following user pain points over the next 6 months: support for dropped/concluded courses, login workflow improvements, the customization of registration emails, registration improvements, shopping cart, stripe integration, and bulk purchases. Overarching goals include creating more support for non-traditional online learning, supporting institutions in creating an online teaching and learning marketplace, and offering further support for managing and tracking course enrollment.
Zoom/Panopto Feedback Opportunity
Quyen Vaillant (Internet2) announced the upcoming opportunity for I2 member institutions to provide feedback to Zoom/Panopto regarding their service platforms. In order to be eligible to participate, institutions must have an NDA with Zoom. Please reach out to Quyen (qvaillant@internet2.edu) if interested.
Thank you to all who participated in this month’s meeting for your insightful feedback, ideas, and discussion! 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
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.