Backgrounder on the Instructure Canvas pilot
Summary: The Canvas pilot is one in a series of probes into new technologies to generate user experience data that can be reported back to the relevant decision making bodies. This is a backgrounder to provide context for the current Canvas pilot.
In the fall of 2012 a colleague introduced me to Jupiter Grades. I experimented with the package briefly but found that I hit pay walls when I wanted to do something beyond maintain a personal gradebook. I could not generate student logins without purchasing an annual subscription. I was also not all that impressed with the interface which felt almost DOS like at times. Jupiter Grades did convince me that the college ought to explore the use of a learning management system.
At one point the college had a Moodle instance installed on the college server. I had tried to set up a Moodle gradebook, but quickly realized that Moodle was essentially an open framework - the instructions should have said, "A lot of assembly required." I was looking for something closer to a turnkey operation, not a build it yourself kit.
In January 2013 I read good reviews concerning Engrade, which was free at that time. I started to use Engrade that spring term to track grades and to provide student logins which they could use to check on their grade. Engrade worked well enough for my statistics and ethnobotany courses, but did not work as well for physical science where I was using a rubric to mark laboratory reports.
By August 2013 I had found that Blackboard's Coursesites was freely available and I began using the package in my physical science course. That same August a faculty member had suggested that I try Edmodo. Thus I deployed Engrade in statistics that fall, Edmodo in ethnobotany, and Coursesites in physical science in a three way test of learning management systems.
Coursesites proved to be difficult to use for students, and laboratory report submission rates dropped. At the time I tried to put a positive spin on the negative results, but students were struggling to submit reports and were not seeing the feedback I was giving them on those reports. I also had learned that Edmodo could not, at that time, handle marking via rubrics.
Circa 2015 Engrade was bought by McGraw Hill. There was brief warning of the imminent shut down of Engrade Free, a small window in which to download one's gradebooks. A number of faculty turned to me at that time slightly panicked at having lost their gradebook platform. I helped a number of faculty get up and running in Schoology. This experience taught me that when the learning management system you are using is purchased by an entity with their own agenda, access could be abruptly lost.
By fall 2017 a number of faculty were using Schoology and the college opted to purchase an institutional license for Schoology starting January 2018. That summer I would attend a Schoology Next annual conference. I would get the opportunity to discuss the unmet assessment needs of a higher education institution with product engineers and one of the founders of the company. A newly formed higher education interest group within Schoology held its first meeting. I briefly encountered the CEO at one point during the conference, but when I mentioned I was in higher education he turned and walked away. I was puzzled, but thought perhaps he had somewhere else to be. A year later the newly formed higher education group would no longer be in the Schoology Next 2019 program.
In February 2019 I learned in a presentation by Nuventive (TracDat) that they did not directly integrate to Schoology but instead integrated to Blackboard and something called Canvas. I had already had a negative experience with Blackboard via Coursesites, and a vice president had once noted that an institutional license for Blackboard was a six figure expense the college could not afford. This was the first time I had heard of Canvas, but I did not explore that further at the time.
On Sunday 04 August 2019 I learned that Schoology was no longer accepting higher education accounts, but no explanation was being given. That concerned me deeply and I reached out to the team that had been with me at Schoology Next 2018 to let them know of the development.
Spurred on in part by the news that Schoology was not accepting higher education accounts, three days later on 07 August 2019 I signed into and explored Canvas Free as a result of the Nuventive presentation in February with the idea of using Canvas in a single course during the fall term of 2019, piloting the package much as I had piloted Engrade and Schoology in the past.
Within a week I had discovered that the Canvas app was not usable with the free version of the platform. And I already knew how important the Schoology app is to communication with students. I could not see going forward with the experiment without an app and I set aside the Canvas experiment. Because the college now had an official learning management system that all faculty were mandated to use, I did keep the director of IT informed of what I was doing and why, including my decision to pull the plug on my fall 2019 experiment.
In October 2019 news broke of Schoology being purchased by the K12 student information system producer PowerSchool. A later headline summarized the new direction for Schoology, "PowerSchool Completes Schoology Purchase in March Toward ‘Unified’ K-12 Data Ecosystem" I realized PowerSchool would likely eventually want all Schoology users to use their SIS, and our API access was vulnerable on those grounds alone.
Schoology also simultaneously officially announced that it was leaving the higher education market. Those few higher education institutions who were using Schoology could continue to do so, but there would be no further development of the features higher education needed. They would be grandfathered along, but there would be no new features including the aggregation of student learning outcomes higher education need to flow data up their assessment matrices. This also meant that Nuventive integration would never happen.
I realized the college might again face a sudden shutdown situation as it did with Engrade four years earlier. This pushed me to again explore Canvas in late November 2019. I was looking at the possibility of trying to run a Google Classroom versus Canvas comparison in two sections of my courses spring 2020. I quickly learned that Google Classroom could only be run from a G Suite for Education account, and only the institution could apply for G Suite for Education account. I passed this information along realizing that I could not run a comparison by spring 2020.
In March 2020 the college shut down due to the pandemic and within a couple weeks had decided to reopen for summer with online offerings only. I found myself too busy preparing for online courses to consider platform issues. I would not have time to return to platform considerations until November 2020.
By November 2020 a number of schools on Pohnpei had chosen to use Google Classroom. I realized that fall 2021 would bring on board a number of students who were already familiar with Google Classroom. Google Classroom seemed to be the low hanging fruit. The college now had a G Suite for Education account, no small feat as the account required the birth of a new subdomain in the .fm domain. I remain in debt to those who made the effort that was required to make that happen.
My exploration of Google Classroom found that the platform was going to be a significant step down from the capabilities found in Schoology. Faculty would be losing many features in a move to Google Classroom, and the package feels more like a document distribution and collection system for Google Docs with a gradebook bolted on as an afterthought. Any move to a new platform is always going to be challenging. Having to tell faculty that the new package does less makes the process impossible. Google Classroom was not going to get out of the starting blocks.
Google Classroom also lacks any support for student learning outcomes, which would leave the package noncompliant with the requirements of accreditation standard 2a. Some of the documentation I came across even noted that the package had a K13 focus. Google Classroom's inability to track and report higher education student learning outcomes assessment data would be problematic during the 2023 bid for reaffirmation of accreditation.
I also looked at market share numbers and noted that Google Classroom is not a significant platform in the United States higher education market. Schoology obviously did not make the list either. If either were present in the underlying data, they are lumped into "Other" - a category that, along with Blackboard, has the fastest rate of market share erosion. The only platform with a strongly increasing market share trend across multiple terms is Canvas. Canvas is not just a market leader at this point, Canvas is a dominant platform serving 1290 institutions with 7.3 million enrollments according to Edutechnica.
As a former accreditation liaison officer during the 2004 reaffirmation of accreditation cycle I always keep accreditation impacts in mind. The teams that visit the college are chosen from other Pacific island and California colleges accredited by the ACCJC. The California community college system is working to unify onto a single learning management system platform, Canvas:
The selection of Instructure’s Canvas as the CCMS was nearly unanimous among the OEI CCMS Committee charged with selecting a CCMS, including overwhelming support from student participants. “Both the students and faculty members involved believed that students would be most successful using the Canvas system,” said OEI Statewide Program Director Steve Klein. “The student success element was a consistent focus throughout.” The choice was based on the OEI philosophy of doing what is best for the students of California. - California Community Colleges.
When the visiting team for reaffirmation visits in 2023, if the college says it is using Schoology the team will have questions. Many questions. We will be using something no one in higher education will be familiar with at that point. If the college's answer is "Canvas" the team is likely to have members that use Canvas in their own institution. This part of the visit and evaluation will go more smoothly with a known LMS on board.
Canvas is also being used by Chaminade University in Honolulu and their branch campus in Weno, Chuuk.
Given the potential for Nuventive TracDat integration, market share, growth in that share, and the strong positive reviews of the package at other institutions, I realized I only wanted to run the experiment with Canvas. I was no longer interested in comparing Canvas - I knew Moodle required a programming team, and Blackboard's loss of market share reinforced my sense that the package was not meeting the needs of the education marketplace, not meeting the needs of the students.
Over a period of two days in November 2020 I set aside all other work and did a deep dive in Canvas. I looked at both the desktop platform and the student experience on a three year old budget model mobile phone using a browser to access Canvas in lieu of the app. I did this using Canvas Free and realized that the free platform was usable enough to experiment in a course spring 2021. I was already aware of what some of the limitations in the free version would be, but none were what I call "showstoppers."
I hoped to gain permission to deploy Canvas Free in my two hybrid science lab sections which are small in size and whom I meet once a week. My thinking was to use the first Thursday hybrid lab day to get students onto the platform. I began reach out work for clearance to run the experiment with a report back to administration and ICT at the end of the spring 2021 term. I also requested that I be switched from the Assessment Team to the ICT committee. The former VPIEQA had suggested that faculty should rotate every two to three years to a new committee, I had been on the Assessment Team for four years. In November 2020 I saw my future role on ICT as reporting on my experience with Canvas.
In subsequent conversations concerns arose that my experience at the national campus might be too unique to provide enough information for decisions to be made that would eventually affect the whole system. The decision was taken to broaden the experiment with a single instructor on each campus taking a single course in with the intent of providing data from across the system back to the relevant decision making bodies. This would be modified to also permit the testing of specific external apps unique and vital to some courses, bringing in additional faculty.
There was also the realization that the experiment had to be kept small as this first effort would involve a lot of hands-on maintenance - class lists were going to have to be initially loaded through CSV files and then add/drop/withdrawal would have to be manually done by a single system administrator. Keeping the backend workload manageable was a consideration. The experiment would be dubbed a pilot test of the platform with the understanding that the goal is to provide information to decision makers and participative governance bodies at the college. My thinking had always been that decisions cannot be made in the absence of any data on which to make that decision. The pilot exists to provide data, not to make decisions.
A meeting of the pilot team members on 08 February 2021 provided an opportunity to share initial experiences. As with any launch, there have been issues and glitches. Faculty in the pilot have all had to make adjustments to adapt to Canvas. Each of us has found different issues that required a change in our approach. Some issues are still being resolved.
In general, however, the pilot team members report a positive experience with Canvas as a platform. Student surveys will be done later in the term. In my courses I am still exploring the new submission options to find what works best for my students and learning to deploy some of the new capabilities that Canvas provides.
I want to thank the other members of the pilot team for the tremendous effort they have put in. IT has been stellar in their support. The pilot faculty are putting in extraordinary efforts to move and set up material in Canvas while serving their students. Some are working with bandwidth and power challenges that add to their workload. The team is learning together, communicating, and adapting, I feel honored to get work alongside such colleagues.
In closing I would note that the process which led to the pilot evolved organically over many years of probing new technologies that allow the college to better serve the students in this digital age.
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