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Month: April 2017

Canvas On-Boarding Webinars

Published 25th April 2017

Participated in a series of webinars delivered over three days which covered everything we needed to know to get started with our shiny new Canvas VLE.

The webinars were divided into three topics, admin, support and fundamentals. The admin session was an introduction to the administration of Canvas, something we haven’t really seen before, while the fundamentals sessions, the bulk of the training, covered pretty much every other aspect of the system. Together these sessions have given us a good grounding to get started with the deployment of Canvas, and will be followed up with more comprehensive onsite training in a few weeks.

Our contract with Instructure includes their Tier 1 support package which means that they will be taking all of the customer support queries from our staff and students. The support webinar was an introduction to this, covering how their systems and processes work, and how we will access their call logging system to pick up anything that can’t be resolved directly. Happily they are using JIRA, a system I know well.

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PG Cert AP: Day 15

Published 6th April 2017

The final taught day on the PG Cert was for the assessment module, EDPM06, and was about how assessment reflects and can influence pedagogy. We were advised to set assessments which are inclusive of all rather than targeting perceived needs of particular groups, but be ready and flexible enough to meet any specific needs which may emerge. This led to a discussion about equality, especially of access to HE, and social justice. Burke’s book, The Right to Higher Education, was recommended for follow up reading in this area.

Finally, there was some discussion and clarification on the assessments for this module itself. These are to write a reflective report showing how your practice has been influenced by what has been taught on this module, and to write two critiques of assessments which you have set or been given, again based on what you have been taught here.

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Canvas and VLE Market Share

Published 6th April 2017

I’m finally allowed to say that Sunderland have recently chosen Canvas as our new VLE to replace the terminally ill LearningStudio. I’ve known for a while of course, but have been gagged until formalities were met and contracts signed. It’s a good decision, very forward looking; really exiting times ahead for us here.

I was having a look for their market share and I came across the latest report from EduTechnica that shows that Canvas have now overtaken Moodle to become the second most widely used LMS / VLE in the US market place, behind Blackboard which is holding on. When you look at the trends and that graph though, I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before those lines pass each other.

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