On November 22, 2019 Metropolitan Community College’s Board of Governors passed a resolution to license Instructure’s Canvas Learning Management System for a period of three years beginning in August of 2020. This concluded a year-long review process that included presentations and Q&A sessions with LMS providers, hands-on platform evaluations, course migrations, and conversations with peer institutions.
On January 7, 2020 MCC began an 8-month implementation timeline to configure Canvas, migrate course content, integrate with other college systems and third-party tools, and train faculty and staff. As Director of Technology-Enabled Learning, I am facilitating this process, with support from Instructional Design Services (IDS) and MCC’s Online/Hybrid Lead Faculty. IDS holds weekly web meetings with Canvas’ implementation team, and we’ve made quite a bit of progress toward our goal of offering all MCC’s online, hybrid and web-enhanced courses via Canvas beginning with the fall quarter.
Accomplished thus far:
- Single sign-on with MCC’s active directory
- Configured MCC institution preferences
- Configured a sub-account structure for MCC’s institutional hierarchy
- Applied integrations with third-party tools such as OneDrive, Google Docs and textbook publishers.
- Bulk migration of online and hybrid master courses
- Designed standard homepage with custom banner graphics for each program
- Created a Faculty Resources course
- Created a ‘Student Introduction to Canvas’ course
- Hosted a two-day on-site Canvas Admin Training for our Canvas support team
- Hosted a day-long train-the-trainers Canvas Workshop for online/hybrid lead faculty
- Advised Cindy Catherwood on updates to the Canvas Pilot syllabus template.
Happening this spring:
- We are launching a pilot of around 35 course sections in Canvas. More courses will be piloted in the summer.
- Coordinating with Administrative Computing on the design of a custom interface to integrate Colleague data with Canvas. AC have targeted April 30 to have a version ready for us to test.
- Scheduling weekly training opportunities throughout the spring quarter.
- Coordinate with online/hybrid lead faculty to facilitate trainings within their program areas in April.
As of March 5, 2020 all MCC Faculty are able to login to Canvas, access training guides and resources, and access a sandbox course to begin learning how to use the new system. They also all have the ability to create courses on demand into which they can import content from Blackboard or start building new courses from scratch.
On August 20, 2020 MCC’s license with Blackboard will end, after which we will no longer have access. IDS will ensure that all courses are archived and saved offline, but faculty should make sure they have moved all course content into Canvas they intend to use going forward by the end of the summer quarter.