It really allowed us to have a lot of training sessions and work with our centers for teaching and learning.” LaForge, an assistant professor of political science, said the transition to Canvas on her campus was “amazingly smooth.” “We didn’t have to do the transition in a few weeks,” she said. But, she added, she’s a “digital native” who enjoys learning new technologies and is a strong advocate of online education.ĭuring the last academic year, Canvas was solidly in place at Indiana, although instructors could still view their old documents in Oncourse, download them or move them to Canvas. The first year, the campuses ran Canvas and Oncourse in tandem, and let instructors move to Canvas at their own pace.Ĭhera LaForge, Faculty Senate president at Indiana University East, said she built her courses in Canvas while continuing to teach with Oncourse during the first year so she wasn’t trying to learn the new LMS and teach with it at the same time. “We wanted to show ‘You are part of the decision.’ I can’t tell you how important that has been.”Īfter the pilots ended and the analysis was completed, Indiana selected Canvas for its new LMS and implementation took place over two academic years: 2015-17. “When it came time to select the next LMS, we wanted to know this is what the faculty and students had to say about the LMS,” she said. The implementation didn’t go well, and Morrone said administrators didn’t want to make that mistake again. So in 2013 administrators conducted a semester-long pilot of three products: Desire2Learn (now called D2L), Blackboard Learn and Canvas.īefore Indiana began using Sakai in 2007, administrators did not ask for input from instructors or learners. Indiana began researching LMSs in 2012, but found that no system was “head and shoulders above another,” said David Goodrum, who served as director of teaching and learning technologies at the time. “But it was it was hard to keep pace with what was happening in the technology industry.” It served us incredibility well once people were used to using it,” Morrone said. However, they thought it had limitations that wouldn’t allow the university system, which has 115,000 students, close to 18,000 instructors and staff, and a growing online presence, to meet teaching and learning needs in the coming years. Indiana administrators and faculty members say they were not dissatisfied with Sakai, the open source LMS that the university founded in collaborated with the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the uPortal consortium. Canvas operated in tandem with the Sakai Oncourse platform, which was Indiana’s LMS for 10 years, so that faculty members and staff had plenty of time to learn the new system and transfer their course content and other materials to Canvas. “I believe my thoughts were taken into consideration,” said Tammy Fong-Morgan, an associate professor of Spanish at the South Bend campus who was involved in one of the university’s three LMS pilots.Ĭanvas by Instructure now is fully functioning at all of Indiana’s campuses after a two-year implementation process that began with the 2014-15 academic year. We needed to factor in all those things that faculty and students had to say.”įaculty members say they were heard. “We needed to do a pilot with each of the companies, and ask instructors and students for feedback. “We approached this with a reasonable amount of rigor, especially because we are doing more and more with online teaching and online proctoring,” Morrone added. Morrone, associate vice president for learning technologies at the Indiana University System. Whose idea was this anyway?’ comments,” said Anastasia S. “We didn’t have very many ‘You ruined my life. The Indiana University System’s relatively pain-free implementation of its new learning management during the past two academic years is being called “amazing” and “surprising” by faculty members and administrators.
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