UCI’s year-long Canvas Pilot kicked off March 30th, 2015, with the start of Spring instruction. The Canvas Pilot is an opportunity for instructors, teaching assistants, and students to use Canvas in their courses and participate in a formal assessment of the value and usability of Canvas as a potential addition to the instructional technology ecosystem at UCI.

The Winter 2016 quarter concludes the Canvas Pilot. The final, unique participant counts for the pilot come to: 505 instructors, 642 teaching assistants, and 22,570 students.

Throughout the pilot, assessment results have indicated strong Canvas adoption support from participating instructors, as well as a preference for Canvas (albeit less pronounced) from teaching assistants and students. Given the strength of the results, the two faculty & staff committees tasked with producing a recommendation for next steps, the Learning Management Systems Future Directions Review Team (which approved the pilot to initially) and LMS Advisory Group, both issued recommendations to proceed with adoption.

This recommendation was accepted, the decision formally announced via campus-wide email on February 8th, and OIT has finalized the ongoing contract in time for the Spring 2016 quarter, ensuring continuous service. Additional Winter outreach and communication included presentations and updates to both review committees, academic counselors, SAS management, Engineering Undergraduate Council, ASUCI Legislative Council, UCI Administrative Business Officers Executive Committee, Academic IT monthly meeting, OIT all staff meeting, and a final Canvas Pilot Update & Instructor Panel event.

Completed development updates include improvements to data loading, compatibility updates for EEE WebsiteLinker and Canvas course space URLs, minor Canvas UI customizations, improved handling of public course spaces, a new ability for instructors to modify existing Canvas course spaces with additional sections, replacement of ‘pilot’ branding with ‘EEE Canvas’ as we move from pilot to roll-out, custom training content, automated creation of Canvas user accounts for -all- campus users (previously limited to those with a pilot course affiliation), launch of a new transition website (sites.uci.edu/canvas/), and support for managing course spaces in multiple concurrent terms (in time for Summer’s overlapping sessions).

We continue to work with Instructure to advocate for our campus’ priorities. In Winter, this advocacy included a campus visit with product representatives, who met one-on-one and in small groups with campus faculty and instructional staff to hear feedback about the Grades tool and conduct user interviews with a goal of improving that important area of Canvas functionality.
All assessment activities have now concluded. In the final, compiled results, a majority of participating instructors indicate a preference for Canvas (63%) compared to EEE (14%) or no opinion (23%). A strong showing of TAs (38%) and students (37%) also selected Canvas, compared to EEE (29% of students; 22% of TAs) or no opinion (34% of students; 40% of TAs).
Next steps include rebuilding unique legacy EEE tools, such as our robust online Evaluations system and Rapid Return exam scanning and distribution process, outside the EEE website to stand alone and/or integrate with Canvas, reviewing and integrating additional third party applications, and developing and implementing comprehensive training and support programs (with collaboration from the Division of Teaching & Learning) to help instructors, TAs, and students take full advantage of the tools and services Canvas offers.