UCI’s year-long Canvas Pilot kicks off March 30th 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 Spring 2015 quarter was the first quarter in the UCI Canvas Pilot and an invite-only phase with a small, initial set of participating instructors and courses. Final Spring 2015 participants at the end of the quarter included 5,814 students, 108 TAs (some of whom are also counted as instructors) and 179 instructors.
Spring communication included info sessions for instructors, TAs, and students, coordination with Prof. Alfred Kobsa’s INF132 students who conducted Canvas usability research, updates for the University Registrar on implementing a process to transfer final grades from Canvas to WebGrades, instructor panels with videography from the Distance Learning Center, presentations to ASUCI Legislative Council and ASMs, participation in Distance Learning Center instructional designers’ workshop, and Summer Session coordination.
The Canvas Pilot website has been updated with a complete redesign (https://sites.uci.edu/canvaspilot/), clearer information about exporting pilot courses to other Canvas environments if UCI elects not to support Canvas, video of panel events, a video demo of Canvas for students (https://sites.uci.edu/canvaspilot/videos/), list of participating instructors (https://sites.uci.edu/canvaspilot/participants/), summarized assessment results (https://sites.uci.edu/canvaspilot/pilot-assessment/), a known issues and considerations list (https://sites.uci.edu/canvaspilot/issues/), and video about the project (https://sites.uci.edu/canvaspilot/videos/).
Additional development and configuration work was completed to enable Turnitin.com integration with the Canvas Pilot environment, enhance the WebGrades submission process, and add a new self-service tool for instructors to create their own Canvas course spaces for Fall ‘15 classes.
We continue to advocate to Instructure for our campus’ priorities and standards of support and communication. During InstructureCon 2015 (annual conference for Canvas clients), OIT staff met with Instructure representatives to discuss our ongoing concerns around Canvas usability, feature request & feedback responsiveness, and support quality. We are continuing to follow up with Instructure regarding those areas of concern, sending them a selected list of 25 support tickets illustrating various concerns.
We have concluded Spring ‘15 assessment activities and posted the student survey results on the pilot website (https://sites.uci.edu/canvaspilot/pilot-information/pilot-assessment/). Instructors results will follow soon. As a highlight, when asked if they prefer EEE, Canvas, or have no opinion, students’ responses divide roughly evenly, while instructors favor Canvas at 66.67% compared to 19.05% for EEE and 14.29% with no strong opinion. In addition to the assessment activities AWT conducted, we received the results of the usability review undertaken by students in Professor Kobsa’s Spring HCI course. Those reports concluded with largely positive assessments of Canvas usability, with some examples of issues and suggestions for improvement.
Next steps include posting the remaining assessment results summaries, initiating Summer assessment activities, implementing a vetting process for requests to implement third party tool integrations with Canvas, and conducting extensive review and planning as we look ahead to the Fall 2015 quarter.