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 Fall 2015 quarter was the first open opt-in period during which any interested instructor could choose to participate in the UCI Canvas Pilot through a self-service course space creation process. All told, 330 instructors chose to participate with 606 course sections, 298 teaching assistants, and 13,303 unique enrolled students (approximately 43% of the undergraduate student enrollment).
The Office of Information Technology continued campus outreach and communication with several zotmail messages to the campus community, two sets of postcard mailers to instructors, an update in the final edition of the UCI Brief (now Zotline), two pilot update & instructor panel events (including one attended by visiting representatives from Instructure), multiple workshop and info session offerings, and presentations to the Academic Senate’s Council on Student Experience, at the New Faculty Teaching Academy, EEE Introduction to Instructional Technology for New Faculty, and Humanities Core Orientation.
We have continued to work with Instructure to advocate for our campus’ priorities and high standards for support and communication through in-person meetings, calls to confer with Canvas product leads on specific areas of functionality, and collective advocacy via the Canvas R1 Peers community.
Fall assessment activities concluded with results that, consistent with data from earlier assessments, strongly support Canvas adoption. Cumulatively across all assessments to-date, a majority of participating instructors indicate a preference for Canvas (63%) compared to EEE (14%) or no opinion (23%). A plurality of TAs and students also selected Canvas (37% each) compared to EEE (29% of students; 19% of TAs) or no opinion (34% of students; 44% of TAs).
At the initiation of the Canvas Pilot project, OIT staff preemptively scoped out general plans around EEE legacy tool support and sun-setting options, as well as campus outreach, training, and support for either pilot outcome (adoption or rejection of Canvas, in which case OIT staff would be tasked with significant rebuilding a homegrown learning management environment). In light of the strength of the assessments results to-date, we have begun more robust planning activities for a presumptive Canvas adoption and migration over a multi-year period in a phased rollout.
Next steps include planning and conducting Winter 2016 outreach, support, and training activities, as well as concluding, summarizing, and publishing final assessment data.