Introducing Canvas to the college has been a large undertaking which has taken most of the year, to provide ‘future focused’ learning experiences. I’ve spent well over a decade with learning management systems in colleges and universities. My experience of their benefits for students is backed up by research which supports the need to have high-quality online systems – that won’t fall over – which allows students to not only access courses but connect with their teachers in and out of the classroom.
Canvas is the newest of a long line of learning management systems (LMS) and has already been adopted by Australian colleges, universities and TAFE. We are in the final stages of piloting it at CCSC and have put the system in place for at least the next three years.
For students and parents, it means having flexible access to teachers and their courses on site and when they are at home or on an event. Canvas works on both desktop and mobile – and will be used across the college at the start of 2018. Staff have been undertaking extensive training on developing their courses to offer a ‘blended’ learning experience, which can be personalised for each student. Their study takes place online and in the classroom, allowing students to choose more pathways and follow more of their interests in any given discipline.
Better feedback, better interactions, better engagement.
At a glance, teachers and students can see their current grades in all subjects, or drill down into each rubric and activity to see their performance, and what they could do to improve. It also gives them (and us) real-time analysis of their interactions with the site and other insights into their progress. They can see their participation levels and page views … all of which gives students more confidence and feedback on how they are going.
So far, students have jumped into Canvas with great success. They are looking at their performance, reading feedback and the demand for re-marking and improving their work has shot up. Feedback is widely seen as the most important aspect of learning. Professor John Hattie has been telling us about the power of feedback for a long time, and that there are both good and bad ways to do it. The worst way is punitive – taking marks away, not allowing students to improve on a task or giving grades and letters which don’t account for many aspects of a student’s efforts – such as their emotional efforts.
Hattie explains “success criteria,” and goals without clarity as to when and how a student (and teacher) would know they were successful, are often too vague to serve the purpose of enhancing learning. Second, feedback allows students (and/or their teachers) to set further appropriately challenging goals as the previous ones are attained, thus establishing the conditions for ongoing learning.
With this in mind, Canvas will be used to provide students with results of their assessments and progress in line with reporting requirements, but also to ensure teachers can give students meaningful feedback in near real time. Not only that, Canvas has a parent app that allows parents to see what their child sees – and we’re sure this will make learning more transparent and give parents ongoing reporting, rather than the ‘traditional’ end of semester summary.
There is still a lot of work to be done but we are thrilled to be offering students and parents this industry leading platform.
BIANCA WILLIAMS says
how do we access canvas at home for our children to complete further tasks? and what is the link for both student and parent please?
Julie Dolan says
Please contact your child’s home room teacher for more information or call 4302 9000 to ask to speak to that teacher.