What’s New and Changing LMS transition for Fall 2022

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Tags: Learning Management

What’s New and Changing LMS transition for Fall 2022

Brief history thus far:

Last December a task force of 21 faculty, staff, and students chose Instructure’s Canvas product to replace Schoology as the college’s sole Learning Management System (LMS).

Last spring the Provost announced this decision by email and in person at the February 22nd  faculty business meeting.  It was decided that graduate faculty needed the tool more urgently while undergraduate faculty needed more time to make the transition.  Graduate faculty will start teaching with the tool this fall; undergraduate faculty in the fall of 2023.

WheatonX, a non-automated, outward-facing instance of Canvas has already been successfully launched.

 

Implementation of “Canvas Academic”

A small pilot of a half-dozen graduate faculty are currently teaching summer courses in Canvas.  The transition work for this group has all been done manually.  All other graduate faculty will be trained in Canvas by August 11th.  Those who cannot get to any in-person or online training, for whatever reason, will be asked to watch the video here.

In early August the Intelligent Learning Platform (ILP) was installed making communication between Banner and Canvas Academic automated.

Faculty and student accounts are created automatically for any given term.  Staff members who desire access to Canvas may open a ticket at the Service Desk, please give the technician your netid.

Cartridges have been brought over from Schoology and left unpublished. Only faculty – generated content can be transferred. Faculty may request access to past courses, if you are not seeing content you need from a past course, please contact the Service Desk.

Graduate faculty were trained in Canvas over the summer.  In the event that you were unable to attend one of these training sessions, please watch the recap here.

Grad Faculty teaching in Canvas: You may request TA access by clicking on the  ?HELP logo in the left-hand margin and selecting “Requesting Special Role Form.”

Undergrad Faculty teaching in Schoology: You may request TA access by clicking on “waffle iron” logo and select “request special academic enrollment.”

Both systems: Your students will first see their classes on their dashboard on August 17th in Schoology. Students can see classes in Canvas but will not be able to interact with them until August 17th.

Cross-listed classes will remain in Schoology.  If you are teaching any undergraduate-level courses, they will also be found in Schoology.

If you have any student-submitted assignments that reside in Schoology that you would like to keep, you should download them and save them to your personal computer or to a secure cloud location (like Box or Google Drive).

Examples: 

  1. single courses ranging from 500-999 will be using Canvas
  2. single courses ranging from 100-499 will be using Schoology
  3. courses that are cross listed (in any way) will be using Schoology (e.g. even two graduate level classes that are cross listed together would be in Schoology)