Navigating Seasons of Change: Lessons Learned from a Semester Filled with Transitions
Concurrent Session 5
Brief Abstract
This sessions will showcase how a small instructional design and technology team at an R1 university led their organization through an LMS transition from D2L to Canvas LMS in the middle of an academic year.
Presenters
Extended Abstract
Learn how a small instructional design and technology team at an R1 university led their organization through an LMS transition from D2L to Canvas LMS in the middle of an academic year. This presentation will highlight how they gained and leveraged broad institutional buy-in to train all faculty, make necessary policy changes, migrate courses, and develop new training experiences to facilitate the change and foster continued growth. Attendees will leave this presentation with an ability to identify key stakeholders for change; develop effective communication strategies to keep everyone informed and connected; modify and adapt the training strategies that proved effective during this transition to their own institutional change projects; maximize their teams strengths while leveraging vendor support to effectively train a large number of faculty with a small team; and identify as well as construct initial solutions to barriers for effective transformation at their own institution. The presentation will close with a poll and interactive Q&A allowing attendees to engage the presenters about how any team and institution can effectively transition their LMS despite the perceived obstacles they face.
The session will provide participants an overview of the LMS transition and how UM3D was able to develop a comprehensive training program for all faculty, staff and students at the university. We will provide an overview on how instructional designers and technology trainers created a Canvas training boot camp to prepare end-users with all the tools and resources to provide quality courses to promote student success. The session will also provide details on how the Canvas Implementation Committee was formed and the various stakeholders/leadership involved with managing the implementation.
Canvas Implementation and Training:
The transition to Canvas fit within a broader institutional campaign to improve faculty awareness and efficacy regarding educational technology. At the same time as the RFP process was unfolding, the University of Memphis had transitioned nearly every course to remote online instruction in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. This necessity for online instruction brought almost every faculty into an online learning environment forcing them to confront the opportunities and challenges it provides. To support faculty as they navigated these opportunities and challenges, the instructional designers and technology trainers comprising UM3D launched a new training opportunity: the Summer Institute.
UM3D launched the inaugural Summer Institute in June 2020 as a two month long professional development event focused on blending instructional technology training with pedagogical best-practices for designing, developing and delivering online courses. The Summer Institute design for providing faculty professional development was adapted to on-board and train faculty/staff on Canvas.
To facilitate training all University of Memphis faculty on Canvas, UM3D adopted a train-the-trainer approach that focused on UM3D staff as well as pre-selected faculty to serve as institutional Canvas trainers, and they were trained directly by Canvas trainers during the administrator training.
Building off the experiences of the Summer Institute, UM3D created a blended learning experience incorporating training on Canvas as a collection of technological tools as well as how to realize pedagogical best-practices within this environment. These trainings occurred asynchronously through a Growing with Canvas course within the LMS provided by Canvas Commons, and synchronous trainings were conducted multiple times a week both virtually and in-person. Training began the semester before the full transition to Canvas giving faculty four months to learn and practice the tools Canvas provides within their sandbox courses. At the end of that semester, UM3D hosted an intensive Canvas Bootcamp focused on preparing courses for their first offering within the new LM.
Takeaways
Attendees will leave this session with a thorough understanding of how an R1 university successfully transitioned to a new LMS in the middle of an academic year. This will include a detailed model for organizational change, training templates that could be adapted to their institution’s needs, and an outline how vendor and institutional training can be leveraged together to produce high-quality and low-cost training experiences for faculty.
Interactivity
Attendees will interact with the presenters in polls conducted during the presentation and through a Q&A at the end.