Sacred Heart College Geelong

Sacred Heart College Geelong is one of the largest secondary girls schools in Victoria, with a diverse curriculum and distinguished history of almost 160 years. Students from Years 7 to 12 attend the school, and students in the Middle Years take part in the rigorous International Baccalaureate (IB) program. In a student’s final years, they fulfill the state-based qualifications of the Victorian Certificate of Education and Victorian Certificate of Applied Learnings.

The College leadership teams are redesigning learning, moving from an industrial approach to a ‘network’ model, ie a real-world application of teaching where learning is transdisciplinary and students engage in collaborative open-ended projects that allow them to problem solve and engage in learning by doing. Sacred Heart College has a high level of IT use in the classroom, and has always made technology an integral part of its culture.

The College had developed an in-house intranet which acted more as a repository for files and less than a true learning management system (LMS). However, in 2014, administrators began to look for a new platform that would allow students to have the necessary resources and prepare them individually for their future pathways. They attended Australia’s largest technology conference, EduTECH, and spoke with 20 vendors, including Instructure.

“We developed a rubric we used to assess the systems,” said Mark Pleasance, the Director of ICT. “We knew what we were looking for because we asked our staff what they wanted.”

As they looked at the possibilities further, they saw that Instructure Canvas Learning Management Platform was the most user-friendly. In addition, they noticed that Canvas had a documented API (Application Programming Interface), integrated smoothly with other digital tools, and made data easily accessible. Staff and students experimented with the Canvas platform, and in 2015, Sacred Heart College had fully implemented Canvas.

Administrators were dealing with a large community of users with diverse needs and skills. Their school calls for a very high need for continuous reporting, and staff had spent hours working on written term reports. Sacred Heart wanted to increase transparency and communication with families. Canvas gave them the opportunity to re-imagine compliance. Mark explained how the school accomplished both goals by creating the reporting dashboard:

“Using the API, twice a day we scrape all of the assessment data, all of the comments, all of the grades, video feedback, and files. We scrape that out of Canvas, and we store it in a local database at school. We’ve written our own view of that Canvas Data that families can access. So it has a list of every single subject, all their assignments, all their grades, all on one screen.”

Teachers have expanded their use of the platform in a way that students now know their performance over time, and even get alerts when they miss their desired results.

“We couldn’t do that before. Canvas is telling us more than the normal data,” said Mark. The experience, faculty said, is more interesting, more interactive, and more accessible for learners. That includes updated tools from discussion boards to video conferencing that teachers and students will use for proper remote learning.

Sacred Heart’s mission is to “self-motivate, self-manage, self-modify and self-monitor.” To do this, students need to track their progress and to develop learner dispositions.They want students to build their skills, add to their portfolio of work, and bolster their online CV. “We see these more important than a score at the end of the school year,” said Mark.

In recent years, Sacred Heart College has become a model and reference of what’s possible with Canvas. The College has hosted numerous schools from surrounding regions to discuss the platform.

Administrators note that embracing innovation does not have to be difficult. “One of our favourite things about Canvas is the small barrier to adoption. You are up and running quickly with little help. However, in that simplicity comes a lot of power,” said Mark.

“It’s a great learning environment we have here. People are taking on technology, and Canvas has become part of the language.”