[Holy Angel University] Strategic Innovation at HAU: Leveraging the LMS

Thank you for the introduction, Amy. I am Leo Valdez. For those who are older here, you probably think I'm the singer. I am not. One of the little secrets I also told him was, when I was in high school, I was in a seminary, and so some people think that I look like a priest. And I said, No, no, I don't think that's the case.

And then I met with other presidents of the Philippine Association for Catholic Universities, and the other priests were saying, Good morning, Father. And I said to them, No, no, I'm not a priest. Okay? And I'm also not a singer. So, thank you very much for being here. My presentation is all about strategic innovation at Holy Angel University and leveraging the learning management system.

Now, if you have gotten to my age and you're traveling and working around the world, it's more likely that you've also been through several, several careers just like I did. I have experienced over a dozen roles and assignments. These assignments have taken me from Manila to, Vienna, Austria, and then to Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, and then back to the Philippines. And now I live in Angeles City. Since my first teaching job at the Executive MBA, I specialized in business strategy, and that was one of my most important roles.

Of course, I have to say that my most important role is an instructor because we are a teaching group. Now, I've been a fan of anything strategic. During the election period in the United States right now, I look at all of the things that are happening and see, for example, game theory at work. So strategic intent has always been present in all of my roles, including my current role as the officer in charge president of Holy Angel University. Our previous president was the one who introduced strategic intent to HAU.

He's a Filipino American. He left Woodbury University as the as their president and joined HAU in twenty fifteen. In addition to his exceptional global roles on quality assurance, he was an excellent leadership and business strategy instructor, and that's where we have our similarities. What we have in common is business strategy and leadership. Mister, Doctor Kalingo hired me in twenty sixteen, and I'm Filipino Canadian, so between the two of us, we tried to introduce or internationalize Holy Angel University.

He was also instrumental in introducing new programs such as the Green MBA, cybersecurity, big history, and gastronomy. During the pandemic, when we were stuck, both stuck in the West Coast, here in California, me in British Columbia, we would meet on Zoom just before lunchtime, and it was nighttime in the Philippines. So we discussed campus reopening and, things that are happening with online learning. And, as of September twenty twenty one, I was able to return to the Philippines, but he wasn't. He caught COVID-nineteen and he passed away from complications.

Two weeks later, they nominated me and selected me as the officer in charge president. So, Doctor Kalingo and myself, we were instrumental in making the decision to go for Canvas LMS. For some of you who were here last year, these are some of my greatest hits again. You you'll see some common things that that were presented last year. We lost two weeks of classroom instruction during the twenty nineteen ASEAN Games that were held at Clark New City and, or Clark Green City, and we had to extend the school year by an extra week, which our parents were very angry about.

And that's why we needed online learning in learning in case of class suspensions. And you've already heard that, this morning, that one of the real reasons for coming up and using and continuing to use the, learning management system, Canvas, is because of class suspensions. When we got started, our goal in twenty nineteen was to use Canvas as a repository for course materials, but we still needed to convince our instructors to adopt it. However, our starting point shifted, of course, in twenty twenty because of the pandemic. And as business strategies, we were thinking, well, the threat is now an opportunity because now we can force the teachers to use it.

So our goal became a little more ambitious. Now, throughout the history of software development, and here we're getting into strategy, software companies have made value propositions and they're hoping that it's what the client and they're hoping that it's what the client needs or wants. The more that the client sees what the software can do, sometimes they'll ask the question, can your software do this? And with the dollars in their eyes, the developers will usually say, Oh, it's in the next version. Okay. Do you remember vaporware? Okay.

Now there's a different thing though. What Apple was doing was really good. What Apple did was they presented you with something that they never presented before, and it's usually something that you didn't know you wanted. Okay. You remember, the iPod and the iPad when they first came out? We just said to Apple, Take my money.

So also, we keep lining up for the latest iPhone, versions. Canvas LMS had that same effect on us. It had certain features that we didn't know we liked, that we wanted, that we needed. Our customer success manager was presenting these features to us one time, and, our eyes bulged. And I, the LMS implementer, thought, hey, we can use that.

And that's where we started leveraging some of the LMS themes to match with the things that we wanted to do strategically. The first one that we really, joined and wanted to use was, the themes and the templates. It allowed us for a common look and feel, and the banners also helped us provide a connection between the student and the campus, which they were not able to see because of the pandemic. And because of the templates, there were common locations where students can look for information. They knew where they could find, you know, the instructor's information, how to contact, what kind of courses, what kind of, modalities, and, of course, where to find their their course material, which was inside the modules.

The next thing that we leveraged was blueprints. I know a lot of you have now been introduced to blueprints. I talked about them last year. And now that we're looking at blueprints, it made our life so much easier. It helped us for what we would call rapid deployment because we had to come up with standardized content, especially for certain courses.

For example, if we wanted to deploy, Big History, instead of coming up with one course and copying it seventy eight times, we turned it into a blueprint and then associated seventy eight courses to it. Anytime there was a change, of course, then it was easy to make the change and deploy it. You have no idea how much easier it was to administer over three hundred courses when blueprint courses were developed before the first day of classes. The feature, in turn, meant essential changes in the way that we deliver things. For example, number one, the subject matter expert would start building the courses, entire courses, one term in advance.

And you also saw something earlier, the feature where you can check whether a course was complete. Now we're using that as well so that, we would check whether a course is complete before we can start, deploying it. Second, because all the core courses are standardized and complete, The instructors did not have to think about, What's going to be my course topic for this session? All they were concentrating on was how to engage the students. One of the features that came up just at the right time was the system, the SIS integration with Canvas. I think some of you have been using SysIMPORT.

I know some groups did. Once we IMPORT. I know some some, groups did. Once we used SysIMPORT, it was so much faster for us to take it from our SIS and put it into Canvas. We were able to deploy, three thousand courses and, run about eighty thousand student enrollments overnight.

On the way back, though, our SIS did not have the feature to to start putting things back automatically, so we had to, ask our teachers to type it all in. But of course, we turned it into some kind of a feature. So not all features will will work with, our institution. For example, one of our pioneer business instructors tried the different, pathways that were based on assessment results, and many students were stuck or couldn't move to the next module, so we had to abandon it. So when you review your the features of any software, what you want to do is select the most relevant ones that work for you.

What did not work for us might actually work for you, but they're all great features and it is a matter of fit, what fits with the way you do things. Going back to our oversimplified model of applications versus needs, we can safely say that Instructure offers a conversation with its clients to help chart its feature enhancements. And as you can see, that's Instructure on the left side. They do ask a lot of questions or they they show us a lot of things, and then on the right side, we also have the the, the institutions talking to them. So these are usually done through, discussions with your CSM or in locations such as this.

So one of the things that we had been doing was we were looking at what features there are or what features are coming up, and we want to leverage them. So we want we watch out for new developments. Currently, we're already using something called, Canvas credentials, which used to be Badger. The what is the feature? What what what is the, significance of this? That means that we can just run all of our credentials inside Canvas rather than have to, create them elsewhere. We have a a policy of trying to put in at least one industry certificate per program, and then that will be an additional certificate that goes in with the, with the diploma at the end.

In this partnership with Instructure, of course, we seek for, integrations that support our initiatives. At the same time, there's a feature. If there's a feature we didn't know that we needed until it showed up, we'll say that we want it. Okay. One of those features, that did show up recently was the possibility that CanMigo, the AI model, is going to be included, eventually in the US version of Canvas.

And so I'm going to ask our friends at Instructure, can you also extend it to us here at APAC? Yeah, please. Also, earlier, Ruth made a very nice presentation about, what was that feature again? What was that? Sorry. Yeah. One of one of the features was regarding, the use of portfolios. That's the point.

Portfolios, and it's going to come in at the first quarter of next year, which is just in time for us to use. So we have just in time features, and that's the reason why it's very good to discuss these things with them. So in the end, here's the plot twist. I wanted to talk really about how we leverage the LMS, but in another way, it's a partnership. We find that, the instructor listens to us and therefore wants to come up with products or features that they can include.

And whenever we want to to, to talk about those those features, we can do so in in, a place such as this. In my final slide, I just want to show you something that that I did. I just put on one column the, the values of Instructure and then on the other column, our values, and you'll see see that there's a particular match. They're just different words, and, I'll just ask you to guess which which side is Holy Angel University. I think it's a giveaway because on the right side it says Christ centeredness, so yeah, we're a Catholic university.

I was talking about looking like a priest. But anyway, what I want to say is that I want to thank the, instructor and the organizers for this year's Canvas Con for this opportunity to articulate the similarities of our strategies. And that's really the the plot twist here. You you can take advantage of the LMS because the LMS can also listen and and come up with new features that actually meet our needs. So thank you very much, and I'm ready for questions.