Background
Aoba-Japan International School is a K-12 International school based in Tokyo with 150 staff and 600 students. It offers the rigorous International Baccalaureate (IB) program, fostering flexible inquiry-based learning, writing, and critical thinking skills.
The aim of the IB is consistent with the school’s core values. Aoba aspires to develop global leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators, effective communicators, problem solvers, and wise risk-takers. Students can also design online or in- person their Aoba Global Leadership Diploma program for personalised and experiential learning.
While it’s an international school, Aoba is inclusive of Japanese culture and perspectives, and builds on its connections with the local Japanese community.
The Challenge
Aoba had several issues with standardising its previous LMS and Google Classrooms, which meant curriculum coordinators, administrators, and teachers spent countless hours on manual, repetitive tasks.
Chasen Stahl, Aoba’s Group Director of Innovation, says despite team teaching, there was a huge waste of the school’s biggest investment – teachers’ time and instructional content.
“As a school, we spent millions of dollars a year on highly qualified teachers to create learning content. What many schools do – including us – is see that knowledge and expertise slip through our hands like sand. We weren’t capturing, capitalising on, iterating, and improving that knowledge capital,” he says.
When teachers leave a school, they often take the content with them, and the new teacher must start from scratch.
That was a headache for Chasen, who is responsible for delivering technology infrastructure and services across the school’s three campuses, plus developing online and hybrid learning programs and practices.
Key Insights
Aoba’s teaching staff save hundreds of hours a year because the Canvas LMS lets them better organise, share, source, and reuse instructional content.
The Canvas LMS has been pivotal in personalising students’ learning journeys and transforming how the school ‘does business’.
The school continues to add more personalisations to the LMS, saying it’s “barely scratched the surface of leveraging the functionality in Canvas”.
He says Aoba was also keen to “leverage technology to extend the definition of personalised learning”. That would help fix the problem of students’ learning experiences being fragmented and inconsistent.
But, as an IB school, Aoba was unsure how an LMS would work with an inquiry-based learning model. It doesn’t work on averaging scores to reach a percentage to award a grade to compare with peers. Instead, IB focuses on students demonstrating critical thinking and problem-solving skills (i.e. inquiry-based learning) as well as conceptual understanding of subjects and their own learning.
Another challenge was school leadership couldn’t get an overview of education delivery across the organisation at any point in time. As a result, parents had little real-time understanding of their child’s learning. Some parents prefer the Japanese language, whereas the school mainly operates in English.
As a school, we spent millions of dollars a year on highly qualified teachers to create learning content. What many schools do – including us – is see that knowledge and expertise slip through our hands like sand. We weren’t capturing, capitalising on, iterating, and improving that knowledge capital. What Canvas brings to the table helps us address this huge issue.
Chasen Stahl
Group Director of Innovation, Aoba-Japan International School
The Solution
Aoba was keen to ramp up capacity to deliver a 100% online education program, using an LMS with:
- Standardisation and features to automate curriculum creation and student scaffolding
- Native content creation tools and customisation options at a course level
- Multi-language interface
- Compatibility to integrate LTIs, so an open API
- Ability to access, extract and use data, and
- Cloud hosting.
Chasen says Aoba weighed up the operating, maintenance, and risk management costs of installing a new LMS.
“From day one we were looking for a cloud-hosted solution that was secure, accessible, and stable and Canvas really ticked those boxes for us.”
Since migrating to the Canvas LMS for the 2021-22 school year, Aoba focuses on “doing cool stuff” with its cloud- hosted LMS, instead of “spending a lot of time ensuring it doesn’t break”, says Aoba’s Learning Management System Administrator, Vincent Favard.
School leadership can also access real-time data analysis on the performance of the whole school, program, a grade, even down to a single student, he says.
“More or less, by pressing a button, we can download all of the data or synchronise that data automatically with a database for further analysis outside of Canvas. The fact that it’s cloud-hosted makes those integrations a lot easier and faster to get data in and out.”
This is how it works. The school collects a variety of learning data about student engagement and interaction via Canvas LMS and integrated third-party applications. This is fed into a custom data analysis and visualisation engine built around Google Data Studio.
“This end-to-end workflow allows the school to collect, analyse, visualise, and interpret a holistic picture of student learning at a school, campus, cohort, grade and individual student level to constantly improve education delivery and the experience for students and their families."
With some tweaking and personalisation, the LMS does support summative and formative assessments within an IB program, Chasen says. Templates and rubrics pave the way teachers reuse them if they’re assessing the same learning outcomes.
We've only scratched the surface of leveraging that functionality in Canvas. It gives us the ability to template units, archive and repurpose them, or create a new version of a course. It's invaluable and we use the Canvas Commons to essentially crowdsource even more content.
Chasen Stahl
Group Director of Innovation, Aoba-Japan International School
The Results
He estimates teachers save hundreds of hours a year using Canvas and the broader user community, Canvas Commons. These are the keys to better ways to share and organise instructional content.
“We’ve only scratched the surface of leveraging that functionality in Canvas. It gives us the ability to template units, archive and repurpose them or create a new version of a course, but teachers still use their professional judgement to make the lessons and units their own. It’s invaluable and we use the Canvas Commons to essentially crowdsource even more content.”
The school uses Google Docs and Sheets for “big-picture school planning” and embeds them into its Canvas courses and pages for class-specific curriculum planning. Teachers and students also love that Canvas is the one place for their learning at school or externally. For example, all tools students need are embedded or linked within each particular Canvas course.
Meanwhile, Vincent continues to add more personalisation to the “vanilla Canvas”.
“I take what you get out of the box with Canvas and create personalised designs, working with teachers on those to ensure the outcomes, rubrics and principles are aligned with our IB curriculum, plus I train teachers how to use the LMS tools. With a couple of clicks, they can share their content with our entire institution – that’s really powerful.”
Canvas also lets teachers self-assess their practice and see how it tallies with student feedback. They’re quite aligned, says Chasen.
Meanwhile, parents say they more clearly understand what and how their children learn, thanks to Canvas. They hail from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, so the multi-lingual Parent App UI helps update them on their child’s progress.
Vincent says: “Our parents’ guide section on how to first access the platform is in English and Japanese. All of our documentation for parents is drafted in English, and we’re careful not to use metaphors or colloquialisms. It then gets translated into Japanese, so instruction is always available in both languages for the parents.”
That process is a step up from just relying on Microsoft Immersive Reader or an internet browser for translations. Aoba also uses Canvas Studio to create videos in multiple languages with closed captions.
The school is next working on reducing workload and increasing efficiencies in administrative processes such as course enrolments, grading and reporting.
Chasen says: “Canvas has been pivotal to us personalising the actual learning journey for students and updating how we do business as a school.”
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