How Canvas became the backbone of Queensland’s K-12 public schools

Building a digital learning ecosystem for a single school is a complex undertaking.

Imagine scaling that effort to encompass all 1,264 K-12 public schools in Queensland, serving more than 572,160 students and 73,000+ teaching staff. That’s the ambitious feat achieved by the QLearn digital learning system, launched in 2022.

Canvas is the main gateway for QLearn, providing core functionalities to manage courses, deliver content, facilitate communication, and run assessments.

Two leading Queensland Department of Education staff offered an “under-the-hood” perspective on QLearn at CanvasConnect 2023.

Before QLearn, Queensland schools relied on a patchwork of solutions. The system, cobbled together from various technologies, struggled to meet evolving needs. It lacked data analytics, parental access, and central management for staff training.

Michael O’Leary, the department’s Chief Information Officer, described the old system as “full of data,” but lacking actionable insights.

“It was a homegrown product with [Microsoft] SharePoint at the front end and an LMS and openEQUELLA, a digital repository, at the backend, all loosely integrated with manual interaction from the end-user.”

The issues with the old system included:

"We wanted an edtech company we could partner with, not a vendor to sell us something and not be hands-on. We had to do our due diligence to procure a product that would last for 10 to 15 years," O’Leary said.

In starting its LMS product search in 2018, the department acknowledged a “great variation of opinion” among its 1,200-odd schools. That led to it distilling five “really good” edtech company offers into three, then embracing those three. “We still have other products available for schools that do not want to come on board,” said O’Leary, highlighting that schools can choose their LMS journey

QLearn’s criteria included having a single sign-in to everything, data security, and “actually doing everything needed for an innovative LMS.”

It also had to integrate well with OneSchool (the department’s student management system) for timetabling, and student and staff information. Early adopter schools played in a sandbox environment to give feedback on what was too complex so the ecosystem could be tweaked.

“Our workforce tells us that teaching is getting harder and there’s more administration in their day-to-day job. Teaching is about people, so my motto is to let the machines do the repetitive and automatic aspects, and let people do human-tohuman interaction,” O’Leary said.

Canvas forms the backbone of QLearn. It provides core functionalities like course management, content delivery, communication tools, and assessments.

It also integrates with Canvas Commons, a digital library where educators can share and discover learning resources, fostering collaboration, therefore breaking down silos.

Early adopters provided valuable feedback, helping refine the system’s complexity.

QLearn integrates seamlessly with:

The first year of implementation yielded significant benefits:

The department configures Canvas to leverage best practices, a conscious decision to avoid unnecessary customisation. Additionally, pre-populated mandatory training ensures a smooth system rollout at the beginning of each school year.

“We’ve tried to make it easy, so it works for anything from a one-teacher school with a teaching principal to a 4,000- student school. Those smaller schools access support through our service centre, enabling an easier transition to QLearn,” O’Leary said.

Meanwhile, Barry Rieck, the QLearn project director, shed light on the technical aspects of QLearn. “Ensuring the system works smoothly from the start of a school year is crucial,” he said.

Typically, there could be about 120,000+ new and departing staff, and student moves to be processed across all schools. The system also must keep tabs on nearly 600,000 students who have been promoted up a year level.

Additionally, more than 80,000 staff undertake mandatory training in QLearn during student-free days in late January. To manage all those elements, Instructure recommended a consortium model.

“We needed a system with the performance to handle the staff and student movements without degradation at the start of the year for 1264 schools. When we turned QLearn on at the start of 2022, it worked seamlessly. We’d pre-enrolled all staff into their mandatory training, accessible from the Canvas dashboard,” Rieck said.

QLearn has approximately 60,000 students in 140 schools per instance, and 11 total instances. The OneSchool part of QLearn manages timetable integration, dealing with hundreds of thousands of classes, each with a corresponding course that’s automated every 20 minutes, including if a new student is enrolled or if a student changes class.

“The requirement for one full-time-equivalent role manually managing enrolments in a school of 3,000 students is no longer required,” Rieck said.

The system streamlines course management for teachers, too. Each year, it automatically archives past courses, populates the new school year schedule, and pre-loads upcoming courses with blueprint content, saving teachers valuable setup time.

Schools can choose between a one-course-to-one or manycourses-to-one framework. The system can also automatically enrol relief teachers in their assigned courses for the day, so they’re prepared to start teaching immediately.

These approaches have reduced both teacher and administrative staff workload. What’s helped, too, is a cache of comprehensive, self-paced courses that every teacher is automatically enrolled in. They include QLearn essentials, videos, tutorials and tips, as well as simultaneous face-to-face and online professional development. There’s even a school starter toolkit for schools new to the QLearn journey.

To encourage adoption, the department allocated incentive payments to schools for completing QLearn training. Additionally, it collaborated closely with the Queensland Teachers’ Union, acknowledging potential concerns.

QLearn has piloted Cerego, an AI-powered tool that assists teachers in creating and adapting learning content to individual student needs. This technology holds promise for further personalising education. The department is now providing a controlled implementation of Cerego to all schools.

“A teacher can use a keyword to develop a learning sequence or quizzes, and use their professional judgement to assess this AI content,” Rieck said.

“Staff publish a Canvas course with a Cerego assignment included to the students, who then go in only once a day to do the assignment. This builds memory retention of key concepts, the adaptive learning changes for every student depending on their answers to build mastery."

But what about teachers who aren’t keen to let go of their old teaching materials?

The department worked with Instructure partner K16 Solutions to bring all of the material from the old system into an archive for teachers to access.

“Within Canvas, they have the option to modify it and make it work better,” Rieck said.

“However, the vast majority of schools haven’t used the archive. Even though it’s a cost to the organisation, we had to make it available.”

In helping build a new legacy for the department, Canvas is humbled to be the foundation of QLearn. By prioritising user needs, fostering collaboration and embracing innovation, QLearn empowers educators, streamlines processes and paves the way for a future of personalised learning for Queensland's K-12 students.