Common Student Experience through Blueprint Courses

Next topic, which will be on the importance of achieving a common student experience through blueprint courses. I'm very excited to introduce our next guest, as we all experienced during the COVID pandemic, we built relationships throughout that period. And I'd love I like to call this what we call a trauma bond. Right? You work through this trauma, you build these really deep relationships. You call them healthy relationships or not, but I spent a lot of time on Zoom calls, with Leo, from Holy Angel University who will be presenting next. And throughout this time, while we're on Zoom, is introducing me to his dogs.

We're talking about everything of life, and we're supposed to have a thirty minute call. It ends up going for two hours. Divulging and sharing all our challenges throughout this COVID period. So Leo, is a person with a wealth of experience, international experience in nonprofit, corporate and most recently working in the higher education industry. He's currently the OIC president of Holy Angel University, And throughout the time, that he had onboarded with Canvas from the earliest part of the pandemic, he's been able to transform Holy Angel University to create a consistent user experience with the courses and redesigning the way they implement courses at Holy Angel University So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Leo to the stage.

Thank you very much Ramsey. You know, what's what's really interesting is that for about two years. All all we could see of each other were zoom, pictures. Small pictures, you know, like, and so all this time, I I I really thought that I already met him. Then we met yesterday It was like a happy reunion.

Of course, one of the things I I was surprised about is that he had legs. When did you grow those? Yeah. Okay. Oh, I I've got that already. Yes.

I'm I'm from Holy Angel University for those who don't know, it's in Pampanga. It's in Angela City. It's the culinary capital of the Philippines. Not totally Angel, but in the city. If if you've, how many of you know, my namesake, Leo Valdez, the singer? How many of you know, Leo Valdez, a show of hands? Okay.

I know how old you are. Okay. And then the other question that might come up is this. How how does someone get called OIC? Okay. And I was I was, trying to explain to people that, guess you know what OIC means.

Right? Yeah. Filipinos do know what OIC means, but, you know, you what does it mean again? Officer in charge. Correct. So OIC means officer in charge. When I explain that to somebody, then they usually say, Oh, I see.

Right? There, sorry. I'm just trying to lighten the afternoon because I can see that you are not awake yet. Okay. And, finally, the the the question that you might have is, why is there an OIC president making a presentation here? But it so happened that before this role, I was the guy who was doing everything in LMS. And I think, Ramsey can attest to that.

If you were looking for the whole LMS support team in, Holy Angel University. How many were there, Ramsey? The whole LMS support team at Holy Angel? One. Oh, yes. That that was me. Yes.

Okay. So it it, we we were very lean. We were very lean at the time. And, of course, now we have more people in in the support team. Let me let me go through the through the slides here.

One of the things that, I'll talk about is what happened when we switched to, sorry. Is that right? Oh, oh, yes. I'm seeing something else. Okay. Yes.

All about us in twenty nineteen. We had approximately eleven thousand more than eleven thousand college students four thousand in senior high. And, of course, we had, approximately one thousand eight hundred different subjects. So you might call them preparation. So that was in twenty nineteen, and then something happened.

We had to make a decision because of something that occurred, and that was the Southeast Asian games towards the end of twenty nineteen, where classes were suspended, for about two weeks. And because of that suspension, we were really so far behind that we had to extend the school year by another week Now what does that mean? It meant that, some of our, basic education students were coming in even on Saturdays to catch up, and parents were not happy about that. So The one solution we were looking for was eventually that we needed to have online learning so that in case of class suspensions, we'll switch. And that was the that was the decision that we came up with. The previous president, Doctor.

Calingo, was the one who made that decision. And by the way, I took over for him from him in, twenty twenty one because he was the rare case of a of a president who caught COVID and, died from it. So it's a very unusual situation. So, so I had to look after. First, I was looking after LMS, and then all of a sudden I had to look after school.

Did you see what they did there? No. That's dark over there. Then it became light. Yeah. See, you know? Use those special features.

Why did we go for Canvas? Let's take a look at there was a video that we saw And we saw ourselves in that video because we were looking for something that our current LMS could not do. Thought it was good. At City University, the use of LMS is not mandatory. So it's voluntary. And in the first semester that we adopted Canvas, roughly a thousand five hundred courses signed up for that.

And it's all purely because they they just want to use it. And that's incredible because adoption rate ranges from zero to eighty percent of all courses within that one semester. Training for Canvas is usually for new colleagues. We don't need to keep re showing people how to do it because it's so easy. Anyone with the most fundamental computer literacy could use this system and use it without fear.

Canvas give you so much more time for the teaching side of teaching. So the key items that we got from that video were simply that, first of all, the adoption rate was very high. They had eighty percent of of their courses adopted. And then the deployment was all, also very fast. Imagine trying to deploy fifteen hundred, courses in this case, fifteen hundred courses, and they had to do it in one semester.

We were thinking that my gosh, it would take us the entire semester just to do it with the previous LMS. And, of course, as was mentioned, it's the ease of use. I I don't know if, does does everyone here already have Canvas are there people here who are still thinking about the Canvas decision? So everyone is a Canvas user? Okay. It's you already know that it's very easy for for your students to pick up Canvas. It's not one of those things where you have explain to them how to get into things.

So we went into, a lot planning. We had to figure out first, what's the scope? Are we going to have canvas for all our levels? And we decided, we'll start with, senior high school sorry, with college, then, graduate school, and then senior high school. There was another LMS for, other levels of basic education. We had to look at the support teams, who's going to be involved in it, and, And what kind of, what kind of features we might be able to use, for example, if we had to deploy it real fast, we needed kind of as comments or other things. The other, the other thing that we were looking at was how were you going to go from point eight to point b.

So our goal in twenty nineteen was to just go into turning canvas into a repository for course materials. And have a couple of activities, for example, a few a few quizzes so that you could find out what's going on with, with the student. However, we saw that things have changed. Right? So our point a changed to a prime. Something was different.

We could not go anymore to point b because we were not in the classroom. You you know, of course, what we're talking about sometime in March of twenty twenty, it all changed. And so our goal had to change. We had to go into something something more advanced than what we had thought of in the beginning and that we would add online learning, activities, and, of course, we try to add some assessment in there. So their new point B now was going to talk about was going to deal with three items, and that is a repository for textbook and course materials.

A platform for learning activities, and an assistant for monitoring and assessing student performance. With this new goal, of course, we had to take a look at how will it look to the student, eventually And, this was just the first the first cut. We were thinking, okay, let's students love the, love the campus. Let's show them the campus. But the when when we were into implementation, of course, it was complete lockdown.

So one of the things that we had to talk about was try to connect the student during lockdown with what they were looking for in education at Holy Angel University. And there are three things that we identified. One of them was campus life. They love the campus. Some of them made their decision to go to this school because of the campus.

They had their friends there. And of course, they also love their instructors. You know, when when they come back as alumni, they normally talk about these three things. So, like, oh, what does that building like? Who are your friends? Are you still alive? Still alive? That kind of thing? And also, they would talk about their most unusual instructors. So they never talked about us who were in administration or, you know, the lessons that they had.

It was only these three things. So we wanted to make them have that connection without having the ability to go into the campus. So we had to come up with a way to illustrate that on canvas and using templates We took a look at everything that we currently had in the campus, and we we put, these images into the templates. There was a template for senior high school, another one for college, and another one for the graduate school. And as you can see, it's very colorful.

They would have a connection with the with the campus and with activities. And of course, with the possibility of student success. So these were all included in there, but one thing, of course, we could not give them was the ability to connect with each other. So here's what the timeline sort of looked like. This is a a an illustration really of what happened, before the pandemic.

And this is just the first time, we made we made we had the decision to go into Canvas LMS, and then you'll see on the left side, all those, yellow, orange boxes, that's what canvas was doing for us. Right? And and you already know that level of support. And on the right side were the things that we were doing And as we continued to the timeline of just before COVID, we were already looking at what kind of e learning goals we had, the common look and feel and the integration with our student information system or assist. And of course, we still had that weekly support support call, and then suddenly, bam. That's it.

We weren't in the classroom anymore. And we had all of this all set up that we were going to work on and all of these that we were supposed to work on But as you can see in the dates, that's March. Well, training began in April twenty twenty. And it was all online. And then we started be building our blueprints in June and July of the same year.

Now why did we choose to use blue blueprints We decided that we wanted to prepare our courses ahead of time, and that means that instead of each in structure having to think about their lesson plan for the next week and the following week, we want them to just deliver Okay? We also decided to change our vocabulary. So where everybody else was talking about Oops. Sorry. About online classes, we were saying meetings that took a little, a little time to to explain, especially for for our, for the for the parents. And and the students, the new students, they always said, make, you know, they would say the same thing, make, and then we would say, Well, you have an online meeting.

Okay. We we didn't want it to be called meetings, online classes because we didn't want them them to think that they were just going to be taught during that session. We also started using blueprint one of the words we started to use as well was mother courses because they were having difficulty at trying to understand what is blueprint, and so our teachers were going through that. And, of course, we had to explain to them that the associated courses were then the child courses. Right? So it's easier to remember.

Okay. You're going to make the mother course, then all of the other instructors are going to deliver on the child courses. Okay? And finally, if we know this, we started talking about the synchronous and synchronous learning all new to these people who were who were very used to having things in a classroom. So we have some new roles. We had the LMS administration.

We had LMS support. Definitely, we needed to have subject matter experts or SMEs, and these are the people who are going to develop the courses on blueprint And then finally, we have the instructors or teachers and those teachers, of course, were to deliver what the subject matter expert have put together, and they could also collaborate with the SMEs. Finally, we also had to create a role called the chair, and the chair is a special administrative role that oversees the activities of the SMEs and the instructor. So here are the policies that we had to develop. One of them is that we should never have lectures in meetings.

Okay. One of the things that we we determined was this. The students, some of the students didn't have the right equipment, and they didn't also have the ability to get good high speed internet So therefore, we wanted to make asynchronous learning more important than synchronous learning And that meant that everything that they did online had to be important. So that's what we said. Synchronoss is expensive.

Therefore, we should use it primarily for socialization. Okay? Not for lecturing. Only socialization. Of course, when it got to implementation, we still had a lot of instructors doing the same thing. They were still teaching.

K? And then finally, and this is very important. Develop courses one semester or one year in advance using blueprints. Now that's a tall order, and they were only given about two months to prepare. And out of the eighteen hundred, courses, unique courses About two thirds were were created yet that particular summer. So from the moment that the, lockdown started until we started classes, it was about four months.

So for the people who are administrators here, here, here are some of the, items that you probably already familiar with, but but now you'll see the whole, concept. Of course, we had to bring in these users. They went into student information system. We gave them all email addresses. And then using those email addresses, we could create Canvas accounts for them.

After that, they went into training, and training was on their own. Okay. I'll show you what it looks like later. Course development, we had to start off by creating the template. The three templates for the three levels.

Then we had our subject matter experts, populate those template and then we turn them into blueprints. Now if you know what how how blueprints work, you have to turn on the switch inside. K? You you just can't can't start building a course and then say, yay, we got a blueprint. No. You have to go into each and every one of those courses and turn on the switch.

And so that was the that was actually the biggest work that we had to do because it was easier to use using SIS import to build all those, blueprints, the, the blueprint courses but it was very difficult to turn the switch on. So we had to do that separately. Now we get to the courses. So the courses are determined by the number of students who came in. We call those loads.

So who are who are the instructors, how much load are they going to get which particular sections they're going to take? And sometimes there could be as many as eighty sections for one particular course which was developed as a blueprint. So the next thing was to associate all of those different courses into the blueprint. Okay? Then you started, enrolling the teachers in there so that they can start changing somethings in there. For example, everything in the template shows things like, choose which of these, banners you're going to use for your particular class. And also, if you want to, you can put in a description about yourself, your policies, a little bit about the course itself.

But that most of that's already in the blueprint. So you now assign the teachers, and you must have a little bit of time for them to put in, specific, content which they've created for their course. So that modification happened. This whole part here would usually take one night. One night.

So this this this is a lot of work. I think Kevin can can attest to that. The first time we did it, it took us about three days because some of the schools were not ready. Therefore, we had to wait for the loads so that we could associate them and assign the teachers and then the teachers can modify. So this one, went from one night to about, three days.

Finally, first day of classes, we would assign or we would put the students in then we turn on the course. How do you turn on the course? Publish it. Okay. So each instructor had to turn it on. They had to turn on published.

So our our support calls were always the same. It was like, where are my courses? Right? Where are my courses? It goes on and on like that. Then we realized, oh my gosh, they hadn't turned it on yet. They hadn't published the course yet. Okay.

So the publishing, the launching part, that's the published part. And then at the end of the semester or the term, then we had to archive that. Okay. So this is the whole the whole process, and I hope that it it has, some meaning for you. Now here are some of the benefits of doing something like this.

First of all, the templates were used for a common look and feel. So that whenever a student went from one course to another, even if they had five or six courses, They knew what would show up in the front page. There would be a banner. There'd be a description of the course. There'd be the name of the instructor and how to contact the instructor.

And then as they went into the modules, the modules were following a particular format. Of course, the blueprint was meant for common content. So the students in section one one one one, had the same context as those in section one one one two and one one one three. So they were missing out on something because they had a better teacher. Right? So what does that mean if you were doing, them in blueprints? You had the modules ready be because it was done one whole semester in advance.

The modules were available for people to see what was coming up next. So those who are faster can move forward and those who are slower can catch up. And if you had several of these courses in your, what's it called to get dashboard Then, some people are going to go back and forth among the courses, and taking their time on the courses they're not very good at. And then, of course, that meant that if the content was ready, that meant that instructors would only focus on engagement. How would they be able to engage them in meetings, or in, online activities.

Of course, we know that the students learn Canvas on their own and we just presented every student with this one. They went in, they went into each of these modules, and that's it. They were ready. The most common question was, what's my password? Yeah. It's the most common.

And, of course, the second most common is where's my course? The the where's my course part was just that the course was not yet published. Okay. A little bit about the feedback. The positive feedback is, here on the top, I can access all my courses in one place, recorded meetings help me review or catch up, I like the mental health breaks after the exams, and instructors listen to me and give consideration. However, there are two negative comments here, and the most important one is this.

Several courses are happening at the same time. They were they're they had the same deadlines. And you can tell that there was so much frustration. We did a, we did a survey, and we found out that, about a third, no, two thirds of two three thousand eight hundred respondents were saying, this is too much. We're overwhelmed.

Because they would just look at their calendar and they'll see so many deadlines on single dates. Okay? And of course, those who are in the in the technical courses, they wanted to have more of the meetings because of the technical details. And essentially, you know, we you'd think, oh my, does that mean that we we failed not necessarily because we were able to deploy so quickly and to have a common look and feel that their real concern was scheduling and not the actual content. So, essentially, what what's happened since then is that we've been making changes. And, you know, you've you've seen all the other presentations previously talking about how they they continue to engage or change things.

We're trying to do some of those and, go back to the recordings of those to to get some of the, key learnings. And, So ever ever since then, we've been continually trying to improve in the delivery. And I hope that at least something like this is important that you are trying to have a common look and feel so that the student is not lost. By the way, one of the things that you'll learn, and I guess you already know it. So they were struggling in the first semester.

Then in the second semester, they were getting into it by the third and the fourth semesters. They were beginning to cheat. Right? And so grade inflation, don't don't lie to me. We there was a lot of grade inflation going on, right? So, yes. So those are the things that we had to deal with.

So thank you very much. That's my time. Thank you so much, Leo. I might just hold you off on stage for a moment just to see if there's any questions from our audience here. Excellent.

Just a little past me to sing. I'm not the singer. Hello. Good afternoon. I am Rodora Lynn Lenpaca Baba from the University of Santa Thomas, and we appreciate your presentation, and we were all able to relate to your experience, with your LMS with Canvas because we also went through the same thing.

Only in our situation, we were using Blackboard before sorry Canvas, but we are now switching, of course, to Canvas in most of the the the institutions, colleges, or departments in the university are now into Canvas. You were able to share to us some of the important points in your experience with Canvas as your LMS. My question now is something on the process that you did And one of the striking points in your presentation that struck me was about the context of socialization. What do you actually mean by socialization as a, as as as, something for the synchronization session that it must be, I mean, the synchronous sessions must be used for socialization because this might mean something else for you and could mean something else for us. So I would like to, be clarified as to what you meant by that statement And the other question, if you would, allow me is to, you also mentioned something about a one night to accomplish the courses, stage, do you think that was enough and and and how were the teachers able to comply with that one night only for, preparing the courses.

That will be all. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. And and thank you for switching to Canvas. Look what I did there.

First of all, socialization doesn't necessarily mean, oh, you know, you're just going to to, you know, talk to each other. But essentially, that was it. One of the things we discovered when we were training our six hundred instructors was that, we asked just a couple of questions. The first question was, how are you? And then we started getting a lot of instructors talking about their situation and they started crying, you know, that kind of thing. So mental health was an issue.

And if that was an issue for the for the instructors, can you imagine how it is for this for the students? And part of the the, part of the frustration of the student in in, Canvas was not necessarily about Canvas itself. But all of the work that they had to do in addition to many things happening around them and they're stuck in their in their, homes they had to probably share one computer. So one of the things we were looking for was to make sure that since data is so important, so so expensive. We needed them to have the ability to talk to each other while they were in their meetings, not classes. So, it's it's a way of recognizing, that the person has to be whole, right, rather than just learn that, you know, competency is not the only thing.

We also needed to look at compassion and, and their conscience. Right? So that was, one thing. What was the second question again? Oh, yes. Good question. Was was the one day enough? No.

No. So what not normally happened was that our previous president said, okay. On day one, you have to have a class. Right? And and then we couldn't do that because some some, were having their classes on Mondays. The others had there on Tuesday, Thursdays.

So instead of that, what we did was our first week was spent on trying to, get to know our students get them to understand what what they're up up against in this in this whole, process. And therefore, the one day turned into a co into a couple of days, it actually turned into one week. And that gave them a chance to connect with their teachers, which is which was a good thing. And yes, you're right. It we could not fulfill it in one day.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Leo. Other questions from the crowd. Let's make it oh, it's okay. We'll just, head to the front, and then we'll follow-up with the FU question after the question at the front.

Please go ahead. Afternoon, sir. I'm curious about the blueprint because we haven't tried do saying blueprint. What we have is the master courses for our teachers, and that serves as our PLC courses also for their partners. But what's the difference with them, with blueprint and Master Course? Thank you.

If if I understand it right, your master course is the course that you will copy from so that it goes into different. Yeah. So the difference is that in a blueprint, you can determine which of the components of the blueprint will be automatically transferred to the child courses. So you can turn on the switch, and then you can even termine there which of the components, like which pages are going to be, standardized. And because of that, then you don't have to if, let's say, you had ten sections and your master course, every time you made the change, you would have to copy it ten times.

Right? In, in blueprints, all you have to do is synchronize. You go into the blueprint with after making the change, You hit synchronize and all all the ten courses would be updated then. That's great. Thank you Sorry, last one. So does it mean even if we do it every week? Because we usually post our, purse we do it per cycle.

So we do it on the last day of the last cycle. So it's okay. We just click the sync. Thank you. Thank you for that.

I it's it's great for the and that's why the tie the title was the common user experience. Is that all the all the users of the ten sec are going to have the same content. Of course, anything that's added by the instructor, separately will be different from the other classes. But, yes, that's the way it works. Thank you.

Thank you for the question. Moving to our friends from Fireston University. Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the presentation.

Everything was concise and, I believe, really as what the USDA have mentioned, everyone could relate because, the after effects is probably what everyone went through. But What got me excited is actually your start, your shifting, when you started Canvas. It's like, Your single support with fifteen thousand eight hundred. If I'm not mistaken, eleven thousand from college and four thousand eight hundred for your senior high, So I was, my act my question is actually not related to the main topic, the blueprint. You had a slide earlier, the planning part Reen, you actually have there separated the canvas, they call us directly to the central, then NTP to the, to the HR.

So I was trying to debug and understand the planning part, everything that we went through there. And there's just one sticking out there that I could not, understand or debug, what what part is she there. So that's my question actually because it would stick on my mind for days if I couldn't ask. Who's miss Santos? Very, very good. She is she she was at the time our vice president for academic affairs.

Oh, okay. Thank you so much. Excellent. Okay. So that brings us to the last question for this session. Leo, thank you so much for your time. If we could give Leo a round of applause, thank you everyone.