Canvas: A Story About Students, Professors and Employees
Canvas at Zigurat has been used to train college students, to transform SMEs into professors, and to improve corporate expertise not only outbound but also inbound. It has been seen as the platform to base all our company’s content and share it with three different kinds of actors, making the most of one single website.
(upbeat music) - Everybody, thank you for joining this talk. My name is Federica Formenti and I hope that you'll be inspired by the topics we've checked further on as a good starting point for a perspective shift in your professional life and on Canvas. This talk is intended for anyone who feels stuck on finding solutions or new resources. I'll be sharing some tips based on how my company shifted perspective in the last few years, and how this affected our use of Canvas. In order to do so, let me start introducing myself. My professional career in education started more than 10 years ago as an academic coordinator at an international university.
Later on, I joined a global corporation as a training content strategist for seven years. And at the moment, I'm working as a learning designer for a digital tech institute. Thus, I've been lucky enough to closely know three different aspects of adult learning. Academic, corporate and internal training. Because of this, I had different job titles and roles, but how I really define myself is a multitasking professional in learning and development with many, many hands in lots of different projects.
At first glance, you'd probably notice all those stretched arms. These help me reach my teammates and solve problems. But if you zoom in and look for more details, you'll notice that there's a hidden aspect, more powerful, which is a little eye right in the middle of the forehead. Could you spot it? In Sanskrit, this is called Ajna Chakra or third eye. The third eye is a mystical invisible eye usually located on the forehead, which is said to provide perception beyond ordinary sight.
Some say that when open, the third eye can give wisdom and insight, as well as deepen spiritual communication. Ajna is the sixth chakra in our bodies. In general, all chakras are believed to be energy centers that affect well-being. Whether you believe in chakras or not, from this story, I take the concept that it is useful to have a third eye in life and at work. I'm not referring here to micromanage what your colleagues do in the office, but I rather mean that perception and awareness given by the third eye will help you to see new insights or perspectives.
This talk is basically the story of my multiple point of views, which led me to see three different stakeholders that were going to use the platform. Students, professors and employees. My current company is called Zigurat. It is a digital university based in Spain with 2,000 online students per year who are based in more than 100 countries. It has almost 200 professors giving classes from their houses all over the world.
And we count on 80 employees, mainly located in one office in the city center of Barcelona. In 2017, Zigurat choose Canvas to be our innovative online campus. COVID was still in unknown concept and was way before remote working was a real need and eLearning skyrocketed. Since then, Canvas was trusted to reflect Zigurat's dynamic academic paths. And it was chosen to make our learning process a truthful transformative experience.
Let's hear it through an alumni's voice. - What makes it really easy for me to study in Zigurat Institute is that now I can combine my work and my studies. The fact that it is online and that Canvas adapts to all the devices, allows me to participate in live classes, network sessions, master classes of experts from home, from the train, or even from the bar. I'm very satisfied with my experience and I can see my evolution on a daily basis. And what is more important? All this is reflected in my professional life.
Now, I'm able to provide better solutions. I feel qualified to face new challenges. And I have generated a global network of professionals in my sector. - Throughout the years, Zigurat has been thinking about the future of digital education and implementing new methodologies and activity in its learning experience more and more hybrid. Innovation was our goal.
And after attending in Instructure Events, we've been inspired on how to customize our Canvas, improve its usability and reflect our new branding. Professionals also acknowledge Zigurat improvements in our learning techniques. - Interesting phase comes now after the hype, so the actual standardization of the technology. The implementation, and this part where businesses start using this technology to really make a difference in their use PS and in their whole models - [Narrator] Equipped with global vision and local insight. - We aim to produce people who are specialists in understanding the bigger picture, and are able to recognize how things are interconnected.
It's this ability to think and act strategically that takes projects and careers to new. - But we all know that the world has changed since 2017, and we have to change too, at least our perspective. As time passed and our business grew, the company started to understand that not only students were shaping our community, but more stakeholders were also involved. On one side, we have Zigurat professors. These are all experts in their fields such as architecture, engineering and tech innovation who may or may not have experience in teaching, not to mention digital teaching.
On the other side, there's Zigurat's internal staff. COVID hit our offices, too, and employees had to learn completely new processes and how to adapt to remote work. Canvas has been used to collect all our company's content and to share it with three different kind of excerpts making the most out of one single website. Canvas, basically, helped us to fulfill different needs and host everything in one place. More specifically, it has been used to train masters students, to transform subject-matter experts into professors and to improve corporate expertise, not only outbound but also inbound.
But how was that possible? How did we manage to shift our perspective? As Instructure is telling us this year, learning is a lifelong journey, embrace the journey. So it's never too late to learn a new skill such as having a global perspective. My talk is an invitation to open your third eye. Start from your current need. Keep all the stakeholders in mind, or better said, in your forehead.
Check which resources you have. And finally, make the most out of them, especially in times of economic uncertainty. In story, this is translated as the develop awareness, strengthen your perception and look for hidden insights and opportunities. All of those energy centers distributed throughout your body. In real life, at Zigurat, the final result took the shape of three courses based on their main users.
Let's have a look at them. This is the faculty board center. It is the very first landing page for professors on Canvas. Here, they can find onboarding materials to start their collaboration with Zigurat, register for our train the trainer Program or check more training resources to become digital teachers. Then we have the master programs.
Many weeks before a master starts, our students can access the so-called block zero with basic information about the school, our dual degrees, basic software courses and our community networks. Then, each module refers to one of our masters and this is meant for our students to access their masters' content such as synchronous online classes, additional resources or papers, check the calendar, deliver submissions and develop industry related discussions on the forums. Finally, we have Zigurat internal training course. This one is for internal employees onboarding on all our programs. Every six months, new videos are added to cover all the new processes our schools faced.
As you may have noticed, a few layouts and course structures were very similar, if not the same. This was intended. We decided to mirror common features to have different users quickly adapting to a similar layout to feel more empathy with our masters students and to launch brand new courses faster. I'll put this into context. The grad employees professors who clearly use Canvas to give classes, but even before that, they are in the students' shoes, being students themselves, receiving materials for their own train the training program.
In 2021, we also had an exponential internal growth in our company's academic department, which forced led our staff to receive onboarding on Canvas. As a result, having all these different users browsing the same interface made things easier when they also had to learn how to interact with masters students on the same platform. Canvas options also allowed us to reflect Zigurat's values in each course design. Our global community is active on the faculty board center, participating in the networking forums. We believe that by announcing professors engagement, making them feel part of our ecosystem will also improve students' experience.
Collaboration is another important point for Zigurat. This is made possible in our masters by creating groups that work together on a project. Specific announcements can also be sent to the required group by easily selecting the right one in the recipient field. And personal development is supported all the internal training course by offering you an updated content base on the staff needs. Summing up all these aspects that the third eye has helped us see.
These are a few tips that can be followed when you're designing your Canvas, which students on a broader level, can benefit from. First of all, when building course architecture, try to think on the long-term. Create a structure that can be used for several courses with a branded layout from your institution and similar features. Develop your own design to establish branding and consistency. Create templates to mirror.
On the one side, this will prevent double effort on an admin level, and your job will be more efficient. On the other side, different users will get used to navigate through a similar interface. Promote Canvas internally. If users know it for themselves, they will more likely give critical feedback that will help improve it for commercial purposes, too. Centralize materials that can be shared among different courses and between employees, professors and students, if this is the case.
This will prevent having several copies of the same document which will also be easier to find since it will be in one single place. Send out announcement on Canvas. Use it as the main communication channel, so everybody's prompt to use it at an early stage. Notification can still be synced on personal emails and calendars to be on the safe side. Send out invites to internal training sessions and process updates on Canvas Calendar.
Consider these activities as lifelong learning. Provide checklists to track progress of training parts. These help to raise awareness of the learning journey and make it step the process clear. Issue badges and the final diploma of completion to recognize achievements and increase engagement throughout the journey. Finally, create surveys on Canvas to request feedback and to store all the information by the course in one single place.
Here is a recap of all these tips again. Well, for the future, Zigurat challenges include, offering more and more training content and video tutorials to our professors and enable their participation through engaging discussion forums and hybrid networking sessions. Creating proper pages for our students to deliver information in a nice interactive way instead of simply using the platform as a PDF repository. Our LMS team is also looking for easier interior solutions for uploading materials. And for our onboarding, we analyze and learn from our word mistakes.
Instead of designing this course as one big block, we realized that is better to conceive of it as a module system under the long-term. HR and the academic department are working together considering a bigger variety of learning needs and preferences based on internal stuff. And now, it's time for you to take a further step in your learning journey and reflect on your personal perspective shift. Are you ready to open your third eye? Here's how. This is a very simple list of points to reflect on in order to start having a more global perspective.
This is intended to be used at your workplace, but in can also be useful in your life in general. You can take a screenshot of this slide on screen. First of all, choose a specific topic you'd like to reflect on. Then take a blank paper. Draw a frame in it.
Write down a brief description of your current perspective. Now, turn the paper sideways and write the desired perspective. This is useful to define a goal. Feel free to look at it in case you feel lost or when you need to remind it to yourself. Do not also forget to consider all the stakeholders and resources available to you.
And start developing it as a micro project with three quick steps. If the idea of having an additional project to work on overwhelms you, think that you don't have to actively invest time and energies on all those aspects altogether. You can define your own pace. One step at a time. Finally, decide what your first action would be.
Practice will expand your options. This process can also be translated to Canvas. Start thinking about your current needs on the platform or an issue you'd need to solve. Write down the current situation and the desired one. Think of all the stakeholders involved, users, admins, new audiences, and the resources you can use at your benefit.
Then define three things you can do to get you ready for your desired situation. It is important at this point to do some research, be up to date and participate at different talks offered by Instructure. Start thinking outside the box. Explore how your ideas can be implemented on Canvas. And start with your first baby step.
As a final takeaway, Ajna showed us changing perspectives is relatively simple but not necessarily easy. There are a lot of hidden aspects that may be out of your ordinary sight. How you see something becomes your truth, which can sometimes be a bit self-limiting because reality is broader than your perception of it. Be ready to let a mystical third eye help you to disclose wisdom and your insights. Thanks everybody for your time.
I hope you find some helpful information that you can use at your institution or in your everyday life. My name is Federica Formenti, and I'd be happy to listen to your stories about new global perspectives on LinkedIn. Thank you.
Later on, I joined a global corporation as a training content strategist for seven years. And at the moment, I'm working as a learning designer for a digital tech institute. Thus, I've been lucky enough to closely know three different aspects of adult learning. Academic, corporate and internal training. Because of this, I had different job titles and roles, but how I really define myself is a multitasking professional in learning and development with many, many hands in lots of different projects.
At first glance, you'd probably notice all those stretched arms. These help me reach my teammates and solve problems. But if you zoom in and look for more details, you'll notice that there's a hidden aspect, more powerful, which is a little eye right in the middle of the forehead. Could you spot it? In Sanskrit, this is called Ajna Chakra or third eye. The third eye is a mystical invisible eye usually located on the forehead, which is said to provide perception beyond ordinary sight.
Some say that when open, the third eye can give wisdom and insight, as well as deepen spiritual communication. Ajna is the sixth chakra in our bodies. In general, all chakras are believed to be energy centers that affect well-being. Whether you believe in chakras or not, from this story, I take the concept that it is useful to have a third eye in life and at work. I'm not referring here to micromanage what your colleagues do in the office, but I rather mean that perception and awareness given by the third eye will help you to see new insights or perspectives.
This talk is basically the story of my multiple point of views, which led me to see three different stakeholders that were going to use the platform. Students, professors and employees. My current company is called Zigurat. It is a digital university based in Spain with 2,000 online students per year who are based in more than 100 countries. It has almost 200 professors giving classes from their houses all over the world.
And we count on 80 employees, mainly located in one office in the city center of Barcelona. In 2017, Zigurat choose Canvas to be our innovative online campus. COVID was still in unknown concept and was way before remote working was a real need and eLearning skyrocketed. Since then, Canvas was trusted to reflect Zigurat's dynamic academic paths. And it was chosen to make our learning process a truthful transformative experience.
Let's hear it through an alumni's voice. - What makes it really easy for me to study in Zigurat Institute is that now I can combine my work and my studies. The fact that it is online and that Canvas adapts to all the devices, allows me to participate in live classes, network sessions, master classes of experts from home, from the train, or even from the bar. I'm very satisfied with my experience and I can see my evolution on a daily basis. And what is more important? All this is reflected in my professional life.
Now, I'm able to provide better solutions. I feel qualified to face new challenges. And I have generated a global network of professionals in my sector. - Throughout the years, Zigurat has been thinking about the future of digital education and implementing new methodologies and activity in its learning experience more and more hybrid. Innovation was our goal.
And after attending in Instructure Events, we've been inspired on how to customize our Canvas, improve its usability and reflect our new branding. Professionals also acknowledge Zigurat improvements in our learning techniques. - Interesting phase comes now after the hype, so the actual standardization of the technology. The implementation, and this part where businesses start using this technology to really make a difference in their use PS and in their whole models - [Narrator] Equipped with global vision and local insight. - We aim to produce people who are specialists in understanding the bigger picture, and are able to recognize how things are interconnected.
It's this ability to think and act strategically that takes projects and careers to new. - But we all know that the world has changed since 2017, and we have to change too, at least our perspective. As time passed and our business grew, the company started to understand that not only students were shaping our community, but more stakeholders were also involved. On one side, we have Zigurat professors. These are all experts in their fields such as architecture, engineering and tech innovation who may or may not have experience in teaching, not to mention digital teaching.
On the other side, there's Zigurat's internal staff. COVID hit our offices, too, and employees had to learn completely new processes and how to adapt to remote work. Canvas has been used to collect all our company's content and to share it with three different kind of excerpts making the most out of one single website. Canvas, basically, helped us to fulfill different needs and host everything in one place. More specifically, it has been used to train masters students, to transform subject-matter experts into professors and to improve corporate expertise, not only outbound but also inbound.
But how was that possible? How did we manage to shift our perspective? As Instructure is telling us this year, learning is a lifelong journey, embrace the journey. So it's never too late to learn a new skill such as having a global perspective. My talk is an invitation to open your third eye. Start from your current need. Keep all the stakeholders in mind, or better said, in your forehead.
Check which resources you have. And finally, make the most out of them, especially in times of economic uncertainty. In story, this is translated as the develop awareness, strengthen your perception and look for hidden insights and opportunities. All of those energy centers distributed throughout your body. In real life, at Zigurat, the final result took the shape of three courses based on their main users.
Let's have a look at them. This is the faculty board center. It is the very first landing page for professors on Canvas. Here, they can find onboarding materials to start their collaboration with Zigurat, register for our train the trainer Program or check more training resources to become digital teachers. Then we have the master programs.
Many weeks before a master starts, our students can access the so-called block zero with basic information about the school, our dual degrees, basic software courses and our community networks. Then, each module refers to one of our masters and this is meant for our students to access their masters' content such as synchronous online classes, additional resources or papers, check the calendar, deliver submissions and develop industry related discussions on the forums. Finally, we have Zigurat internal training course. This one is for internal employees onboarding on all our programs. Every six months, new videos are added to cover all the new processes our schools faced.
As you may have noticed, a few layouts and course structures were very similar, if not the same. This was intended. We decided to mirror common features to have different users quickly adapting to a similar layout to feel more empathy with our masters students and to launch brand new courses faster. I'll put this into context. The grad employees professors who clearly use Canvas to give classes, but even before that, they are in the students' shoes, being students themselves, receiving materials for their own train the training program.
In 2021, we also had an exponential internal growth in our company's academic department, which forced led our staff to receive onboarding on Canvas. As a result, having all these different users browsing the same interface made things easier when they also had to learn how to interact with masters students on the same platform. Canvas options also allowed us to reflect Zigurat's values in each course design. Our global community is active on the faculty board center, participating in the networking forums. We believe that by announcing professors engagement, making them feel part of our ecosystem will also improve students' experience.
Collaboration is another important point for Zigurat. This is made possible in our masters by creating groups that work together on a project. Specific announcements can also be sent to the required group by easily selecting the right one in the recipient field. And personal development is supported all the internal training course by offering you an updated content base on the staff needs. Summing up all these aspects that the third eye has helped us see.
These are a few tips that can be followed when you're designing your Canvas, which students on a broader level, can benefit from. First of all, when building course architecture, try to think on the long-term. Create a structure that can be used for several courses with a branded layout from your institution and similar features. Develop your own design to establish branding and consistency. Create templates to mirror.
On the one side, this will prevent double effort on an admin level, and your job will be more efficient. On the other side, different users will get used to navigate through a similar interface. Promote Canvas internally. If users know it for themselves, they will more likely give critical feedback that will help improve it for commercial purposes, too. Centralize materials that can be shared among different courses and between employees, professors and students, if this is the case.
This will prevent having several copies of the same document which will also be easier to find since it will be in one single place. Send out announcement on Canvas. Use it as the main communication channel, so everybody's prompt to use it at an early stage. Notification can still be synced on personal emails and calendars to be on the safe side. Send out invites to internal training sessions and process updates on Canvas Calendar.
Consider these activities as lifelong learning. Provide checklists to track progress of training parts. These help to raise awareness of the learning journey and make it step the process clear. Issue badges and the final diploma of completion to recognize achievements and increase engagement throughout the journey. Finally, create surveys on Canvas to request feedback and to store all the information by the course in one single place.
Here is a recap of all these tips again. Well, for the future, Zigurat challenges include, offering more and more training content and video tutorials to our professors and enable their participation through engaging discussion forums and hybrid networking sessions. Creating proper pages for our students to deliver information in a nice interactive way instead of simply using the platform as a PDF repository. Our LMS team is also looking for easier interior solutions for uploading materials. And for our onboarding, we analyze and learn from our word mistakes.
Instead of designing this course as one big block, we realized that is better to conceive of it as a module system under the long-term. HR and the academic department are working together considering a bigger variety of learning needs and preferences based on internal stuff. And now, it's time for you to take a further step in your learning journey and reflect on your personal perspective shift. Are you ready to open your third eye? Here's how. This is a very simple list of points to reflect on in order to start having a more global perspective.
This is intended to be used at your workplace, but in can also be useful in your life in general. You can take a screenshot of this slide on screen. First of all, choose a specific topic you'd like to reflect on. Then take a blank paper. Draw a frame in it.
Write down a brief description of your current perspective. Now, turn the paper sideways and write the desired perspective. This is useful to define a goal. Feel free to look at it in case you feel lost or when you need to remind it to yourself. Do not also forget to consider all the stakeholders and resources available to you.
And start developing it as a micro project with three quick steps. If the idea of having an additional project to work on overwhelms you, think that you don't have to actively invest time and energies on all those aspects altogether. You can define your own pace. One step at a time. Finally, decide what your first action would be.
Practice will expand your options. This process can also be translated to Canvas. Start thinking about your current needs on the platform or an issue you'd need to solve. Write down the current situation and the desired one. Think of all the stakeholders involved, users, admins, new audiences, and the resources you can use at your benefit.
Then define three things you can do to get you ready for your desired situation. It is important at this point to do some research, be up to date and participate at different talks offered by Instructure. Start thinking outside the box. Explore how your ideas can be implemented on Canvas. And start with your first baby step.
As a final takeaway, Ajna showed us changing perspectives is relatively simple but not necessarily easy. There are a lot of hidden aspects that may be out of your ordinary sight. How you see something becomes your truth, which can sometimes be a bit self-limiting because reality is broader than your perception of it. Be ready to let a mystical third eye help you to disclose wisdom and your insights. Thanks everybody for your time.
I hope you find some helpful information that you can use at your institution or in your everyday life. My name is Federica Formenti, and I'd be happy to listen to your stories about new global perspectives on LinkedIn. Thank you.