Canvas LMS
Northern Arizona University
Strong change-management and faculty enthusiasm resulted in NAU's successful migration to Canvas LMS.
Arizona
28,000+ Users
Adopted Canvas: 2022
Nestled in the mountains of Flagstaff, Northern Arizona University (NAU) works to make education accessible for anyone, serving students in 20+ locations throughout Arizona and offering robust online operations with more than 150 education programs. With a student body comprising 45% first-generation college students, NAU aims to be an engine of opportunity, vehicle of economic mobility, and a driver of social impact for the communities it serves.
In 2022, faced with the need to move on from its legacy Blackboard learning management system (LMS), NAU successfully transitioned to Canvas LMS.
The Challenge
With its existing system reaching the end of its useful life, NAU would need to migrate all course offerings. University leaders decided to think expansively about how the institution uses learning management technology and how it integrates with other systems. Including the campus community of students and faculty into the decision-making process was vitally important.
“Since this is really an academic endeavor, we decided that we needed to ask the community what they needed and wanted,” said Don Carter, Director, Teaching & Learning Technology Services, ITS.
To simplify the process of choosing the new LMS, the selection team narrowed its choice to one of three systems already in use across other large Arizona universities; then, they approached the cross-discipline, university-wide project review, and resource committee for approval and resources to move forward.
With an initial list of requirements, the selection team set out to listen to the range of academic, support, and staff perspectives, and conducted a series of town halls for each of the colleges. They made certain to include student affairs, curriculum committees, professional education programs, technology support teams, and others who make use of the LMS across disciplines. Sandbox environments helped faculty see for themselves how each of the three systems would work in reality, and the combined effort led to the selection of Canvas LMS in early 2022.
“Happily, we saw very strong consensus emerge that Canvas really was the system that best fit our needs,” Dan Stoffel, Assistant Director, Teaching & Learning Services, Technology Services.
Key Insights
Listening to what faculty and students want matters. Open engagement and purposeful conversations across the NAU community helped build consensus and enthusiasm for their new LMS.
For NAU, effective and comprehensive project management served as a conduit to collaboration, consensus, and strong relationships.
Taking advantage of the opportunity to redesign courses while making use of Canvas’s broad capabilities helped to reinvigorate classes and support a strong academic foundation for the future.
Faculty participated in intensive, two-tier training that included on-demand offerings, live webinars, and facilitated online workshops, all supported by incentives to honor their efforts.
The Solution
The institution planned to converge on a single LMS, while supporting and encouraging good design practices, consistency, and intuitive navigation as it migrated thousands of courses. Comprehensive project management would be key to successfully meeting these objectives, while also training hundreds of faculty and updating integrations with the student information system (SIS) and other academic and scheduling processes.
The learning management system is the most used and most important IT system at the university, which touches everyone… Concurrent with the LMS project we are dedicated to developing a cohesive and effective larger ecosystem that supports the broad university and learning enterprise.
Steve Burrell
CIO and VP for IT, Northern Arizona University.
Variety of Option Course Migration
Content migration provided NAU with the opportunity to refresh course content. The university offered three methods for faculty to migrate their content: assisted migration with the help of a migration vendor, self migration where a faculty could import existing content into Canvas and clean it up themselves, and the ability to build courses from scratch starting with a simple template and Canvas course shell and take advantage of the opportunity to really learn the tool.
Instructional designers were on hand to support faculty every step of the way, providing guidelines on how to prepare a course for migration and live assistance when needed. Faculty who had used Canvas LMS previously at other institutions and other early adopters led the way in course migration efforts.
“The more organized and modular a course was prior to migration, the easier it was to clean up post-migration,” said John Georgas. Senior Vice Provost, Technology and Learning Center.
Leveled Training Helps Meet Faculty Where They Are
Two levels of training combined with faculty incentives to learn and adopt Canvas proved particularly helpful. A combination of on-demand offerings, live webinars, extensive knowledgebased articles, and facilitated online workshops helped get faculty up to speed. Daily open labs encouraged faculty to drop in and ask questions of NAU’s instructional designers.
“Incentives for faculty to complete trainings honored the fact that we were asking a lot from them on top of their normal loads, particularly after asking them to teach in high flex modalities during the pandemic,” said Amy Rushall, Assistant Vice Provost, Teaching and Learning Center. “While it represented a lot of effort, we also observed a lot of enthusiasm from faculty to move toward Canvas.”
A user support effort that included both NAU’s service desk helped manage first-tier support for students and faculty, and Instructure’s 24/7 support for escalated support was also valuable in keeping things rolling.
“We had about 2/3 of faculty engaging in the level one training, over a thousand faculty engaging in some sort of Canvas training over the year, and almost 100% enthusiastic participation in engaging with Canvas learning,” said Amy Rushall.
Summer Semester Soft-Launch Pave the Way for Success
A soft launch in the summer semester, with a smaller set of courses and fewer students and faculty in attendance, helped the university put the system to the test, and a clean switchover followed in the fallsemester to provide the best possible student experience.
“As we were going into fall, everything was just too quiet. I had this pang of uncertainty as to whether all of the prior efforts for the better course of two years had gotten our faculty to engage and be ready. And let me tell you, I'm glad I was proven wrong,” said John Georgas. “Our fall launch was absolutely smooth. Fantastic. A testament to the good choices that we made leading up to that.”
If you just transfer everything over, you're probably doing things the same way you've always done them. And that's not a good way to go. Or you can try to transform things. And so transformation has always been on our mind.
Don Carter
Director, Teaching & Learning Technology Services, ITS
Early Open Engagement For the Win
Most important to the success of the Canvas LMS go-live was the focus on broad, early, open engagement across the widest and broadest possible parts of the NAU community.
“We engaged our faculty, our students, our staff in these conversations purposefully and fairly early in the process,” said John Georgas. “We spent the better part of the first year in consultations, in conversations, and baking the information we captured into our process.”
The team also attributes its success to good project management and strong collaboration that helped them align when they needed to find consensus on their approach and processes. As part of that, the willingness to rethink the technology and take advantage of new capabilities also made a significant difference.
With Canvas LMS now actively in use across the university, the NAU team is looking forward to building on its success. “I think people across the university know each other in different ways, in part because of this project. With the groundwork that we've laid and the cohesiveness of the community around this project, we have more opportunity to transform how we use our LMS,” said Don Carter.
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