Impact by Instructure
Richmond County School System
How Richmond County Schools Maximized LMS Adoption And Supported Teachers
Georgia
30,000 Students
Adopted Canvas & Impact: 2020
Located in Augusta, Georgia, on the border with South Carolina, Richmond County Schools is a district of over 30,000 students and 4,000 staff, 2,000 of which are classroom teachers. With the help of Impact by Instructure, they successfully onboarded students, parents, and teachers to their learning management system, Canvas.
The Challenge
In 2020, Richmond County faced the challenge of virtually implementing a new learning management system for all 58 of its schools. In a matter of weeks, they would need to train and onboard their entire learning community.
“We had six schools from the pilot that had heard of Canvas before,” Kim Stripling, Program Specialist for the district, said. “Everyone else was new.”
Adopting a new learning management system that genuinely improves student outcomes requires collaboration, strategy, and clear communication. The long-term goal was for every user at Richmond County to feel confident engaging with Canvas to support innovative learning strategies in their classrooms.
They also needed to consolidate all of their digital learning materials. Stripling described their curriculum and other learning materials before Canvas as “scattered all over the place between Dropbox and Google Drives.”
When Richmond County returned to the classroom after remote learning, some teachers were hesitant to continue embracing the new environment. Identifying these teachers and finding avenues to support them has been critical to their success and made more accessible with Impact by Instructure.
Key Insights
Richmond County successfully rolled out Canvas LMS virtually to all 58 schools with strategic professional development and support from Impact by Instructure.
Impact by Instructure is simple to implement and quickly allows district-level personnel to see which teachers are or aren’t adopting features in Canvas LMS.
Hiring Instructure’s Principal Learning Consultants helped Richmond County plan, guide, and strategize efficiently.
Using Canvas LMS and Impact together has allowed Richmond County to increase educator engagement and improve student outcomes.
The Solution
Canvas LMS served as their one-stop digital shop that housed their curriculum, learning materials, and even courses for teacher professional development. Impact by Instructure–through its targeted, in-app messaging–empowered them to encourage everyone to engage deeply with Canvas LMS and implement high-quality instructional strategies.
”Our implementation of Impact was remarkably painless… Compared to some of the other things we’ve implemented, it was one of the easiest…The level of support we received from the Instructure team has been phenomenal,” Dr. Owen Fletcher, Digital Learning Coordinator, said.
When we started the rollout of Canvas LMS, for me, it was like seeing a dream come true.
Kim Stripling
Program Specialist
Accessible, Actionable Data
Schools usually turn to data to evaluate the implementation and adoption of a new Edtech tool. Curating and responding to this data takes time and effort. Fletcher explained their process for diving into the data and how Impact enabled them to identify usage patterns.
“You have to be careful when looking at a pile of data. Earlier this week, I looked at the tools used in the past month. We have a pretty good adoption rate of Discussions in Canvas LMS. I saw that student responses are about half the rate of teachers using the tools. At first glance, it looked good, but then I realized we needed to do some work to get students to respond. That would have been impossible to spot without Impact,” Fletcher said.
Upon recognizing this crucial need, Fletcher and the Richmond County team have created targeted professional development to support deeper usage of key features like Discussions.
Fletcher has continued to turn to Impact to help design transformative support solutions that meet teachers where they are.
“With Impact, we’re now much more proactive instead of reactive. We can set up campaigns ahead of time to support teachers. For example, we ran a digital citizenship campaign at the beginning of the school year. Upon login to Canvas, teachers see a message that gives them the required resources to share with students,” Fletcher said.
A Trusted Partner in Learning Services
“We hired a Principal Learning Consultant, and that was the best money we ever spent at Richmond County,” Stripling emphasized. “She's worked hand in hand with us in all of our projects and everything that we do. And, it's really helped us push on to the next levels with Canvas, and the Instructure products.”
This partnership yielded a Literacy course the Georgia Department of Education is currently reviewing for broader distribution. Additionally, in response to teacher needs identified from Impact and Canvas Commons data, Richmond 101, a student-facing course, was crafted to cover their Code of Conduct, Digital Citizenship, and Growth Mindsets.
Richmond County also utilizes Mastery Connect for Georgia Milestones preparation. Their teachers, guided by their Learning Consultant, have honed their data analysis skills and created and administered their own common assessments.
The Results
Overall, Richmond County has used Impact to make its LMS rollout and ongoing adoption as successful as possible. Fletcher insisted that instructional best practices are made easier thanks to this technology.
“With Impact, we can identify which features in Canvas LMS teachers are and are not using. We’re going in and finding teachers and identifying high-impact instructional strategies that we can promote with them to have a transformative impact on their classrooms,” Fletcher said.
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