For the University of South Florida, or USF, the transition to Canvas Catalog was transformative. Kevin Hitt, Academic Services Administrator, Nancy Dimis, Assistant Director of Corporate Training & Professional Education, and Dr. James Welsh, Director of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology shared the benefits they’ve seen since implementation.
The Challenge
USF prides itself on being a major research university led by outstanding faculty that promote innovative scholarship and creativity to deliver a world class educational experience. In the last 20 years, leadership at USF decided to be intentional about fostering community both in the virtual and in-person classroom and through the creation of on-campus green spaces where students and faculty could collaborate.
At USF’s Corporate Training and Professional Education (USF CTPE) department, non-credit training program courses run everyday throughout the year, providing training and upskilling for non-traditional students. Having a registration system in place that provided a seamless customer experience was a necessity. With their previous systems, automated enrollment reports would take days to generate updates to course rosters and only offer a snapshot of enrollment at one point in time.
The need for a simple, expedient registration process was front of mind, according to Dr. James Welsh at the Florida Center for Instructional Technology, whose student population is mostly working professionals.
Key Insights
Finding a solution that would allow non-traditional students to easily register for courses with a couple of clicks was critical.
Expediting access to enrollment data reports put educators in the drivers’ seat to immediately know how their courses were shaping up for the semester.
For the USF’s professional education programs, Canvas Catalog serves as a natural, seamless extension of Canvas LMS for both instructors and for students.
The transition to online learning and registration can, quite literally, happen overnight with the support of Canvas LMS and Canvas Catalog.
The Solution
When Canvas Catalog was implemented, the benefits were immediately realized across campus–both for instructors and students. The instructors were impressed by the speed at which Catalog put enrollment data into their hands.
“Canvas Catalog was so streamlined compared to our older systems that one of the groups we were working with…had to come back and confirm with us that registration could be that simple and quick. They thought it was some sort of error,” Kevin Hitt said.
For us, it was important that we had a registration system that we could rely on that really allows the students to have a seamless experience. Something that is easy to navigate…and lets students register with a couple of clicks. The factthat Catalog gave us all of that…for us it was an easy solution for us to go with Canvas Catalog.
Nancy Dimis, Assistant Director of Corporate Training & Professional Education
Custom Storefronts & Streamlined Data Access
Instructors at USF CTPE were accustomed to waiting days to get access to reports with their enrollment data. With Canvas Catalog, faculty could now get access to their course enrollments at any time–no longer stalled by reporting delays. Instructors were also now able to export reports in the format that made the most sense for them.
“You used to have to wait to receive an automated report that would give you a snapshot of a point in time of what your registration is. Now, you have live access to real-time registration data. Anytime you want you can login to the dashboard, see the live registration data, and export your own report,” says Welsh.
Additionally, the ability to have different storefronts and payment connections has expanded accessibility according to Hitt. Setting up separate payment gateways in these custom storefronts, Welsh added, has allowed USF CTPE to create a pipeline directly from each Canvas Catalog storefront to their respective financial accounts..
“...Any departments that are doing non-credit work in our office can directly collect revenue [through the payment gateways]…which is a major thing because…if all of those transactions come into a central point and then have to be transferred out to their respective departments, it’s a lot more work than you would imagine,” said Welsh
All in all, Canvas Catalog has served as a gateway for USF CTPE to empower its instructors and course administrators with both realtime enrollment data and a simple, streamlined way to allocate funds to their appropriate department.
A Seamless Addition to the Canvas Family
After exploring many of the course registration options out there, the team went on to say that Canvas Catalog stood out as the frontrunner because USF’s campus was already using Canvas LMS to deliver coursework. Since offering a seamless user experience to students was a top priority, they knew that no other solution would integrate as seamlessly.
Fostering a student-centric culture is top of mind for institutions like USF. Choosing an LMS and course registration tool that best serves all students, from traditional to non-traditional, is one avenue colleges can take to put students front of mind. To learn other practical strategies for creating a student-centric learning environment in higher education, download our free ebook here.
The Results
Implementing Canvas Catalog started as a way for USF’s CTPE office to offer its students a more flexible registration option and has ultimately become a core component to setting their program up for sustainable, long term growth.
“Previously, about 95% of our professional development courses were conducted in person…We, in a day, transitioned all of our courses online and that was because of the support that we had from Canvas. Because of the success we’ve seen…we have strategically decided to stay live online so it’s going to be 5% in person and 95% live online…,” said Dimis, when describing what the path ahead with Canvas looks like at USF CTPE.
Moving forward, USF’s CTPE plans to continue leaning into Canvas LMS and Catalog to deliver a seamless learning experience for all–from course registration to completion.
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