Leverage the Data with Catalog

So hi, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. I hope that everyone is in the right room as we are going to be launching into quest for how to leverage the data with catalog. So my name is Artin Napier. I'm an IT manager in EdTech Services at Florida International University.

And I primarily oversee the instructional tech specialists on our team as well as working with any units or departments that are interested in using Canvas catalog. And my name is Robert mono on the IT assistant director for educational and technology services. I primarily work with the system administrators. Alright. So as you can see here, this is some of our members of our team.

Our team overall is twelve people consisting instructional texts, trainers, and system admins. And we're all a part of the division of an IT umbrella. We support faculty and instructional staff with the various technology tools needed for courses as well as in our Canvas instances in both academic professional development. And now we're gonna talk to you a little bit more about our professional development environment that we every branded from Canvas catalog to FIU develop. So if you hear us say either FIU develop or Canvas catalog, know that they're both the same thing.

So FIU, who are we? This is kind of a glimpse of FIU by the numbers. I'm hearing a lot of feedback. So I need to stand somewhere else or no, Robert needs to get farther away. That's alright. So as you can see, we opened in, nineteen seventy two, which means we are a relatively young university we've got about fifty six thousand students, which, you know, means we're a pretty large university.

Although I have seen a couple of others that say they have eighty thousand or so. So they're actually bigger than us. We represent a lot of different countries for both our students, our faculty, and our half. We have a hundred and forty two countries represented. We've got a lot of alumni, a lot of employees, as well as, twelve campuses that encompass around the world.

From, you know, our main headquarters in Miami as well as in Italy and China and, you know, one in the Florida Keys. We're also a Carnegie R1 research university as we are interested in continuing to push the forefront for research and innovation. So the reason why we're all here are quests. Our quest begins because In twenty seventeen, we were looking to replace our custom professional development solution that we had. And even though it was custom, custom was not great.

It had limited functionality. And so a lot of the units at that time were primarily offering our trainings in person, and they were using our proftev environment to attendance track. And it wasn't possible to host or manage any of the online training or share any of the content online with our learners. So in partnership with our FIU human resources department, we were looking for something better, something different. And primarily what we wanted was a central solution that would help us to better manage our professional development offering.

And, you know, we were looking for something turnkey because custom can be great, but custom also fires a lot of maintenance. And it requires, you know, there to be somebody there when there's personnel changes, and that had been a challenge when there was a change in administration, and we couldn't do that easily with our previous solution. So time. Time is also a commodity. We all have an infinite resource.

So whenever you have a custom solution, any kind of development, any kind of changes, updates, updates, grades. You all know that all takes time. And so when you're the one who's doing that and maintaining that, not exactly the best solution, versus if you can find a vendor that doing everything or most things that you wanna do, that's great, because they're then the ones who are gonna be in charge of maintaining, updating, providing any new changes, all of those great things. So we were looking for to add or update the features, sorry if I keep pressing the wrong button to change our our thing forward. And so talking to us about our previous instance.

They also had to our faculty and staff had to manually input any attendance. And so that time is a resource, again, that we are all limited on. And so, once upon a time, at an Shextricon long ago, our FIU ed tech team, for aid to Colorado. Same place we are today. And they were looking for that solution to our professional development tracking problem.

And as we continued on our quest, searching kind low, attending a lot of great sessions, learning a lot of things. We came across a little known presentation about the then mysterious Canvas catalog. So here to talk to you more about why catalog for PRFdev is Robert. Thank you, Arden. So as Thomas was already in use, for academic course, We receive feedback from instructors, their instructional staff that canvas is one of those easy to use solutions.

By using canvas catalog for professional development, The learning curve would have been much lower compared to any other solution. And, also, it allowed us to showcase our core is that it had that storefront, that our end users, desired. The fundamental units, they could also build their own custom storefront as well. And they'll be able to manage their own course visibility. So it doesn't necessarily have to be managed by our team.

But the units can also manage what's available, what's able. Canvas catalog also removed a lot of manual processes, that departmental units were accustomed to. Usually, it trans it's It's was more like, transposing data from one system to another. Right? And again, that's a lot of manual work. With catalog, everything kinda mesh well with all the other systems we had.

We leverage the API. We leverage Canvas data. And in the end, we were able to automatically award professional development hours. Thomas catalog is not only tracked, course completion, based on the Canvas course module requirements, but it also awarded canvas certificates, course certificates. And in the end, it saved the city, money, time, and effort.

We took Canvas catalog a staff further by integrating it with other systems, with our SIS, which is software. And as already mentioned, our original professional development, solution was primarily focused for tracking purposes. Cameras catalog allowed the unit to host online training in addition to the hybrid and in person training that they were already accustomed to. This was valuable just because we launched right prior to the pandemic. So many departmental units began rethinking how they're gonna offer training and find new ways to connect with their with their learners.

So when we transition, we transitioned back in twenty nineteen, spring twenty nineteen. And again, we rebranded catalog as FIA develop. We started with the Office of Compliance. And they had a lot of mandatory courses at Fau, meant for faculty and employee staff, and these are trainings that they were required to take. This meant that the office of compliance, they were looking for a solution that can easily track, completion.

But also they wanted a solution that our end users were accustomed to. And again, everybody was familiar with Canvas at that point in time. During the pilot, we were informed that they needed to expand the analytics feature. Even though Canvas analytics offers information about, yes, This individual did complete the course. They did not offer information about who is this individual.

What is their employee role? Which department do they belong to? So we worked with our Panda Soft BI team to integrate with the SIS and also create mechanisms to automate messages. So reminder messages to these individuals. Hey, you haven't computed this course. We would send messages via text email, etcetera. It really depends on the course.

The success of the compliance courses and university exposure meant that the adoption has greatly increased. Since we transition to Canvas catalog. Alright. So that we've talked to you a little bit about what Canvas catalog or FIU develop is, we're gonna talk to you a little bit more about who it is that uses it. So all courses on FAU develop are led by a unit or a department at our university.

Our goal is to be supportive of their Canvas and FIU develop usage for their initiatives and their needs. And as our director who age momming forest in the front row likes to joke, we are, the internet service provider of hosting so that our unit is not necessarily creating or any or all of the content for those courses. So on the list, you're seeing I keep doing this every time on the list you're seeing are heavy adopters, any of those mandatory or regulatory courses that work great on FAU develop. These are some of the courses that our compliance offer Office is offering, and, you know, we're all familiar forPA and HIPAA about sensitive information. And, you know, cybersecurity trying to make sure that we're maintaining our community and knowing about not losing sensitive information, protecting our existing resources.

And Our EHS department or environmental health services who, you know, provide a wide range of trainings from forklift safety to hazardous materials training to how it is that, people need to act in a lab. And So FAU develop is important when there are any kind of those unexpected university wide, courses that will pop up And it helps to, you know, keep track of those and to provide a place in space for that to be hosted as well. As well as any other, courses that may be required at one time can turn into optional courses. Some examples of those we have listed are hazing, your sexual assault prevention courses, or a Panther career readiness course that we have in, relationship to our legislature proposing house bill twelve sixty one, I believe it is. And so we're using that course, an FIU developed to fulfill that, criteria.

And then, so for these types of courses, our team may work with the unit or department. In order to build those courses. But they may also work with vendors to incorporate those integrations or scorns as it or the unit may be doing those courses entirely by themselves. It all depends on what is in the best interest for the unit or department offering the course. And as Robert mentioned earlier, our adoption did take off greatly with the start of the pandemic because There was no other option.

And we needed to have a place in a space to continue to do those trainings. And all of the units and department really relied on FIU develop at that time to stay connected to their teams and their employees. And a lot of them have gotten very comfortable with familiar with FIU develop and have opted to stay on a FIU develop for their training needs, even as we have returned to campus. So as you can see, the professional development courses available can be very broad or a very broad audience or for a very specific audience. And, you know, some of the professional courses that you may find in our instance include Canvas training for our faculty and staff.

Microsoft trainings that our team offers. UDL trainings or accessibility trainings or trainings on any other new tool that mean we may launch at the university and is university supported. How you develop also hosts micro credential courses, that are available to the community, which was not something that we previously had with just our academic instance. This micro credential initiative at the university has created courses to upskill learn For example, during the pandemic, we offered a remote teach ready badge that provided, remote teaching preparedness, best practices for our, faculty and teaching staff, as well as QEP, which were quality enhancement plan, which many of you familiar with as our crediting, accreditation. And as we mentioned previously, Canvas helps our units who would also like to provide training to the community.

So some examples of units that we have using that are executive education, as well as our center for leadership. And now getting into the technical stuff. So what some of the benefits of centralized reporting? Well, first of all, it's awesome. It provides a lot of visibility a lot of data all in one place. And Canvas does a great job at data collection, but it doesn't do all the things.

So our SIS or student information system can complement the data that's available to us for Canvas catalog. And it allows us to identify by things, like major, grad term, you know, special status, like student athlete, Greek life, If it's an employee, that's a specific type, if it's an employee manager, it allows us to segment that part of the search. And this is invaluable information, for example, when you need to track if all your Greek life students and student athletes have taken a hazing one course. Or another example with cybersecurity. It's our annual course, but we can filter that to make sure that all active employees are enrolled.

And so then for reporting purposes, we're also to segment it out further when an employee maybe hasn't completed the course, what unit department are they from? Who is their manager? And this helps with all those outreach efforts that Robert's gonna talk to you about in a little bit. So the big takeaway from this is that we compliment the reports that we have an Oracle BI with our data that we get from our Panther SIS. So what are we leveraging? And the next few slides, Robert's gonna talk to you about the systems that you see listed here that fit into our FIU develop world, helping to access and analyze various aspects of our courses. Thank you, Jordan. Alright.

So first up is, the one item that we do leverage quite a bit. It's called a Canvas data. And we use Canvas data for all reporting purposes. And this is where the majority of the Canvas data comes from. It includes not only data from the Canvas LMS, but it also includes data from the catalog side.

So we get to see which courses are available through, in on the catalog side, which listings are they associated to, we get to see if an individual completed a course. In addition, the primary reason we leverage Canvas data is because we get to see additional information from the Canvas side what's the course activity, user activity, grades, assignment submissions, etcetera. So if there is something we want to know related to the Canvas LMS component, then most likely we are looking at the Canvas data side. Now if it's something related to to the catalog component, then we do leverage the API a little bit more. Our team has worked with the BI team within the division of IT.

To export all the data over to to the BI system. And since the BI team is not necessarily familiar, with Canvas, our system administrators act as that subject matter expert. They help translate all the Canvas lingo into something that they would understand. It's important to note that with Canvas data, the data can be up to forty eight hours old. But we are exploring Canvas data too.

To reduce that time. And for real time data, we are leveraging the API. And on the API side. There's the Canvas API. Canvas API provide to us with information regarding the Canvas student account, their email, their status, within the course, like the enrollment status, assignment submission information, etcetera.

The reason we do not leverage the catalog API as much, is because it's limited. It only provides us information about whether they completed the the the course or not. And, it allows us to perform enrollments. I mean, there there are other endpoints available, but those are the two that we primarily use at FAU. So what is the use case for obtaining a course completion via the API compared to Canvas data? As I mentioned, Canvas data has that data delay the API is more real time.

So at FIU, we have a process with our Pentersoft team. In which if somebody does not complete a course, they have a hold in the SIS, or they have a to do item. So that way as an employee, when you log in, get to see that reminder saying, Hey, please complete this course. So we rather leverage the API just to make sure that we we can check. Okay.

Yes. This individual, they complete the course and remove the whole other to do item, as close to real time as possible rather than wait those forty eight hours. The primary reason we leverage the catalog API is for enrollments. The catalog API has a feature where upon enrollment, it does trigger an email. Right? And that email can be customized by departmental units.

So if there's a unit that would like to add in additional instructions, specific message about the course, they're able to do that. Well, it's more on the catalog side, on the sub catalog side. But the only drawback is that it takes a little bit longer to process those enrollments. So we do use the, the Canvas SIS import feature. That allows us to process thousands of enrollments within a few minutes.

The only drawback there is that we don't have access to that email notification that is sent up. But we do leverage other other solutions to communicate with the end users. But where do we send this data? Everything comes together in Oracle BI. This is what the university uses for majority of the reporting. And we're pulling information from Canvas data the catalog API, the Canvas API, and the SIS.

For example, for professional development, a university require courses, managers tend view and track completion for required courses. So these reports can show which unit has the least amount of, completions, number of employees that unit employee type, role, etcetera. And all of this is pretty much canvas information that is being enhanced by the SIS. At FIU, we do have we do have the ability to create custom dashboards. But those are available upon request.

And those are requested by the department who So our team at tech services, we would work with the PanthersSoft BI team and also with the unit to determine what their reporting needs are. So we have the data in BI. So now what else can we do? So various units have expressed interest in creating a communication campaign. It allows them to reach out to individuals that did not complete, require trainings. And our PeopleSoft BI team has developed a process to send automated reminders.

Again, these range from emails, text, push notification, SIS portal notifications. We work together with the course owners to determine the reminder type and establish the frequency again. We don't wanna over spam our end users either. And I we we understand that we can leverage Canvas announcements, Canvas messages to reach out to these individuals. But using it outside of Canvas and outside of catalog.

We're able to to target a specific subset of users. And, reach reach out to them in a way. Maybe they're not always as employees going into Canvas to to look for what they need to complete. So emails, tags, push notifications, those are the other, methods that we have. For example, the cyber security awareness training that are already already mentioned.

We can send our communication to departmental units and notify the second level managers. Right? And they get to see who the direct which direct reports are missing, completions. In addition, automated messages allow managers from all levels to identify missing completions from their direct reports, and it has driven, course completion at the university. And now to and now are going to wrap the quest up. So our quest, we found Canvas catalog as our centralized solution.

It's got that auto tracking, auto awarding, flexibility, and reporting capabilities. We were looking for, and we've augmented those reporting capabilities by working with the other units and using our BI We're gonna continue to essentially manage this LMS, and, you know, there's been continued growth and little adoption of new courses on FAU developed by units and departments at our university. One of things that we've learned is that we need to continue to streamline processes. And one of the ways that we're doing that is by leveraging new catalog updates her features, to help us to scale as we grow and to increase efficiency. So one of the most recent examples of this is utilizing the flexibility with the predefined, enrollment dates to help our teams kinda, you know, set it forget it when you're doing a listing as opposed to needing to manually publish every listing, when you're working with it.

And, you know, we've always learned There's always room for improvement. We have a great relationship with Canvas, and we're continuing to work with the instructor team. To pitch additional feature requests for ways to enhance our Canvas catalog environment. Thank you all for coming with us on our quest today, and we're gonna open it up to see if there are any questions. One in the back.

Some of the courses, you you put in Canvas catalog cardi in it, the LMS in Canvas first, and then just add It's more. Hang on, Robert. So the question was that do we have, or did we have any of our courses that are currently in our Canvas, catalog environment previously in an academic instance? And then all we had to do was turn on the registration. So, Robert, go ahead. Alright.

So it's pretty much all in one. Right? So as we're creating the listing, we're creating the Canvas course. And enrollments really depends how the unit desires and moments should be performed. Sometimes they are, meant for a specific subset of users. So we reach that data from the SIS and we perform the bulk enrollment.

And at times it's more optional optional courses, they can self enroll. And I think he might have also been asking if they were previously like developed courses, meaning the course content already existed in academic canvas. Yeah. So primarily, no. There were some, that had maybe been developed in moodle environment, when we had that, or we're in our academic canvas environment, but we've really tried to move towards, any development opportunities at the university being within our FIU develop, environment.

Alright. I see another question. So question is we have two instances, one for academic and one for professional development. The answer to that is yes. Go ahead.

How do you since it's Canvas on the back end, how do you manage the courses that require recurring enrollments, say compliance courses like HIPAA where the person to demonstrate from did they check-in the course every year or every two year? So the question is how do we manage the recurring courses like with compliance and the enrollments for that, Robert's gonna talk to you. So at the start of every fiscal, it is a manual process where we have to manually create the course. And the listing. But we do obtain the the latest feed, I guess, of enrollments, like, who should be in the course. But the process of creating and the listing and the course It's it is manual.

They automatically involve people in place in our course. Okay. So there there's an audience member for those of us who are listening who talking about that they have figured out a way to have automatic enrollments occur, and they are willing to share that information with whoever it is that is asking. Where are you from again? College of Florida on the two Sarasota. So state College of Florida from Sarasota.

Alright. Any other question? Yes. So what kind of data points are you guys using to determine which users should receive the automated message? Okay. I'm gonna see if I can repeat that. So what type of data points are we using to make sure that our users are to determine which users are receiving the automated messaging? Determine which user users are receiving the automated messaging.

So it's more on course completion. Right? So module module progression. Now which user should receive the notification is really dependent on the unit. Right? And then we retrieve that information from the SIS. Again, everything comes together.

And then on the on the, on the process side, we know who to target from there. On the Canvas side, it's more who completed the course and who would they not? Yes. And since they have an account in your SAS system. So, the question was, if all users who are in our U develop instance have an account with our SIS. So any of our internal, students, and we define internals, any of the FIU faculty staff and students who are of.

So, yes, all of those people do. Any other question? Oh, we have another one. So the question is, what do we do if we have external users? So, Robert, do you wanna take this one? Sure. For external users, we don't have as many required courses There are no users. I mean, those are optional.

Right? So they can solve they can create their own account. They can enroll in these courses. But the fur book courses, compliance courses, those we bulk and roll. So they cannot access the so, oftentimes, the the unit or department that we're working with provides us a list of people with their names or emails and says, we want these people in the course, or we do also, as well, offer the self enrollment, option for users who wanna do that, or any users who are using our payment gateway? Yes. How are you covering the the technology fees from the structure that are associated with catalog.

So how are we covering the fees from instructure your catalog, and we pay for them. Our our unit or department pays for it. Okay. So you just cover them for all your users. We do.

Yes. We all, so I'm getting some help from the crowd. We also we also do charge for you using it. So different units at our university, depending on types of services that you need, there is a nominal fee in order to use those services. We do charge for ours as well.

Yes. How do external folks authenticate So the question is, how do external folks authenticate into our system? They leverage the Canvas accounts. So they create account through the Canvas system, and it's a more like a local account. Yeah. Can you hear it? Sorry.

Follow-up. Sure. Your internal folks, new single sign on? Whatever your version of, like, they use their FIU credentials to get in as well as the external close-up So, yes, the question is, can our internal people use single sign on, as well our external people are using the local sign on and answers. Yes. Alright.

The question is, do we have problems with duplicate accounts? We did, at the beginning, we found a way to mitigate it. By blacklisting the FAU email address. We used, a different URL that most like the majority of users were not identified So if somebody tries to enroll with identify your email, they will receive an error message, and then they will need to create an account at that point. Yes. That's been great for our courses that are intended for the university.

It's not a perfect solution. It's just a way to mitigate it, and we've been working with to see if we could happen on their solution incorporated. So the question is, do we just collect name and email for external users, or do we collect more information? So we primarily with cap like, our version of catalog, we're collecting the name and email. Correct. And, catalog does have the feature to add additional form.

Fields. So there are some units that do require additional information. There's no perfect way to validate that. So the question is, is there a way to make sure that your learners put the right information into those fields? And the answer is Not really. No.

Unfortunately, no. But it was a great question. Thank you for playing. Alright. Yes.

Before you adopted the Pampers catalog, Did you have two separate Canvas environments, one for academic courses and one for professional development? So the question was before we had FIU develop up, did we have two Canvas instances? So, no, our professional development, solution was custom. We called it because we were really creative Proftev. And it was, a custom solution, but it, it isn't anything at all like Canvas. So University had academic Canvas. We also had, our College of Medicine instance, but our team does not support that.

We have our people here who do that. Well as, our FIU online team has a different instance as well, but that's not a professional development, one for the university. I'm curious, for example, that a tool that uses their LMS for both academic and non academic courses, could they adopt catalog just to promote the non academic courses, like professional development courses in that illness? So the question was if a school has academic and non academic courses in one cattle one instance can they also use catalog to promote to the community to promote. The professional development courses. So to catalog the professional development courses that I don't know, we'll see if Robert does.

I'm not a hundred percent sure in that I do know that when you connect it to catalog, that dashboard link is in the global nav menu, that will take you to the catalog dashboard. It would not take use of the course cards that users are accustomed to already. Alright. I see I see one all the way in the back Yeah. So we have some audio participation, and she's letting everyone know that they use serious identity in order to authenticate for external users because they did not wanna have local accounts.

They use our we have one instance of Canvas and then they have catalog connected to that information. Alright. And then was there another question, or you were supporting her? Perfect. You were supporting her. Wonderful.

Yes, ma'am. Do you have any specific advice for a Kenza who is newly entering into the panel field? Oh, so any specific advice for any Canvas admins who are new to Canvas catalog? Oh, so the doozer don't. So Robert had a lot of that learning curve that I'm sure that he can share with you. Yeah. We we could talk offline afterwards.

It's it's free. It's a pretty long list. I'd be happy that. Uh-huh. Sorry? We should have a dinner table tonight.

For Yes. We may be dancing, but there may be a dinner table discussing all of the things that we're talking about today. Mariel, you wanted to interject some additional support. You can start with that. So starting with MFA for local accounts.

That would that is a recommendation. Yes, ma'am. I just wanna pursue advice. Sure. That might be helpful.

I I don't currently but I think for institution, I had an admin that claims cut along, and I had an issue where, something, you know, I was created first, we invested in the content, and then we went, and couldn't find it to, of course, it doesn't exist anymore. It's because in the settings, it's that the course content can Yeah. Yes. Yes. So what some more audience participation did bring up an excellent point is that if you think that you have lost your content in the course because you have reset it, then, yes, you have because you reset the course.

So it's a different number. That's why it's not found anymore. Another, oh, another thing it doesn't have to do with the admins, but it has to do with your people on your team who are talking to the people using catalog. Always tell them that if they make any changes to their requirements after the course has launched and learners have completed that they can't make any other changes because it will negate or invalidate all of the previous completions. So we learned that the hard way a couple of times when Canvas first started in our catalog instance, And it's something that we make sure that we talk about with every new new unit who is creating a new course in develop because that is the the biggest hurdle if they have forgotten to do that.

It's also part of the reason why we, for our, like, ferpa or courses that are like an annual recurring course that will go ahead and archive and close out that course and create a new shell so that if there's any tweaks to the laws or legislation or anything like that, or they just wanna ask harder questions or change things up, then they can do that, and it doesn't impact anyone who has previous completed that. Alright. I'm seeing nodding heads. So I think that's, pain point felt by many. Alright.

Yes. How do you deal with, old listing, like, archival? Because currently, you have to either Alright. So the question is, how are we dealing with archivables? We are hiding them from the from any catalog listing. So There's that option to hide from via direct link. No more direct links.

No more, show in the catalog. It's just completely hiding it. We don't delete the listing. We don't do anything else. That's really special.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering if you got a better way to scroll through this Not currently, but we're still looking. So if we find something, we'll let you know. Nameing conventions of us us out a lot, making sure we had that year at the end.

So we can just to distinguish between all these recurring years. Yes. You, looked at linking your catalog partners with with Canvas credential? So the question is, have we looked at linking our Canvas catalog with catalog credential our micro credential office is currently utilizing a credential system that is not Canvas credentials, and they're the ones who are in charge of issuing or offering any micro credentials at our university. Yes, ma'am. So for this system that you've created, it allows you to do the bulk enrollments and the notifications, through the integration, your SIS, and other things.

Would that work with just like a catalog sub catalog? So the question is, will our communication kind of campaign that we have created work with just the subcatalog because we just have a sub catalog for our our professional development courses? Well, we are targeting by based on the Canvas course. So we have the Canvas course number, and we we just see who's who should be enrolled in that course, who's in that course that we have to reach out to. We don't really look on the catalog side. Any of relevant information. It's mostly just completion.

So it wouldn't work? Yeah. Yeah. It should work. If you if you're looking at your completions through your sub catalog, that should work. Okay.

Yes, ma'am. Yes. So the question is, how do we get everyone to play nicely along to make this happen? Yes. So we did, and we do have a closer relationship with our registrar's office. We do have a close relationship, with a lot of units because we are central IT at our university.

But yes. Sometimes when there is those universal or mandatory required courses, then there is a a group kind of created a couple from our team, those respective to make sure that everything launches correctly for that initiative, and then we continue to maintain that. But, yes, you do need partnerships within your university and, you know, like we've learned in kindergarten. We work well with others. So that helps to make everything kind of go a little bit Any other questions? Really? Well, you guys have been an excellent group.

Thank you so much for the audience participation. And joining us on our quest. Have a great rest of your day. We hope to see you tonight.