Leveraging Canvas and Slack to Increase Student Engagement

I'm Adrian Luton is Senior instructional designer, manager at ASU by day. I manage a team of instructional design associates that deploy our courses each session. And then by night, I am an instructor for our learning design and technologies master's program, and I'm a lead learning technologist for eye design. It turns out the puzzles I were doing, I was doing at night weren't paying nearly as well. So I just do course building instead. And I'm Robert Bruce.

I'm a Canvas administrator. I work on custom integrations into Canvas and, theme development as well. So today, we're gonna talk a little bit about how we build community and student engagement and help our students with a Slack integration in Canvas. We'll talk about how we do that at a very small scale and also a very large scale. And then Robert is gonna talk the LTI integration.

Yes. So starting out on a really small scale. And first, let me ask, how many use Slack in your institutions with students. Alright. Keep your hand up if you have at least a hundred students in those workspaces.

At least a thousand Over ten thousand? ASU. Yeah. So on a small scale in our EDD program, We have, you know, one instructor, twenty students, small cohort. They use it actually for assignments. And and this is somewhere where I think ASU in our college, teachers college has an opportunity to use it quite a bit more in actually deploying and using it for assignments as opposed to that collaborative and community building aspect.

So this is the example of the assignments that are in Canvas. In each module, there's a connect assignment and the students are using some kind of tool. In this case, it's Slack. So just like they do a Canvas discussion, they go out to the Slack, workspace, and they post their answer to this particular prompt. And this is what that prompt looks like, where students are about is an EDD program.

Right? There are a lot of jargon used in these programs, and they go out to Slack. They post their, colleagues respond to them just like a discussion. The instructor comes out, provides feedback, and then they go out to, back out to Canvas, right, and it's a zero submission, and they put the points in there. And this is a really great use very, very popular, assignment in this program. Now we're gonna move to, like, a little bit larger scale.

Right? We learning design and technology masters that I mentioned earlier, and that's upwards of about a hundred students. So now we have five instructors, and we have a scaling model that I'll talk about in a little bit just for context. But in this case, we have a lead instructor that has a slightly smaller group, say, ten students or so because they're also managing those co directors that have no more than twenty nine students in their own groups. In this case, they they do some community building, communication, also support. And this is a really great one.

This particular faculty member is hilarious. His name is Steve Salock. And he built basically a panic button. So just like the workflows, if you're, you know, sending out Giphys to your colleagues, he has the panic button that students can go in and click on in their courses and just get a little extra help and just identify the him or or us as co instructors that they're they're stuck. So when they click on it.

It goes, from you know what? I'm I'm having trouble to I am in a state of panic, and I really need some help. And then go ahead. Then they all oh, back when. Then they can, you know, further elaborate with what is usually the the issue. And, you know, he's hilarious.

So it it's, super fun. Alright. Go ahead. Then we build a little bit bigger. Right? Now we're upwards of five hundred students This is where our scaling model actually brings in co lead instructors that also have a slightly smaller group, and then they help manage that team of co instructors across the whole court.

In this case, in a session, you know, we could have twenty five instructors in this one canvas course. Okay? In this case, we have this course. It's an EdTech course, and it's actually, works for the course requirements across all colleges. So it's not just the college of education that has these students. We have people that have been teaching this course.

Gosh, I'd say, well over a decade, but we also have very new two. So what they choose to do is kind of like crowdsource the student assistant, and instead of having like a virtual office per instructor, They actually have all the instructors in each module. And as they see questions come up, they can answer the questions. In that way, it also helps those new people that are on onboarding, learn how to answer those sometimes very odd questions. Right? Alright.

Good. So this is that scaling mod that I talked about earlier. This is our MA in special education. They're applied behavior analysis programs. This is where it gets crazy.

Right? So we're upwards of almost two thousand students in one course in one session. Right? So that takes a lot of support with our scaling model. That shows basically the lead instructor has that smaller group. These are our co lead instructors, and then each individual co instructor with that no more than one to twenty nine ratio. In this case, there's a lot of communication going on, and we had to really think about how to manage this.

And just aside because there are a lot of heavy lifts and grading, they're not just like self graded quizzes and things like that. We can't actually run all two thousand students in one Canvas shell. We use the blueprint model to split it. There's no magic number. Everybody thinks there's some magic formula.

We say five hundred because it's easy to split there. So we don't actually run two thousand students in a Slack workspace. It's broken down by those blueprint courses. And that allows for us to to be able to run the Gradebook script and things like that. So this is what the workspace looks like, for that huge applied behavior analysis program.

In this case, they don't don't do their virtual offices, by module. They do it by co instructor. Right? This is essentially their virtual office. We don't use the ones in Canvas. We had some troubles.

There are a few bugs with what we're trying to do at scale. So we kinda move them all out year. We do have a process where we can upload and, you know, leverage Excel to kinda get the our user right ASU rights in a little bit easier. So it helps with the lift. But essentially each co instructor, you know, posts, they they do fun stuff with Canva and different different ways to present the the material there.

They mirror the canvas groups, of course. And in this case, each virtual office, that's where they steer their student to post. But we did learn, we had a student community, channel. Right? But with hundreds of students, that gets, like, super hairy in answering and keeping up with. So we actually do if you wanna we actually do an announcements channel now that's only push out.

So this can't post to that channel. That way, the lead instructors, even the co instructors don't post to this. The lead instructors can manage the communication that goes out to these students. We do have some awesome emojis at ASU. I I am very impressed.

I have my own emoji, actually, of my face. But this is a great tool so that the lead instructors can make that communication, in in one place. They all they also leverage all the information too, like updating the, purpose to the channels and those kinds of things. So students can see that this is just for course right. Announcement students can't post here, but they can reply obviously.

So we have a course bot, and Robert's gonna talk a little bit about that here in a second. But this is a really cool tool where students can activate their course bot. And what this does is it will give them notices when there's upcoming assignments. It'll verify them when someone comments on their discussions? What else am I missing? Well, I'll get into you. He's looking into this.

So with that, I'll over to you. So I'll try to stay off of a squeaky spot here. But, yeah, if you wanna go to the next one, before I get into what actually what course the tool is. I wanted to share, like, how at ASU we deploy things at scale. What kind of criteria we think about to, vet these tools before we actually bring them to our users these are kind of the four they're not in any particular order, but, four things that we use as a criteria and or just says things to follow.

The first one is tool choice is very important. I think it's, vendors are great at what do. So they end up finding ways to sneak into and sell their tools, to our, to our instructors, or at least to pitch it to them. But when they come to us, we need to be ready and and really evaluate whether or not that tool aligns with course objectives or if it actually, If it's not just smoke and mirrors, it's actually something that will, improve the learning experience. Cost and support models is also very an important that they scale.

Sometimes you have tools that are very expensive and they work in person. But when you get to a hybrid model or fully online program with many students that might not scale. It gets pretty expensive best. And also at ASU, getting off as well. At ASU, we, we have a twenty fourseven support team.

Still though, like, if you think we have over seventy tools at this moment that we support and they if we end up installing tools that aren't really they don't have the right support documentation or we can't triage support cases over to their team. Then that's something we really consider when we're installing these tools. The next one is analytics. We really have a whole team that takes make when we installed something, we want to make sure that it has some sort of analytic data we can get out of and that we can throw it into our ecosystem to help us make decisions about these tools. And last but not least, security.

There's a security process for every tool. I know a lot of universities, I've heard them talking about their process in this conference. We have a similar one. We just want to make sure we're protecting the student data as the tool scales. Go ahead.

So the tool that we ended up going forward based on that criteria, we we really wanted to use slack, and we already used it, but it wasn't integrated with Canvas. So Slack reached out to us and said, Hey, we have this cool new LTI tool. It's called course core spot. And anyone here can reach out their to their Slack rep, and they can get it set up on their system. But so the main features are basically there's a it's an LTI integration you can create the workspace from within the course, which is pretty neat, and it enrolls users directly into that workspace.

You can set up a few default channels, where everyone that is in that Canvas course will automatically get dropped in there. And, it also has some workspace archival, which, you select the date at the end when you want to archive the space. That is the product that Slack provides. However, based on that criteria, you saw earlier, we ended, of having to partner with them. Do you wanna go to the next So we we have to customize it because for us, it's it's really important.

We we kind of do, on near real time enrollment, ads and drops into our courses based from our people's thoughts, student information system. And, so it was very important that when the student leaves, they still don't have access to that course, Slack workspace. So we've we've changed the we partner with robots and pencils, create development shop that we work with. And also with Slack to do this. We also because of the analytics point I made earlier, we need to name these workspaces a certain thing just so that we can keep track across the whole organization.

And we've also disabled some tools that were available in the original tool set that Coreswap provides, just for, making we just weren't sure how users were gonna use it, and it's scalable. If it's a mess, it'll scale at a large rate. So you can imagine that. I think we have over a hundred and fifty thousand students right now. And so it gets pretty crazy.

Next slide. So this is what it looks like from the this is the instructor journey. And we're hoping that the internet works. There we go. And you might wanna speed it up a bit too.

Trying to see if it's playing in there or out. Oh, you're leaving Sure. You guys are paying for the course coverage as a paid for service? It's, so you'll have to talk to lack about that. What ended up happening, we partnered with them, and we have our own repository of this code. We do pay You saw robots on pencils up there.

They host the application for us. I'm sure they're willing to work with anyone to do something similar as well. Mhmm. I think I have to play it outside because it's not pretty easy. Get some ads.

Let's see. Yeah. Oh, goodness. Yep. Hi.

Hello? Okay. Yeah. Well, you're trying to play that movie. Yes. We'll be over here.

It doesn't. No. Post playing. Is that the music? Yeah. It's playing through the HDMI.

Oh, okay. I didn't. I don't think I didn't. But, wow. Okay.

A nice elevator music for us. So we it's an LTI tool. It's a course, math placement. So all the student has to do is click on that or I'm sorry. This is the instructor journey.

They click Slack. It pops up just the prompt like, hey, you're about to create this workspace. The Slack product, I believe you can customize a little bit of the name, but since we want to keep integrity with those course name, Slack workspace names. We do that. Once it's set up, then the connection is made every time a student goes to the slack button.

They're presented with these two, screens so they can open it on their web browser or the the actual slack client. Is it better? I'm just no. Oh, okay. Then that's fine. It takes a while to process the I have so many workspaces because I do have the testing as you can see.

So it's well, You have the most. I think she holds the record for the most workspaces. But yeah, once it comes up, you'll see, that the students are in the course, get automatically enrolled, and then towards the end of this. Yeah. There you go.

So you'll see up at the upper right hand side, five people are enrolled. Those are. So instructors get mapped as workspace admins. They can change some of the settings there, create channels. You could also This video is what I was gonna say.

So, yeah, there's a core spot app within I mean, the app concept of Slack. And it lists all the student assignments. So you can get reminders, and also messages of whether or not something has been graded. And I think you can move on to the next slide. That's about it.

So there's, yeah, go ahead. The fourth spot, is that pulling data from canvas? That is pulling data from canvas. So So students that on the science game gets graded they're getting their canvas application and they're getting stuck. Right. Yeah.

So, like, there's that whole death by notification thing that may happen, but you could always choose to enable or disable both the Canvas notification or the Slack one. You can choose one or the other. So there are settings in there. Go ahead. Those notifications and, like, on a few day or higher, is that your personal implementation? Fourth box or not out of the box? That's out of the box.

Yeah. So it's a a neat feature that they they have if you contact Yeah. I think like ninety nine percent of what you see is what you would get with a Slack product. As you saw, the only implementation that we did was mostly admin trade of changes and, like, naming convention thing so that it maps to our data. Yeah.

I like that if there's questions. So yeah. Yeah. Don't work. Does he work with Kayla's groups? So do they give you great pianos? That's a great question.

So we, It is a great question. Yeah. It is because it's, at this point, it doesn't, but it's one of the things I'll mention in my last line. Because it's it's not perfect just yet, but, it is super helpful. So this is the last slide.

Usage since we installed it. Like, we can actually see that a bunch of people have created workspaces workspaces, but we don't have significant activity. There are groups, like what agent does that they are rock stars, like getting people engaged with it. But since it's in it's installed at the root level, anyone can install it. We get a lot of, like, people that just open it and don't actually use it.

And I think that's partly us not having the right resources to kind of train people like, Hey, this is these are some exciting new ways you can actually teach using Slack. And also that's why on the roadmap, we're gonna focus on increasing engagement and also provide more administrative features, which to your point, I think really taking structural concepts that exist in Canvas and bringing those into Slack will be important. Just to increase engagement as well. And, just for those large courses. I mean, we really are focusing on scaling this.

So those groups make it super useful when you want to scale. Yep. Even on the scale, like, other students know exactly, are there certain expectations about how responsive that we are experienced because I'd imagine that there might be a student that would respond panic button in the middle of the night. I need to get a response that's a pretty good question too. We set that up in, like, kind of a etiquette type within our syllabus to make sure that they know that within twenty four somebody will get back, but usually sooner, you know, within business hours and things like that.

And then also to the point about enrollment, I kinda mentioned earlier, we actually just use, we take, ASU rights, our ASU emails out, we take, like, the ASU out of it. We use to kind of clean up the data and then drop it all in at once. So we're not hand manually entering users. We we can use the process. Basically, like, helps.

That's not quite like plug and play. Yeah. Another important thing if you're thinking of implementing this is the student needs or the user that's launching this tool needs to exist in Slack already. So you'd work with your rep to actually you have to, like, streamline, like, connect your other systems to Slack to make sure you have both users on the system. No, just in time, provision.

And to my knowledge, they since we branched off of that main product, they might be working on something. Yes. I have two questions. Mhmm. The students at my institution, for, like, the career management system center and they use it among themselves, but we don't use it not Do you find that students are using Canvas unless enrolling over to Slack? And do you have any students that's on how the transition to abusing Slack within Canvas is going or the students looking for Canvas? So good questions.

As far as the ADA program, I don't even wanna say this out loud of the Canvas conference, but they drive them entirely to slack. And they the first day of, courses, they have announcement that goes out that directs them directly to ASU emails and Slack so that there aren't multiple places that they're going, both the nCheck and the students. Right? And they just direct everybody straight to slack, and they found that that's kind of helped, like I said, both instructors and the students. And they we we get good great feedback with it because they're they're more prompt. You know, they don't have to go out through the email.

A lot of our folks are FAs. Right? So they don't work for ASU during the day, and they're only doing that at nine it's more convenient for them to have their workspaces open, and and they're more able to provide that and submit feedback or close to it. No. I'm assuming Are you guys on the the grid that Yes. It's enterprise grid.

Yeah. So how did you approach the the fact that when the students join the work space in the grid, they can be searchable throughout the grid. Is that something that you guys address? I know at Harvard, we just have a disclaimer saying if you don't Right. We we don't restrict that to my knowledge. And, There is so I showed you the instructor journey, but when you are a student, before you jump into the Slack workspace, We they are presented with a code of conduct, and they I mean, there's space to kinda add information similar to what you do.

It sounds like. Yeah. Yes. Do you have to be a teacher of twelve to three and four space? You do. You have to be, either a were you allowed TAAs or instructors? A support role Well, it depends.

I mean, from the perspective, it's an administrator role. Like, you can create roles in canvas, but the underlying layer of it is either, an administrative role or an instructor role so, yeah, whichever you've once you've set up. But as long as it's one of those administrative or instructor roles, you'll be able to launch a new course workspace? Yes. Do the instructors have the ability to change settings on their workspaces and with about two thousand workspace is, do you find that that comes back to you? A lot of, like, alignments to stuff? Or, like, from your perspective? Right. Yeah.

No. Just me. She comes to me and then. But no. In reality, like, they are create So if you're an instructor or a TA, you're assigned the workspace admin role.

So you can and we have that somewhat limited You can change, like, the icon picture. You can change some of the names, and you can create workspaces and rename them. But, but, I But you don't need to win two thousand people asking No. And like I said, we have a twenty fourseven support, and it some of those questions are pretty easy for some of that staff to handle. Yeah.

But what's your experience on that? Like, are you hearing a lot back from the instructors? No. I mean, there every once in a while someone will archival workspace. Mhmm. Yeah. Like, there's little settings you don't think about because that's how I'm built for what we do.

Right? And they're, you know, I have a laundry list of things for them. Right? And I just passed on to him and, you know, told him and prayed. But, yeah, the other issue too is that students can any messages too. Do we still have that set that way? I believe so. Yeah.

Yeah. So they'd be going to delete something that so if there's an issue, like, we do let our instructors and things like that know take screenshots or if something, you know, is sensitive in nature. Yeah. I I have a related question. Did your instructors find it hard to manage or acknowledge to follow-up.

The message is in a channel with maybe more than one hundred and two or two on users? Yeah. So good question. That's why we moved, from the student community type, channel where students can ask questions. We still do that in of the smaller courses, but the AVAs, they don't even have a student community. All the the most students would be like less than thirty in the one co instructor's virtual office, and then they push out the announce Yes.

I was curious been prior to Slack security using anything like a discussion or a piazza. And if so, if this is, like, for him to replace it, or if you're using this in parallel to these platforms? It's an absolute nightmare. It's an absolute nightmare. Yeah. In, inscribe's yellow dig.

We had Some used to Piazza, they then Piazza went through the, the implosion, and now they seem to be coming back. Head discussion is used, extensively by our engineering schools and and the computer science program and stuff like that. And I side because her things were all. Yes. You said that, like, since we have a notification to stop about assignments being two, we have slash channel.

So when they submit work, how does that happen? And, like, does that get incorporated into Not that direction. So all of the assignments live in Canvas, and there's no way to talk back to it with feedback or scores or things like that. So it'd be like submission, like, with some of the tools that we have to use. They go out and they'll, you know, provide feedback and the instructors and, you know, the students respond of that. And then the instructor has to take the grate and put it back in the in the canvas shell.

Yeah. It's a great feature, though, that would be nice to have. Like, actual assignments coming back to it, like, grade pass back in some way. Yeah. Mhmm.

Put that on the list. See? It on there, but that's a big glitch, though. Other questions? Yes. That you you indicated that core spot as it is, it doesn't account your drops in canvas. If you have middleware or something from, it's been developed that takes that into account.

Right? Yet real time jobs. Like, it does do some dropping of students if they fall off the roster, but we actually use, like, live events. And, yeah, we ingest those in actually see as it's happening and we drop them. And then since that's not perfect, like sometimes we use a queueing them, and they might come in at a different, like, someone gets added dropped. And now we have the wrong state, there's a nightly job that actually does it true up between both of those? Any other questions? Yes.

It's just honestly that faculty's personality. Yeah. I mean, he's just really well known for it. He it kinda helps him build community, I think. He's been at ASU for decades.

He his reputation proceeds himself. So And that's the need. They have the ability to I mean, this is you kind of administrate the workspace, but there's the ability to tie into building Slack tools so that they can use, like, the panic button or even, just the fact that you can something like, for example, taking a picture and just uploading it sharing it, it's way easier. And we have some instructors actually going out into the field and, like, using Slack for some of those assignments. Like, hey, just snap a few pictures.

Makes it easy, and you have your, phone with you all the time. Sorry. Listes where you can, you know, have someone that they can, you know, have somebody in answering. Right? Yeah. We start typing questions.

Not at this moment. That doesn't exist now. That list keeps you any longer. Any other questions? Yes. Does your version of the four spot handle the account creation process, or do you have just open by domain, for the students you? It doesn't.

But So we have, like, a user management system that feeds into different systems and creates accounts. So when someone enrolls at ASU, they get what we call the AAC, right, that is then pushed out to these systems. And so you will have matching accounts on Slack, and and that's why that works. Yeah. Yeah.

And the bonds for the the course ask they have to go and click and go to another place, create their account, and then come back. Oh, is that coded? Are you using that? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah. I think they can work with you. It's maybe if you have a system, like what we do that propagates those accounts to different areas, then you might be able to get that going. Yes. Earlier you mentioned, like, yeah, my medications were, like, from a faculty standpoint, is there, you know, it's like, so I had raising, but then people also have to know.

There's also one of the campus campus turned off. There's all these different ways that students could contact you. Do most faculty in a just in his back, work and that chemo coming in in responses to Gradebook comments So in the big, big program applied behavior analysis, they point them directly to Slack, and they they, you know, it's it's really well want really well well run. There we go. But as far as like the smaller ones, generally what we'll do is just indicate what our references.

Like, hey, you you can reach me by any means, but I prefer Slack and you'll get a faster response, and that tends to direct them to Slack instead. Yeah. So admittedly, I am a, extroverted introvert and was a little nervous at first and talked too fast. So I wanna ask you. I meant to ask you.

What are you all doing? Is anyone there doing some interesting assignment type uses with Slack. It's a little different than, like, just the standard virtual office or collaborative nature? Yes. So at Harvard, we have, the first all are in the yard. Yeah. Love it.

So when they get on campus, have a big yard workspace that is used to create a museum on them, and then when they get put in their and forms, they can all have their own different things. So the creative community part is really great. And that about in March twenty twenty. Oh, yeah. To do this.

And it's also really nice because I'm back also gets the call in the grid at once. And once they get into their courses, they're already familiar with it. And they That's fine. Someone else had their hand up. Yeah.

What we use is not gale support. The staff you made, like, an application to handle all the information from the enrollment and everything, like, like, with with the, with the flash. I, like, with the flash command. We also, like, the whole community of university is is using data within three cost. Oh, yeah.

And there is sort of something It's not the same as you guys are. You mean Microsoft teams. Right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. I created a workflow for dealer application of, application being not technical application. For assignments, to create engagement, and we could do the collaboration in the Slack space, and then, it was pop up little nuggets -- Oh, nice. -- along. Yeah.

And pop it back and forth between canvas and slacks so that we could get some material and then back into that collaborative suites. That's great. Awesome. Anybody else? We use it enterprise for, you know, all of our departments at ASU as well. Our our college of education actually used it in in our, office of digital learning right before we even went enterprise for for the whole university.

We even have like Easter egg set up. So if somebody uses the phrase Oxford comma, it like puts like, a specific gift in that channel. And, like, you know, those kinds of things, but, we use guru a lot as well. And that's a really great shortcut that you can use in conjunction with back to you can just do a backslash and put the name of the card and it'll put it right in the slack message to that person. That's really great for training.

So that's super helpful tool as well? Yes. I mean, like, it has poly. It has poly. Yeah. You can have, like, other tools that will do that.

Yeah. But nothing to do with that. But that's what I meant by, like, it it's really neat to get people to Slack -- Yeah. -- from campus, but then you can enhance it with all these different plugins that exist. Have you guys experienced any accessibility issues with slack, especially for screen owners? That's a good question.

It hasn't come up to me. We have a group that assesses all tools, and I've never heard anything. Go ahead. We haven't heard anything then. Okay.

I originally mean order. I wasn't sure if that happened quick. Okay. Yeah. No.

Go ahead. We have an accessibility slack channel that's actually frequented by people who use free readers and then informed when they're questions by non screen reader users. So not only is it accessible, but it turned into a tool for training. And that's an ASG statement. Duh.

Mary right here. My bad. Alright. Well, thanks for coming. Yeah.

Thanks for sharing. If you have any questions, we'll be around. Let us know.